world englishes

20 Aug 2001 11:31 AR ar141-22.tex ar141-22.sgm ARv2(2001/05/10)P1: GJB

Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2001. 30:527–50Copyright c© 2001 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved

WORLD ENGLISHES

Rakesh M. BhattUniversity of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Illinois 61801; e-mail: [email protected]

Key Words language spread, language contact, language variation,language change, English language studies

■ Abstract This essay is an overview of the theoretical, methodological, pedagog-ical, ideological, and power-related issues of world Englishes: varieties of Englishused in diverse sociolinguistic contexts. The scholars in this field have critically ex-amined theoretical and methodological frameworks of language use based on west-ern, essentially monolingual and monocultural, frameworks of linguistic science andreplaced them with frameworks that are faithful to multilingualism and language vari-ation. This conceptual shift affords a “pluricentric” view of English, which representsdiverse sociolinguistic histories, multicultural identities, multiple norms of use andacquisition, and distinct contexts of function. The implications of this shift for learn-ing and teaching world Englishes are critically reviewed in the final sections of thisessay.

INTRODUCTION

This article focuses on major current theoretical and methodological issues relatedto what has been characterized as “World Englishes.” In the past three decades,the study of the formal and functional implications of the global spread of En-glish, especially in terms of its range of functions and the degree of penetrationin Western and, especially, non-Western societies, has received considerable at-tention among scholars of English language, linguistics, and literature; creativewriters; language pedagogues; and literary critics. It is in this context that thelate Henry Kahane remarked: “English is the great laboratory of today’s soci-olinguist” (1986, p. 495). There is now a growing consensus among scholars thatthere is not one English language anymore: rather there are many (McArthur1998), most of which are disengaged from the language’s early Judeo-Christiantradition. The different English languages, studied within the conceptual frame-work of world Englishes, represent diverse linguistic, cultural, and ideologicalvoices.

The field of study of world Englishes—varieties of English used in diversesociolinguistic contexts—represents a paradigm shift in research, teaching, andapplication of sociolinguistic realities to the forms and functions of English. Itrejects the dichotomy of US (native speakers) vs THEM (nonnative speakers) and

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emphasizes instead WE-ness (McArthur 1993, 1998, Kachru 1992a). Referring tothe logo acronym of the journalWorld Englishes(1984), WE, McArthur (1993,p. 334) interpreted the field most succinctly when he observed “there is a club ofequals here.” The pluralization, Englishes, symbolizes the formal and functionalvariations, the divergent sociolinguistic contexts, the linguistic, sociolinguistic,and literary creativity, and the various identities English has accrued as a re-sult of its acculturation in new sociolinguistic ecologies (Kachru 1965, Strevens1992). The pluralism is an integral part of world Englishes, and the field has,especially in the past three decades, critically examined theoretical and method-ological frameworks based on monotheistic ethos of linguistic science and re-placed them with frameworks that are faithful to multilingualism and languagevariation (Kachru 1983, 1986, Lowenberg 1984, 1988, Chisimba 1984, 1991,Magura 1984, 1985, Mesthrie 1992, Bamgbose 1982, Bamgbose et al 1995). Thisconceptual-theoretical shift has extended the empirical domain of the study ofEnglish. English is regarded less as a European language and an exclusive expo-nent of Judeo-Christian traditions and more as a pluricentric language representingdiverse sociolinguistic histories, multicultural identities, multiple norms of use andacquisition, and distinct contexts of function (Smith 1981, 1983, 1987, Ferguson1982, Kachru 1982, Kachru & Quirk 1981). Linguistic and literary creativity inEnglish is determined less by the usage of its native speakers and more by theusage of nonnative speakers, who outnumber native speakers 4:1 (Crystal 1995,McArthur 1992).

The world Englishes paradigm raises several interesting questions about the-ory, empirical validity, social responsibility, and ideology (Kachru 1990). Aninquiry into world Englishes invites (a) theoretical approaches to the study ofEnglish that are interdisciplinary in orientation, (b) methodologies that are sen-sitive to multilingual and multicultural realities of language-contact situations,and (c) pedagogies that respond to both intra- and international functions ofEnglish (Bailey & Gorlach 1982, Ferguson 1982, Cheshire 1991, Kachru 1982,Foley et al 1998). The philosophical-theoretical assumptions underlying the studyof world Englishes are grounded in what has come to be known as liberation lin-guistics (Labov 1972, Kachru 1991, Bhatt 1995a, Milroy & Milroy 1985, Mesthrie1992, Lippi-Green 1994, 1997). Liberation linguistics, as a general term for sev-eral forms of linguistic beliefs and practices that accent the sociopolitical dimen-sions of language variation, is rooted in contexts of social injustice and seeksto transform these contexts radically in the interest of the speakers of the “othertongue”—the nonnative speakers (Bhatt 2001a,b, Kachru 1997, Deni`ere 1993,Parakrama 1990, 1995, Viswanathan 1989, Phillipson 1992, Pennycook 1994,1998, Canagarajah 1999). The liberation linguistic-theoretic assumptions havedisplaced and discredited the trinity of ENL (English as a native language), ESL(English as a second language), and EFL (English as a foreign language) and haspresented instead a model of diffusion of English that is defined with referenceto historical, sociolinguistic, and literary contexts (McArthur 1992, 1993, Kachru1986).

