KINGSLEY BOLTON
Over the last three decades, World Englishes (WE) has become an established subfield of linguistics, with particular reference to sociolinguistic and applied linguistic approaches to language.1 Since the 1980s, the world Englishes turn has succeeded in effecting a paradigm shift in the academy, transforming English studies as an area of international research and scholarship, and in the process, relexifying the language we use to talk about the spread of English worldwide. Before the 1980s, discussions of English worldwide usually employed a normative vocabulary which foregrounded a distinction between “native” versus “nonnative” speakers and employed such terms as English as a Native Language (ENL), English as a Second Language (ESL), and English as a Foreign Language (EFL), in order to classify particular varieties of English. Since the early 1980s, however, world Englishes, with its inclusive plural, has increasingly become the standard term to refer to varieties of English worldwide.
Debates about the status, functions, and features of varieties of English may be traced back to the mid‐1960s and the work of Halliday, McIntosh, and Strevens, who asserted that “English is no longer the possession of the British, or even the British and the Americans, but an international language which … exists in an increasingly large number of different varieties” (Halliday, McIntosh, & Strevens 1964: 293). Twelve years later, the US scholar Larry Smith described English as “an international auxiliary language,” and asserted that it was “time to stop calling it a foreign language or second language,” suggesting instead the term “EIAL” (English as an International Auxiliary Language), which, he asserted, “more accurately reflects the present state of English language usage around the globe” (Smith 1976: 39). Since then, the work of Braj Kachru, Yamuna Kachru, Larry Smith, and associated scholars has effected a major paradigm shift in English studies. Since the 1980s, there has been a remarkable recognition of “Englishes” from a pluricentric perspective, as in “English languages,” “international Englishes,” “new Englishes,” “varieties of English,” and “world Englishes.” Of all these designations, the best‐established term in the literature is “world Englishes,” and the last three decades have seen the rise of this discipline (or subdiscipline) in linguistics as a site for substantial scholarly research and publication. There are now a number of academic journals, including Asian Englishes, English Today, English World‐Wide, and World Englishes, devoted to this field, numerous book‐length studies dealing with research in this area, as well as the International Association for World Englishes (IAWE), which regularly organizes international conferences across the globe (Seargeant 2012a).
The term “World Englishes” may be best understood as having both a narrower and wider application. The narrow application of the term refers to schools of thought closely associated with the approach to the study of English worldwide pioneered by Braj B. Kachru and a tight‐knit group of fellow scholars. The wider application of the concept also includes many other approaches to the study of English worldwide ranging from the regional Englishes of Britain to varieties of English in the US, Australia, and New Zealand, and to the Englishes of East and West Africa and many Asian societies, as well as the study of discourse and genre in those contexts where English is regarded as a second or foreign language. Research on WE in the widest sense includes at least a dozen distinct approaches, including those of English studies, corpus linguistics, features‐based approaches, the sociology of language, “Kachruvian” studies, pidgin and creole research, applied linguistics, lexicography, popularized studies, critical linguistics, futurological approaches, and English as a lingua franca (Bolton 2004, 2006, 2012, 2018a, 2018b). To this list, we might now add current work on “cultural linguistics” (or “linguaculture”), a recently emergent approach to cross‐cultural communication from a WE perspective, which has gained a good deal of recognition in recent years (Sharifian 2017). These approaches are summarized in Table 41.1 below.
From the 1960s onwards, the English studies approach was associated with such scholars as Randolph Quirk and others active at the Survey of English Usage at University College London, including David Crystal and Sidney Greenbaum. The work of these UK‐based scholars was complemented by the research and publications of a number of German scholars, including Görlach (1995) and Schneider (2007), and by work in corpus linguistics, which again is closely associated with an English studies approach, as in the work of Greenbaum (1996), Nelson, Wallis, and Aarts (2002), and others on the International Corpus of English (ICE) project (ICE 2016). In addition to the ICE corpora worldwide, research teams have also begun to compile their own regional corpora of Englishes, including the important SAVE corpus of South Asian Varieties of English (Mukherjee 2012).