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WORLD ENGLISHES 529

SPREAD AND STRATIFICATION

The Spread of English

The transformation of a tribal language to Standard English in the nineteenth cen-tury is well documented (Platt et al 1984, McCrum et al 1986, Machan & Scott1992, Burchfield 1994, Crystal 1995). Its spread is arguably “the most strikingexample of ‘language expansion’ of this century if not in all recorded history. Ithas far exceeded that other famous case, the spread of Latin during the RomanEmpire” (Platt et al 1984, p. 1). And now, at the dawn of the twenty-first century,we are witnessing John Adams’ prophecy coming true: that English will becomethe most respected and universally read and spoken language in the world (Kachru1992a).

The global spread of English is popularly viewed in terms of two diasporas:In the first, English was transplanted by native speakers, and in the second,English was introduced as an official language alongside other national languages(Knowles 1997, Kachru 1992a). After the initial expansion toward Wales in 1535,Scotland in 1603, and (parts of) Ireland in 1707, the first diaspora of English tookplace—the movement of English-speaking populations to North America, Canada,and Australia and New Zealand. Each of these countries adopted English as thelanguage of the new nation, which resulted in English becoming one of the majorlanguages of the world, along with Arabic, French, German, Hindi, Russian, andSpanish, though it was still not, as it is now, a global language, numerically orfunctionally.

The global status of English became established in its second diaspora. Thisdiaspora brought English to “un-English” sociocultural contexts—to South Asia,Africa, and Latin America—which resulted in a significant alteration of the earliersociolinguistic profile of the English language. It was in this second diaspora thatEnglish came into contact with genetically and culturally unrelated languages:in Asia with Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages, in Africa with languagesof the Niger-Congo family, and in Southeast Asia with Altaic languages. Thecontact of English with such diverse languages resulted in the developmentof regional-contact varieties of English, e.g., Indian English, Malaysian English,Singaporean English, Philippine English, Nigerian English, and Ghanian English(Kachru 1965, Foley 1988, Lowenberg 1986, Bautista 1997, Bamgbose 1982, Sey1973). It was also in this second diaspora that a new ecology for the teachingof English was created, in terms of linguistic input, methodology, norms, andidentity.

Several attempts have been made to model the spread and diffusion of En-glish as a global language (Kachru 1988, G¨orlach 1991, McArthur 1987, Crystal1997). Kachru’s (1988) concentric circle model (Figure 1) captures the historical,sociolinguistic, acquisitional, and literary contexts of the spread and diffusion ofEnglish.

In this model, the inner circle refers to the traditional bases of English, where it isthe primary language, with an estimated 320–380 million speakers (Crystal 1997).

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Figure 1 The concentric circle model. [Adapted from Kachru (1997).]

The outer circle represents the spread of English in nonnative contexts, whereit has been institutionalized as an additional language, with an estimated 150–300 million speakers. The expanding circle, with a steady increase in the numberof speakers and functional domains, includes nations where English is used primar-ily as a foreign language, with an estimated 100–1000 million speakers (Crystal1997).

The impact and extent of spread is not easily quantifiable because many va-rieties of English are used for both inter- and intranational functions. Table 1presents a list of countries where English is used as an “official” (loosely defined)language.

Exponents of Stratification

The stratification of English, especially varieties in the outer circle, has been in-terpreted in two ways: as a polylectal continuum (Platt 1975, Platt & Weber 1980,Platt et al 1984, Mufwene 1994, 1997) and as a cline of English bilingualism

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WORLD ENGLISHES 531

TABLE 1 Countries in which English has official statusa

Antigua and Barbuda Irish Republic Seychelles

Australia Jamaica Sierra Leone

Bahamas Kenya Singapore

Barbados Lesotho South Africa

Botswana Liberia Sri Lanka

Brunei Malawi Surinam

Cameroon Malta Swaziland

Canada Mauritius Tanzania

Dominica New Zealand Trinidad and Tobago

Fiji Nigeria Uganda

Gambia Papua New Guinea United Kingdom

Ghana Philippines United States of America

Grenada St. Christopher and Nevis Zambia

Guyana St. Lucia Zimbabwe

India St. Vincent and the Grenadines

aAdapted from Crystal (1985, p. 357).

(Kachru 1983, Pakir 1991, Bamgbose 1982). In terms of a lectal range, Platt& Weber (1980), following Bickerton’s (1975) model of creole continuum, de-scribe Singapore English (Singlish), identifiable with a spectrum of varietiesspanning from the standard variety of the lexifier—identified as acrolect—tothe basilect, its polar opposite. The sociolinguistic accounts of South AfricanIndian English (Mesthrie 1992), Caribbean English (Winford 1997), and LiberianEnglishes (Singler 1997) offer more evidence for the continuum model: In eachcase, the basilect is the variety of English used by people with little contact withEnglish and no formal education, whereas the acrolect, which shows little differ-ence from the colonial form of English, is the variety used mainly by educatedpeople.

The cline of bilingualism, on the other hand, is related to the users and uses.One end of this cline represents the educated variety of English; the other endrepresents, among others, Nigerian Pidgin (Bamiro 1991), basilect in Malaysia andSingapore (Pakir 1991, Lowenberg 1991), and butler English (Hosali & Aitchison1986). These varieties are not only spoken, they are also used in literature tocharacterize various types of interlocutor identities, socioeconomic classes, andthe local cultural ethos.

There is also a functional aspect of this cline, as found most visibly in thecontext of outer-circle varieties of English (Quirk et al 1972, Kachru 1983).Kachru (1983), for example, has identified four functions of English in South Asia:

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(a) instrumental—English as a medium of learning in educational systems;(b) regulative—English in administrative and legal systems; (c) interpersonal—English as a link language between speakers of mutually unintelligible languagesor dialects in sociolinguistically plural societies, and as a language of elit-ism and modernization; and (d) imaginative—English in various literarygenres.

Linguistic Imperialism or Language Pragmatics

The third phase of English expansion, the second diaspora, has recently gener-ated controversies about the processes and consequences of the introduction ofEnglish into what clearly were un-English contexts. The rapid spread of Englishduring the third phase has been explained at least from two different, thoughnot mutually exclusive, perspectives. According to one perspective, the spreadof English in nonnative contexts was actively promoted, via English languageteaching (ELT) agencies such as the British Council, as an instrument of theforeign policies of major English-speaking states. This theory, known as Englishlinguistic imperialism (Phillipson 1992), argues that English is universally im-posed by agencies of linguistic coercion, such as the British Council and TESOL(Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages), which introduce andimpose a norm, Standard English, through which is exerted the domination ofthose groups that have both the means of imposing it as “legitimate” and themonopoly on the means of appropriating it (cf. also Pennycook 1994, 1998). Ac-cordingly, linguistic imperialism results in the emergence, on the one hand, of anasymmetric relationship between producers and consumers that is internalized asnatural, normative, and essential and, on the other hand, of a heteroglossic (hier-archical) arrangement of languages, pervaded by hegemonic value judgments,material and symbolic investments, and ideologies that represent interests onlyof those in power [for detailed critiques of this perspective of the spread ofEnglish, see Kibbee (1993), Brutt-Griffler (1998), Davies (1996), Canagarajah(1999)].

The other perspective on the spread of English is the econocultural model,proposed by Quirk (1988) and defended in Brutt-Griffler (1998). Industrial rev-olution, trade practices, and commercial exploitation of the late eighteenth- andearly nineteenth-century England created conditions where one language had todevelop as the language of the world market, the “commercial lingua franca.”With England and the United States at the epicenter of industrial capitalism ofthe nineteenth century, it was natural that English became the language of globalcommerce. Especially after World War II—with the establishment of the UnitedNations, World Bank, UNESCO, UNICEF, World Health Organization, and, a fewyears later, the Commonwealth and the European Union—it was inevitable that thegeneral competence in English in different political, social, cultural, and economicmarkets would continue to grow rapidly (Mazrui & Mazrui 1998, Brutt-Griffler

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WORLD ENGLISHES 533

1998). The success of the spread of English, tied to the economic conditions thatcreated the commercial supremacy of the United Kingdom and the United States, isguaranteed under the econocultural model by linguistic pragmatism not linguisticimperialism.

The educational system in the colonies was the most important instrument ofthe reproduction of English symbolic capital because schools1 had the monopolyover the reproduction of the market on which the value of linguistic competencedepends (Bourdieu 1977, Goke-Pariola 1993). In colonial South Asia and WestAfrica, where education was the only source for the acquisition of cultural capital2

and apprenticeship into the “fellowships of discourse” (`a la Foucault 1972)3, theprincipal medium of that initiation was English. The recognition of English as sym-bolic capital is most clearly evidenced, for example, in the second phase—after themissionary phase—of the spread of English in South Asia, which was the result ofthe demand and willingness of local people to learn it (Kachru 1986). It is unsur-prising, therefore, that prominent political leaders in colonial India, or, as Goke-Pariola (1993) reports, Nigerians in many parts of that country, contested the use ofindigenous languages in the schools because it was perceived as denying them thelinguistic capital necessary for the accumulation of both economic and politicalpowers.

When the colonizers left, they left behind the linguistic habitus and the peculiarmarket conditions their intervention had created; but their departure did create anew ecology for the teaching of English in terms of (nonnative) linguistic input,local (Indian, Nigerian, etc.) norms, multiple identities, communicative compe-tencies and methodologies that respect language variation.

1It is in schools, argues Giroux (1981, p. 24), that the production of hegemonic ideologies“hides” behind a number of legitimating forms. Some of the most obvious include “(1) theclaim by dominant classes that their interests represent the entire interests of the community;(2) the claim that conflict only occurs outside of the sphere of the political, i.e., economicconflict is viewed as non-political; (3) the presentation of specific forms of consciousness,beliefs, attitudes, values and practices as natural, universal, or even eternal.”2Cultural capital here refers to the “system of meanings, abilities, language forms, and tastesthat are directly or indirectly defined by dominant groups as socially legitimate” (Apple1978:496, Bourdieu 1991).3The function of “the fellowships of discourse” is, according to Foucault (1972, pp. 225–26),“to preserve or to reproduce discourse, but in order that it should circulate within a closedcommunity, according to strict regulations, without those in possession being dispossessedby this very distribution. An archaic model of this would be those groups of Rhapsodists,possessing knowledge of poems to recite or, even, upon which to work variations andtransformations. But though the ultimate object of this knowledge was ritual recitation, itwas protected and preserved within a determinate group by the, often extremely complex,exercises of memory implied by such a process. Apprenticeship gained access both to agroup and to a secret which recitation made manifest, but did not divulge. The roles ofspeaking and listening were not interchangeable.”