Table 41.1 Research on world Englishes The sociology of language.
| Approach | Focus | Timeline |
| English studies | The analysis of varieties of English from a synchronic and historical perspectives, against a tradition of English Studies (Anglistik), dating from the late nineteenth century, for example, the work of Otto Jespersen, Daniel Jones, and Henry Sweet. | 1960s–present |
| English corpus linguistics | The accurate and detailed linguistic descriptions of world Englishes from a features perspective. | 1990–present |
| “Features‐based” approaches | The description of English through dialectological and variationist methodologies. Situated against the long tradition of British and European dialectology. | 1980s–present |
| The sociology of language | Research on English in relation to such issues as language maintenance/shift, and ethnolinguistic identity. | 1960s–present |
| Kachruvian studies | The promotion of a pluricentric approach to world Englishes, highlighting both the “sociolinguistic realities” and “bilingual creativity” of Outer Circle (and Expanding Circle) societies. | 1980s–present |
| Pidgin and creole studies |
The description and analysis of “mixed” languages and the dynamics of linguistic hybridization in language contact settings. | 1930s–present |
| Applied linguistics | The exploration of the implications of world Englishes for language learning and teaching, as well as intervarietal translation. | 1960s–present |
| Lexicography | The codification of vocabularies of English worldwide, linked to particular postcolonial societies and issues of linguistic autonomy. | 1980s–present |
| Popularisers | The publication of books on English worldwide aimed at a mass reading public. | 1980s–1990s |
| Critical linguistics | The expression of resistance to the linguistic imperialism and cultural hegemony of English, in tandem with resistance to Anglo‐American political power. | 1990s–present |
| Linguistic futurology | The discussion of future scenarios for the spread of English and English language teaching worldwide. | 1997–present |
| English as an international language (EIL) | The broad study of English as an international and/or auxiliary language. A term variously used to refer to the uses of English(es) in diverse contexts across/between/in the Three Circles worldwide. | 1976–present |
| English as a lingua franca (EFL) | An approach to English focusing on those contexts, for example, universities and international businesses, where English is used as a common language by speakers of different nationalities and linguistic backgrounds. | Late 1990s–present |
| Cultural linguistics | Research on cross‐cultural communication and cultural schemas in the context of world Englishes. | 2000s–present |
The English studies approach and the work of corpus linguists overlap considerably with the “features‐based approach,” which typically involves the linguist in identifying and making statements about the distinctive features of varieties in terms of pronunciation or “accent” (phonology), vocabulary (lexis), or grammar (morphology and syntax). Leading examples of this approach include Trudgill and Hannah (2013 [1982]), Schneider, Burridge, Kortmann, Mesthrie, and Upton (2004), and Kortmann, Burridge, Mesthrie, Schneider, and Upton (2004). Schneider has made an important contribution to the field with his formulation of the Dynamic Model of postcolonial Englishes (Schneider 2003, 2007). Sociolinguistic approaches to WE have included (a) “the sociology of language” (Fishman, Conrad, & Rubal‐Lopez 1996); (b) the “linguistic features” (and dialectological) approach (Trudgill & Hannah 1982, etc.); (c) pidgin and creole studies; and (d) “socially realistic” studies of WE (Kachru 1992a: 304). The use of the term world Englishes to refer to a distinct approach to this subject is most closely associated with the work of Braj B. Kachru. The origin of the term world Englishes can be located in the two conferences on English as a world language that took place in 1978, one in April at the East–West Center in Hawai’i, and the second in June–July at the University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign. Braj Kachru and Larry Smith both played a major role in both conferences. A key theoretical and methodological tenet of the Kachruvian perspective was that the earlier threefold distinction between ENL, ESL, and EFL was ideologically loaded and intellectually flawed, and instead an approach was adopted that categorized varieties of English in terms of a threefold distinction between the Inner Circle (including the UK, US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand), the Outer Circle (postcolonial societies such as Nigeria, Kenya, India, Philippines, and Singapore), and the Expanding Circle (for instance, Brazil, China, Germany, and Japan). By the mid‐1980s, a number of popular works intended for a general reading audience began to appear, including publications by Crystal (1997, 2004) and Bragg (2003). Challenging the perceived “triumphalism” of such popular works, Phillipson’s landmark Linguistic Imperialism (1992) encouraged a strong interest in the politics of English and has also informed the work of a generation of other critical scholars. The futurology perspective is best represented in research reports from Graddol (1997, 2006). Work on English as an International Language (EIL) includes the foundational work of scholars such as Smith (1976, 1981), Strevens (1980), and McKay (2002), and research using the EIL approach continues to the present. From the late 1990s, discussions of English as an international language began to be redefined as English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), and ELF researchers themselves have also noted that not only does ELF owe an intellectual debt to WE research, but that the two approaches are “not competing but complementing paradigms” (Jenkins 2018: 12).