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534 BHATT

LANGUAGE NATIVIZATION ANDBILINGUAL’S CREATIVITY

As the English language spread, through linguistic imperialism and linguistic prag-matism, to nonnative contexts and came into close, protracted contact with genet-ically and culturally unrelated languages, it went through a process of linguisticexperimentation and nativization by the people who adopted it for use in differ-ent functional domains, such as education, administration, and high society (cf.Kachru 1992a). Nonnative English speakers thus created new, cultural-sensitiveand socially appropriate meanings—expressions of the bilingual’s creativity—byaltering and manipulating the structure and functions of English in its new ecology.As a result, English underwent a process of acculturation in order to compete inlocal linguistic markets that were hitherto dominated by indigenous languages.Given the linguistic and cultural pluralism in Africa and South Asia, linguistic in-novations, creativity, and emerging literary traditions in English in these countrieswere immediately accepted.

Linguistic Creativity

To understand the structural variation in English across cultures, two questions needto be answered (Bhatt 1995a): What is the structure of “nonnative” Englishes, andhow did they come to be the way they are? With respect to these questions, a begin-ning has already been made toward explorations into the structure of outer-circlevarieties of English. Y. Kachru (1985) has provided valuable methodological aswell as theoretical insights into the structure of Indian English discourse. Mesthrie’s(1992) work on South African Indian English and Bhatt’s (1995a,b, 1997, 2000)and Sridhar’s (1992) work on Indian English provide a framework for syntacticdescriptions that has implications for cross-language transfer and bilingual com-petence. Mohanan (1992), Chaudhary (1989), Hancin-Bhatt & Bhatt (1993), andBhatt (1995a,b) have provided accounts of various aspects of the sound patternsof Indian English. The theoretical approaches adopted in all these studies have aclear methodological agenda—to describe the structure of a “nonnative” varietyin its own terms, not as descriptions of aborted “interlanguages.”

Bilingual’s creativity in world Englishes, especially in the outer circle, is bestcaptured using the methodological premise that a descriptively adequate grammarof English, in “nonnative” contexts, must address the relationship between theforms that English manifests and its speakers’ perception of reality and the natureof their cultural institutions. This premise yields an interpretation of language useconstrained by the grammar of culture (cf. Bright 1968, Hymes 1974, D’souza1988). The theoretical insights in the works of Halliday (1973), Kachru (1992a),Sridhar (1992), and Bhatt (1995a, 2000) provide a framework of linguistic des-cription that not only allows the simplest interpretation of English languageuse across cultures, it also accommodates, in the most economical way, linguisti-cally significant generalizations of the grammatical structure of world Englishes.

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Consider the use of undifferentiated tag questions in Indian English to demon-strate how the theoretical assumptions and methodological insights discussedabove provide socially realistic descriptions of the bilingual’s grammar in theworld Englishes context. In English, tag questions are formed by a rule that insertsa pronominal copy of the subject after an appropriate modal auxiliary. A typicalexample is “John said he’ll work today, didn’t he?”

Tags have also been analyzed as expressing certain attitudes of the speakertoward what is being said in the main clause, and in terms of speech acts and/orperformatives. Functionally, tags in English behave like epistemic adverbials, suchas probably, presumably, etc.: (a) “It’s still dark outside, isn’t it?” (b) “It’s probablydark outside.”

Kachru (1983, p. 79) and Trudgill & Hannah (1985, p. 111) discuss the use ofwhat they call undifferentiated tag questions as one of the linguistic exponents ofIndian English: (a) “You are going home soon, isn’t it?” (b) “You have taken mybook, isn’t it?” Their description, however, leaves out the important pragmatic rolethe undifferentiated tags play in the Indian English speech community. In mostcases, the meaning of the tag is not the one appended to the meaning of the mainproposition; it is usually the tag that signals important social meaning. In fact, tagsin Indian English are a fascinating example of how linguistic form (of the tag) isconstrained by cultural constraints of politeness. Bhatt (1995b) has in fact arguedthat undifferentiated tags in Indian English are linguistic devices governed by thepoliteness principle of nonimposition: They serve positive politeness functions(a la Brown & Levinson 1987), signaling deference and acquiescence. Notice,for example, the contrast between Indian English—(a) “You said you’ll do thejob, isn’t it?” and “They said they will be here, isn’t it?”—and Standard BritishEnglish/American English—(b) “You said you’ll do the job, didn’t you? and “Theysaid they will be here, didn’t they?” In contrast to theb examples above, IndianEnglish speakers find theaexamples nonimpositional and mitigating. This intuitionis more clearly established when an adverb of intensification/assertion is used inconjunction with the undifferentiated tag: (a) “Of course you said you’ll do thejob, isn’t it?” (b) “Of course they said they’ll be here, isn’t it?” The result is,predictably, unacceptable.

In a culture where the verbal behavior is severely constrained, to a large extent,by politeness regulations, where nonimposition is the essence of polite behavior,it is not surprising that Indian English has replaced Standard British English tagswith undifferentiated tags. To understand why Indian English has chosen to use theundifferentiated strategy, the notion of grammar of culture (Bright 1968, D’souza1988) becomes relevant.

Undifferentiated tags are not exclusive instances of the interplay of grammat-ical and cultural rules in Indian English, where one finds the linguistic formconstrained by the grammar of culture. The influence of the grammar of cul-ture on linguistic expressions in Indian English can also be seen in the use ofthe modal auxiliary “may.” In Indian English, “may” is used to express obligationpolitely—“This furnituremaybe removed tomorrow”; “These mistakesmayplease

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be corrected”—in contrast to Standard British English—“This furniture is to beremoved tomorrow”; “These mistakes should be corrected” (Trudgill & Hannah1985, p. 109).

The linguistic checklist of innovations in the outer-circle varieties of English isendless. Several studies on linguistic acculturation and creativity in English in theouter circle have convincingly demonstrated that world Englishes have their ownsyntactic and logical structure, constrained both by cognitive-economy conside-rations and by social-functional requirements (Platt & Weber 1980, Kachru 1983,Sridhar 1992, Mesthrie 1992, 1997, Bokamba 1992, Bhatt 1995a,b, 2000, Bao1995).

Sociolinguistic Creativity

There is also a sociolinguistic dimension of bilingual creativity, viewed in termsof acculturation and nativization of the use of English in the outer circle. Thestudy and analysis of English language use in outer-circle varieties resulted inthe following types of cross-cultural and cross-linguistic research: (a) discourseanalysis, discourse strategies, and stylistic innovations (Richards 1979, Smith1981, 1987, Gumperz 1982, Magura 1984, Y. Kachru 1985, 1995, 1997, Valentine1988, 1991); (b) speech acts (Y. Kachru 1991, 1993, D’souza 1988, 1991);(c) code mixing and code switching (Bhatia & Ritchie 1989, Kamwangamalu1989, Myers-Scotton 1993a,b, Bhatt 1997); (d) genre analysis (V. Bhatia 1997);and (e) language planning (Kandiah & Kwan-Terry 1994).

An illustration of the sociolinguistic dimension of bilingual’s creativity—themanipulation of linguistic resources in language use to generate new meanings—isbest exemplified by code switching (style shifting) reported by Mesthrie (1992). Ayoung South African Indian English-speaking attendant at the security section ofthe airport asked him, “You haven’ got anything to declare?” Mesthrie argues thatin using the nonacrolectal variety, the security guard at the airport was defusing thesyntax of power (“Do you have anything to declare?”) in favor of mesolectal soli-darity (Mesthrie 1992, p. 219). Other sociolinguistic functions of code switchingand mixing in world Englishes, such as exclusion, politeness, identity, and elitism,have been discussed by Kachru (1983) and Myers-Scotton (1993b).

The other face of nativization of sociolinguistic uses of world Englishes ispresented by code mixing in culture-specific interactions, in the news media, inmatrimonial advertisements, in obituaries, and so on. The matrimonial columnsreflect, as Kachru (1986) has convincingly argued, Asian and African sensitivity tocolor, caste hierarchy, regional attitudes, and family structure. It is not uncommon,for instance, to find matrimonial advertisements in South Asian English newspa-pers using highly contextualized English lexical items with semantic nativization,as shown in two Hindu examples from 1 July 1979 (Kachru 1986).

Wanted well-settled bridegroom for a Kerala fair, graduate Baradwaja gotram,Astasastram girl. . . . Subsect no bar.

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Non-Koundanya well qualified prospective bridegroom below 20 for graduateIyengar girl, daughter of engineer. Mirugaserusham. No dosham. Averagecomplexion. Reply with horoscope.

The rhetorical-communicative styles of South Asian English, as in the aboveexamples, show that both the text and the context must be nativized in order to de-rive an interpretation that is faithful to the new situations in which world Englishesfunction. Furthermore, the successful, contextually appropriate interpretation ofthe above examples requires bilingual as well as bicultural competence.

The cross-cultural attitudes about the forms and functions of world Englishesshow a cline: from acquisitional deficit to pragmatic success. On one end of thisattitudinal cline are the linguistic Cassandras, members of the inner circle (Quirk1990, 1996, Honey 1983, 1997) launching paradigms of marginality, for primarilyeconomic gains (Kachru 1996, Romaine 1997, Bhatt 2001a).

The other end of this attitudinal cline is captured rather faithfully in a conver-sation that takes place between a farmer and an Indian in Vikram Seth’s novel,ASuitable Boy.

“Do you speak English?” he said after a while in the local dialect of Hindi.He had noticed Maan’s luggage tag.“Yes,” said Maan.“Without English you can’t do anything,” said the farmer sagely.Maan wondered what possible use English could be to the farmer.“What use is English?” said Maan.“People love English!” said the farmer with a strange sort of deep-voicedgiggle. “If you talk in English, you are a king. The more people you canmystify, the more people will respect you.” He turned back to his tobacco.

But, what about the attitude toward nativization by nonnative speakers? Herethe venerable Chinua Achebe (1966, p. 22) sums it up most eloquently: “I feel theEnglish language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience. Butit will have to be a new English, still in communion with its ancestral home butaltered to suit its new African surroundings.”

Achebe’s observation about the appropriateness of indiginized varieties of En-glish for articulating linguistic voices in nonnative contexts is supported by theresults of empirical investigations on attitudes of nonnative speakers toward ex-ocentric (native) and endocentric (nonnative) models (Llamzon 1969, Bamgbose1971, Sey 1973, Kachru 1976).

Literary Creativity and Canonicity

The nativization and alteration of English ensured its use as a medium for indige-nous expression. As Iyengar (1962, p. 3) puts it: “Indian writing in English isbut one of the voices in which India speaks. It is a new voice, no doubt, but it isas much Indian as the others.” These endorsements of the relationship betweenunderlying thought patterns and language design are perhaps best exemplified by

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Achebe (1969). Achebe provides two short passages of the same material, onewritten in the indiginized/Africanized style and the other in native English style.In the passage, the Chief Priest is telling one of his sons why it is necessary tosend him to Church. The first of the two passages below, the Africanized version(Achebe 1969), reflects faithfully the underlying thought patterns of the culturalcontext of language use.

1. I want one of my sons to join these people and be my eyes there. If thereis nothing in it you will come back. But if there is something then youwill bring back my share. The world is like a mask, dancing. If you wantto see it well, you do not stand in one place. My spirit tells me that thosewho do not befriend the white man today will be saying, “had we known”,tomorrow.