Within linguistics generally, and English linguistics in particular, the World Englishes approach to English worldwide has succeeded in creating a major paradigm shift in academic English studies in the UK and North America, as well as the international academic community. Whereas English studies in the 1960s in the metropolitan academy in the US and UK (and elsewhere) were tied almost exclusively to national literatures (especially English and American literatures), throughout higher education worldwide, English studies are now regarded as areas of study from a global perspective, including both literary and linguistic studies. In this context, World Englishes has emerged and been recognized as a distinct branch of linguistics at many universities. Some have even suggested that the WE approach to English studies now constitutes a distinct “discipline” within the academy, an issue that Seargeant’s (2012a) article examines at some length, highlighting at first the sociohistorical and political underpinning of the field:
[T]he discipline of world Englishes studies … did not arise out of nowhere [and] the development of the discipline is the result of a number of different social, historical and political pressures which frame the ways in which the subject is presently studied in academic circles. In other words, it is these various social, historical and political processes which have produced a mostly coherent field of study which now goes by the title of world Englishes studies, and which provide the meaning‐matrix in which work executed within this tradition exists. And any subsequent work in this field will, in some sense, be a response to this general framework.
(Seargeant 2012a: 114)
Seargeant discusses various components of a “discipline” within academia with reference to previous theorizations, including academic communities of practice, shared domains of academic interests, traditions of scholarship, networks of communication, and conceptual structures, noting that academic disciplines are defined by “how knowledge is organized” and “how organization comes about as a result of the social practices of those involved in the production or reproduction of that knowledge” (Seargeant 2012a: 115).
More specifically, in the case of WE, Seargeant identifies a number of key factors that have led to the emergence of WE as a disciplinary field, namely (a) teaching resources and educational programmes; (b) history; (c) methodology and objectives; and (d) discourse patterns (Seargeant 2012a: 121–126). Teaching resources and educational programmes include all those programmes and courses at undergraduate and postgraduate level on “world Englishes” or closely allied topics in North America, Europe, the UK, Asia, and elsewhere, often using such textbooks as Jenkins (2003), Melchers and Shaw (2003), Kirkpatrick (2007), Mesthrie and Bhatt (2008), Seargeant (2012b) and Seargeant and Swann (2012). Research publications in the field include the key journals noted above, as well as increasing numbers of book publications from such major international publishers as Bloomsbury, Cambridge University Press, John Wiley, Oxford University Press, Routledge (Taylor and Francis), John Benjamins, and Springer. History here refers to the history of WE as a discipline, a topic that I have earlier attempted to tackle in some detail (Bolton 2003: 1–49). At the levels of methodology and objectives, Seargeant notes a good deal of variation, with a range of approaches, from the linguistic to the sociological/political in play, as well as a range of related discourses, all of which (perhaps reassuringly) in “broad‐based” fashion, “allows for diverse and competing approaches to the analysis of the subject … within the wider institutional disciplinary framework” (Seargeant 2012a: 124). In this context, “discourse patterns” refers to the multiple ways in which WE has developed varying yet distinctive “discursive norms” in terms of a specialized vocabulary, as well as diverse norms of approach, methodologies, and scholarship, while ultimately preserving coherence “in terms of shared fundamental concerns and a focus on globally‐contextualized enquiry into the spread of the English language” (Seargeant 2012a: 126). In conclusion, Seargeant summarizes the case for WE as a discipline, asserting that
[T]here is now a stable body of knowledge that constitutes a subject entitled world Englishes studies, and the status of this is such that it is beginning to be projected onto curricula and, occasionally, departmental structures. The pedagogic implications are that there has been a paradigm shift in the way that the academic mainstream now focuses on the teaching and research of diverse varieties of English [which] affects not only sociolinguistic studies of English around the world, but also applied linguistics scholarship, and in this way feeds into the training of language professionals, specifically TESOL practitioners and those involved in language planning.
(Seargeant 2012a: 126–127)
Indeed, as the above discussion suggests, at present the pluricentric and pluralistic approach of WE has become so well established as to constitute something of an orthodoxy in contemporary English language studies and sociolinguistics. So much so, perhaps, that various linguists have begun to question this new orthodoxy, and to problematize various aspects of the WE approach, including the work of Braj B. Kachru and associated scholars.