2. I am sending you as my representative among these people—just to be onthe safe side in case the new religion develops. One has to move with thetimes or else one is left behind. I have a hunch that those who fail to cometo terms with the white man may well regret their lack of foresight.

An analysis of these new/indigenous varieties reveal that the innovations in theirstructure and use are, as discussed above, a linguistic response to the constraints ofthe grammar of their respective native cultures (Bright 1968, D’souza 1987). It is inthese new Englishes, as Achebe ably demonstrates, that we observe today the mostactive processes of a bilingual’s creativity: translation, transcreation, style shifting,code switching, etc. (Bhatia & Ritchie 1989, Bhatt 1997, Bokamba 1992, Kachru1983, 1986, 1992a, 1994, Y. Kachru 1993, Lowenberg 1988, Mesthrie 1992, Smith1981, 1987, Sridhar 1992, Thumboo 1992, Baumgardner 1993, 1996). English isused as a medium to present canons unrelated to traditional Judeo-Christian as-sociations or the European cultural heritage of the language. Thus, the Englishlanguage has become “multicanon” (Kachru 1991), a notion that attempts to ac-commodate the current sociolinguistic reality in world Englishes, where speak-ers of a wide range of first languages communicate with one another throughEnglish.

THE SACRED COWS OF ENGLISH

The global spread of English, its diffusion and penetration at various societallevels and functional domains, has had a very important consequence: Some ofthe traditional, taken-for-granted linguistic understandings of users and uses ofEnglish have been questioned and challenged (Kachru 1988). A sustained academiccampaign for a non-Eurocentric approach to the study of world Englishes resultedin the sacrifice of five types of sacred cows: the acquisitional, sociolinguistic,pedagogical, theoretical, and the ideological.

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Acquisitional Sacred Cow

Acquisitional questions relate to the relevance of concepts such as interference,error, interlanguage, and fossilization, to the users and uses of English in theouter circle. As discussed in the previous section, the use of undifferentiated tagquestions by Indian English speakers is not a reflex of incomplete acquisition, afossilized interlanguage, but a manifestation of a steady-state cultural grammar ofEnglish in outer-circle contexts.

Fossilization theory, a non–target language stage, suffers from the assumptionof what Bley-Vroman (1983) terms a comparative fallacy. Comparative fallacyrefers to the researcher imposing the structure of the target language onto an in-terlanguage. Several scholars have argued, rather convincingly, that the structureof the interlanguage at various stages should be considered on its own terms, notfrom the structural perspective of the target language (cf. Bley-Vroman 1983,White 1989, 1996, Schwartz 1995, Schwartz & Sprouse 1996, Sridhar 1994). AsSchwartz (1995, p. 8) puts it: “If there’s one thing we often know about developingInterlanguages, it’s that they don’t have the structure of the target grammar—sowhy such a fuss about the syntax of the target language. . . .” However, in Selinker’s(1972, 1993) interlanguage theory, there can be no talk of fossilization without ref-erence to such constructs as target language, native speakers, and errors (Davies1989, 1991). These constructs, although invalid for acquisitional accounts of non-native varieties, perform an ideological function; the constructs provide a “habitof thought” that normalizes and universalizes a paradigm of linguistic inquiry thatprivileges “knowledge of language” in the possession only of native speakers.

Theoretical Sacred Cow

The theoretical concerns relate to three vital concepts: the speech community,the native speaker, and the ideal speaker-hearer. The conceptualization of speechcommunity varies from Bloomfield’s definition (“a speech community is a groupof people who interact by means of speech”) to the rather complex definitions ofJohn Gumperz and Robert Le Page (Hudson 1980, pp. 25–30; see also Silverstein1996a).

The standard definition of a second language is one that is acquired in an envi-ronment in which the language is spoken natively (Larsen-Freeman & Long 1991).This definition completely marginalizes the empirical fact that more second lan-guage acquisition takes place in “nonnative” contexts than in “native” contexts (cf.Ferguson 1982, Sridhar 1994). The native/nonnative distinctions, Bhatt (2001a,b)argues, get validated by the kind of intellectual imperialism whereby a particularmodel of language, possessed by “an ideal native speaker-hearer in a completelyhomogeneous speech community” (`a la Chomsky 1986) assumes a paradigmaticstatus in the linguistic sciences as a whole (see also Silverstein 1996b). This ideal-ization produces “the illusion of linguistic communism” and ignores and trivializesthe sociohistorical and economic conditions that have established a particular set

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of linguistic practices as dominant and legitimate. The voices of reason are seldomignored. Paikeday’s (1985) all too familiar conclusion about the theoretical statusof the term native speaker is conveniently ignored:

I am convinced that “native speaker” in the sense of the sole arbiter of gram-maticality or one whose intuitions of a proprietary nature about his or hermother tongue and which are shared only by others of his own tribe is a mythpropagated by linguists, that the true meaning of the lexeme “native speaker”is a proficient user of a specified language, and that this meaning satisfiesall contexts in which linguists, anthropologists, psychologists, educators, andothers use it, except when it directly refers to the speaker’s mother tongue orfirst-acquired language without any assumptions about the speaker’s linguisticcompetence.

In the context of world Englishes, the codification of the native/nonnative dis-tinction in standard textbooks universalizes its legitimacy and contributes to thesuccess of Standard English ideology. And at the same time, this codificationexcludes the oppositional discourse (Rampton 1990, Sridhar 1994, Singh 1995).

Pedagogical Sacred Cow

The research in the past two decades has clearly demonstrated that world En-glishes have their own structural norms, their own characteristic features, and eventheir own communicative styles (e.g., see Bailey & G¨orlach 1982, Kachru 1982,1983, 1986, Mesthrie 1992, Smith 1987, Trudgill & Hannah 1985). However, thepedagogical paradigms—methods, models, and materials—have not shown anysensitivity to local sociolinguistic contexts.

Should the inner-circle norm be the model for teaching English in outer-circlecontexts, or should it be the local variety? The theoretical relevance of this questionis discussed by Savignon & Berns (1984), Tickoo (1991), Nelson (1992, 1995),Smith (1992), and Kachru (1992a). Their views entail a radical restructuring of(classroom) resources, (teacher) training, and (teaching) materials. Such a step,perhaps antidogmatic in ESL pedagogical practices, is the right step toward prac-ticing socially realistic and contextually sensitive pedagogy.

Sociolinguistic Sacred Cow

The sociolinguistic concerns relate to the issue of “pluricentricity” of English,the various national, regional, and local identities English has acquired as a resultof language contact and change. The most important outcome of pluricentricity,Kachru (1988) argues, has been the demythologization of the traditional Englishcanon and the establishment of new canons with their own linguistic, literary, andcultural identities.

Ideological Sacred Cow

The teaching of English, with the entire framework and institutions that supportit worldwide, is a critical site where the dominant ideology, Standard English,

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TABLE 2 Labels used to symbolize the power of Englisha

Positive Negative

National identity Antinationalism

Literary renaissance Anti–native culture

Cultural mirror (for native cultures) Materialism

Vehicle for modernization Vehicle for Westernization

Liberalism Rootlessness

Universalism Ethnocentricism

Secularism Permissiveness

Technology Divisiveness

Science Alienation

Mobility Colonialism

Access code

aFrom Kachru (1996, p. 142).

is constantly evolving and continuously bargaining with regional ideologies forpower (Dua 1994). As a language that conveniently disregards the essentiallycircumstantial, random relationships between itself and the universe, the dominantideology must present itself as possessing some kind of inherent, inevitable tie withthe value it represents. In so doing, subjects of a society are actively taught to believethat the adoption of ideology can bring about social changes for their benefit. Thereare works of many scholars, such as Quirk (1990, 1996), Honey (1983, 1997), andMedgyes (1992, 1994), that illustrate how English language teaching in outer-circlecontexts is surreptitiously forced to serve to inculcate only the culture, ideologies,and social relations necessary to promote and sustain the status quo.

This ideological landscape is changing now as outer-circle varieties competefor functional domains that belonged exclusively to inner-circle varieties. Theideological and symbolic power of English in outer circle has two sides, positiveand negative, as shown in Table 2.

TEACHING WORLD ENGLISHES: CRITICAL ISSUES

Codification and Standard English Ideology

The standardization of English has allowed the interpretation of sociolinguistic,educational, and acquisitional problems as consequences of liberal linguistic think-ing, general grammatical ignorance, and other similar contraventions of Englishlinguistic norms. Conforming to these norms, e.g., Standard English, then becomesthe solution to the problems (cf. Quirk 1988, 1990, 1996). The success of standard-ization depends largely on the ideological strategies and rhetorical operations usedto devalue indigenous (nonnative) varieties against the standard (native) variety.

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It is the function of the (Standard English) ideology that the ELT professionrecognizes “ambilingualism” as the goal of second language acquisition, “fossiliza-tion” as the ultimate fate of second language learners, and “interlanguage” as thevariety spoken by nonnative speakers. These constructs—ambilingualism, inter-language, fossilization—provide a habit of thought. Soon after being introduced,they are understood as mathematical axioms, above debate; the assumptions sharedare not propositions to be defended or attacked (cf. Bhatt 2001b, Kachru 1988,1996). The assumptions form part of the “tacit dimension” of scholarly under-standing. In reality, however, these assumptions consecrate linguistic and culturalprivilege. Even where learners meet the criterion of functional bilingualism, trivialdichotomies such as proficiency/competence and standard/nonstandard are createdby the profession and then used as an alibi for maintaining linguistic ethnocentrismdisguised with concerns over intelligibility among the English-using population(Bhatt 1995a, 2001b, Kachru & Nelson 1996, Lippi-Green 1997). The learners arethus confined to lifelong apprenticeship in the second language without any hopefor sociolinguistic emancipation (Tollefson 1991, 1995).

The system of ideological management—the strategic and regulatory practicesrequired to manage language variation (Bhatt 2001b)—provides the tools, thetheoretical-methodological constructs, such as native/nonnative, standard/nonstan-dard, fossilization/ultimate attainment, and target language/interlanguage, neededto naturalize and essentialize homogenization and standardization. The successof the management paradigm manifests in different forms of attitudinal internal-izations, especially among the ELT professionals (cf. Honey 1983, Quirk 1990,Johnson 1992, Medgyes 1992, 1994). The common strategy employed by the ELTprofessionals to manage and minimize language variation is to present it as an un-fortunate outcome of liberal pedagogy and liberation linguistics that presumablylocks second language learners to substandard use of English (Bhatt 2001a,b).

The liberation ideology confronts and competes with the dominant StandardEnglish ideology and produces competing sets of “values” (Bourdieu 1991), cre-ating strong pressure in favor of the nonstandard-language varieties (Canagarajah1993, 1996). These nonstandard varieties are marginalized by the grammarians,the lexicographers, and the teachers—the agents of linguistic coercion—mainlyfor two reasons: (a) The recognition of language variation threatens, as Milroy &Milroy (1999) argue, the ideological link between “grammar” and authority, and(b) the standard language can continue to function as the norm through which isexerted the domination of those groups that have both the means of imposing itas legitimate and the monopoly on the means of appropriating it (Bourdieu 1977).The recent debate on Ebonics and the politics of diglossia in the United States(Pullum 1997, Rickford 1997), often polemical, bear testimony to the success ofthe Standard English ideology.

Communicative Competence and Intelligibility

The traditional monotheistic methodologies used for teaching English worldwidefail to honor the range of social functions and identities that world Englishes car-ries out in diverse sociocultural contexts. Second language teaching methodologies

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must, therefore, be culture sensitive, as perhaps is the case with the approach knownas ethnography of communication (Hymes 1974, 1996). The key concept in thisapproach is communicative competence, the “appropriate” use of linguistic con-duct. What is appropriate for a situation in one culture may not be so in anotherculture. It is important, then, that learning, teaching, and using world Englishes re-quire familiarization with not only the conversational context but also the broadersociocultural context in which the utterance is located (Berns 1990). Earlier ped-agogical paradigms, with their monolingual and monocultural bias, are untenable(cf. Sridhar 1994, Y. Kachru 1994).

The linguistic realization of different speech acts—greeting, leave taking, com-plimenting, requesting—in Indian or Zambian English is quite different fromAmerican or British English (D’souza 1991, Y. Kachru 1991, Berns 1990). Themodels of teaching and learning need therefore to reflect the sociocultural ethosof the context of teaching/learning, which has wide implications for a theory ofsecond language pedagogy and for its application (McKay & Hornberger 1996).

Another issue, connected to the issue of communicative competence, is that ofintelligibility. The issue touches the very core of the debatable distinction betweenlanguage and dialect, that, over time, different dialects of English will becomemutually unintelligible. Quirk (1985, p. 3), for example, writes of “the diasporaof English into several mutually incomprehensible languages.” For Quirk (1985,p. 6), all English-using nations must accede to “a form of English that is bothunderstood and respected in every corner of the globe where any knowledge ofany variety of English exists.”

Nelson (1984, 1995), Smith & Nelson (1985), and Smith (1992) have arguedagainst the monolithic view of intelligibility and have argued instead that a bet-ter understanding of this concept is revealed in its use as a continuum—fromintelligibility (word/utterance recognition) to comprehensibility (word/utterancemeaning; locutionary force) to interpretability (meaning behind word/utterance;illocutionary force). “Understanding,” an interactional concept in this model, islowest at the level of intelligibility and highest at the level of interpretability.There are, for instance, several examples of English text that are readily intelli-gible and comprehensible but not necessarily interpretable. The matrimonial ex-amples, discussed above, from the vantagepoint of the inner circle will fail atthe level of interpretability. Smith (1988, p. 274) forcefully argues that, contraryto what is being taught to students from grammar textbooks, “interpretability isat the core of communication and is more important than mere intelligibility orcomprehensibility.”

CONCLUSIONS

This essay focused on the theoretical, conceptual, descriptive, ideological, andpower-related concerns of world Englishes. The rise of a tribal language to a globallanguage in a millennium dominated by Latin and, later, French, the languages ofintellectual expression and cultural erudition, is unprecedented. Sociolinguistic

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inquiries into this unprecedented spread of the English language have yieldedsignificant understandings of the linguistic processes and products of languagecontact and language change. There is more awareness today about how languageuse interacts with global economic, demographic, and cultural trends. Graddol’s(1997) provocative survey of the future of English shows conflicting trends oflanguage use: English is increasingly required for high-skill jobs everywhere inthe world; it is the most widely studied foreign language; it dominates satellite TVprogramming and yet its functions in youth culture are more symbolic than com-municative; its share of internet traffic is declining; and its economic significancein many countries is challenged by regional economics.

The historical, sociolinguistic, and ideological accounts of homogeneity andhegemony of Standard English within the world Englishes paradigm have yieldeda broader understanding of the social and discursive relationships between (andwithin) speech communities, the institutional acquisition and use of linguisticresources, and the relationship between language and systems of domination andsubordination (Phillipson 1992, Parakrama 1995, Pennycook 1998, Blommaert& Verschueren 1998, Bhatt 2001a,b, Ramanathan 1999, Skutnabb-Kangas 2000,Woolard 1985, Woolard & Schieffelin 1994).

The interdisciplinary theoretical and methodological framework of worldEnglishes has provided an understanding of the productive relationship betweencultural studies and English studies. Literary creativity in world Englishes, asDissanayake (1985) argues, is able to reappropriate and repossess fictional dis-course that had come under the influence of regimes of colonial authority.

Finally, the pedagogical concerns in world Englishes provide, as argued byKachru & Nelson (1996), an insightful understanding of the relationships be-tween linguistic and language-teaching theory, methodology, and applications.Second language curriculum, testing procedures, and resource materials must beconstructed after careful study of variation, and the pragmatics of variation, for ef-fective second language pedagogy (McKay & Hornberger 1996, Lowenberg 1992,Davidson 1993).

In conclusion, then, the field of world Englishes reevaluates, critiques, and dis-places the earlier tradition of cross-cultural and cross-linguistic acquisition and useof English, its teaching, and its transformations. World Englishes, in its most am-bitious interpretation, attempts to decolonize and democratize applied linguistics.

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