One important challenge to the WE paradigm in recent years has been from scholars who have highlighted the “linguistic imperialism” associated with the spread of English. The foundation document on this topic, Phillipson’s (1992) Linguistic Imperialism, was a landmark publication, which subsequently politicized the debate on WE and related issues. At the centre of Phillipson’s theoretical approach to “linguistic imperialism” are a series of arguments about the political relations between the “core English‐speaking countries” (Britain, the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) and the “periphery‐English countries,” where English either has the status of a second language (e.g. Nigeria, India, and Singapore) or is a foreign and “international link language” (including Scandinavia and Japan) (1992: 17). The nature of this relationship, Phillipson has argued, is one of structural and systemic inequality, in which the political and economic hegemony of western Anglophone powers is established or maintained over scores of developing nations, particularly those formerly colonies of European powers, contributing to a form of “English linguistic imperialism,” where “the dominance of English is asserted and maintained by the establishment and continuous reconstitution of structural and cultural inequalities between English and other languages” (1992: 47). Phillipson’s voice in the early 1990s was original and persuasive and has subsequently influenced the work of many others, including, to some extent, such applied linguists as Canagarajah (1999) and Pennycook (1994, 2001). While Phillipson’s perspective was uncritical of the WE approach at first, his attitude seems to have changed somewhat in recent years. By 2009, Phillipson was maintaining that “global English” was a “capitalist neoimperial language that serves the interests of the corporate world and the governments that it influences,” and was asserting that, in this context, “[t]here are serious theoretical and empirical weaknesses in the way world Englishes are classified and analyzed” (Phillipson 2009: 132, 164–165). In the same year, in an interview, Phillipson further commented that “[m]ost work on World Englishes in the Kachruvian sense is purely descriptive, and an oversimplification of the complexity of the sociolinguistics of English in multilingual settings” (Phillipson 2010).
Other critiques of the WE approach have included the commentaries of Bruthiaux (2003) and Jenkins (2003). The criticisms of both these authors have largely focused on the Three Circles model of the Kachruvian approach, with Bruthiaux publishing a lengthy critique of this strand of the approach. The core of Bruthiaux’s critique is that the Three Circles model “has little explanatory power” and “has left us with a primarily nation‐based model which draws on specific historical events and which correlates poorly with current sociolinguistic data” (Bruthiaux 2003: 161). Similarly, Jenkins’ (2003) textbook World Englishes: A Resource Book for Students, also contained a number of criticisms of the Three Circles model including (a) the assertion that this was “a model based on geography and genetics”; (b) that there were “grey areas” between the Inner and Outer Circle countries and Outer and Expanding Circles; and (c) that “the model implies that the situation is uniform for all countries within a particular circle.” Kachru’s (2005) response to these criticisms emphasized that, for him, the notion of the circles was primarily historical, which also involved a geographical (though not, in his formulation, a genetic) dimension (Kachru 2005: 213). With reference to the “grey areas” issue, Kachru responded by quoting an earlier paper, where he had specifically argued that:
The Outer and Expanding Circles cannot be viewed as clearly demarcated from each other; they have several shared characteristics, and the status of English in the language policies of such countries changes from time to time. What is an ESL region at one time may become an EFL region at another time or vice versa.
(Kachru 1985: 13–14)
On the third issue of supposed uniformity of countries, Kachru’s response was that he had always argued that there was “significant variation” within varieties, and indeed, if we look back at one of Kachru’s earlier articles on “Models of English for the Third World,” he reports on no fewer than 10 distinct varieties of Indian English identified by survey respondents at that time (Kachru 1976: 234). In his (2005) commentary on criticisms of the Three Circles model, he went on to emphasize that it is important to consider the spread of English from a historical perspective for a range of rather basic reasons:
That historical reality [of the Inner Circle] and the source of English need not be negated but has to be confronted in contextualizing the process of the spread of English and its implications. The earlier colonial designs and the resultant Imperial Raj directly impacted the Outer Circle countries (e.g. Nigeria, Kenya, India, Sri Lanka) with their distinct earlier linguistic and cultural histories, which are not necessarily the same as those of the Expanding Circle countries. The post‐1950s period has created a specific dynamic and energy in the Outer Circle in terms of its identities, attitudes and creativity in the language.
(Kachru 2005: 219)
Kachru was fully aware of the dynamic nature of WE, commenting that, within his model, “each Circle, including the Inner Circle, is reshaping itself within fast‐changing sociolinguistic ecologies in which the English language has become a vital partner and a linguistic icon with a variety of avatars” (Kachru 2005: 219).
Criticism of this kind has all too frequently simply repeated Bruthiaux’s critique that the Kachruvian approach to world Englishes has been too simplistically focused on geographically defined varieties of English. However, this in itself a gross simplification, as the analysis of the content of the World Englishes journal in the 20 years from 1985 to 2005 has shown that only a minority of articles focused predominantly on linguistic features (9.4%) or areal studies (11.4%). In fact, most space in the journal in this formative period was given over to such topics as applied linguistics, contact linguistics (including code‐switching and code‐mixing), discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, and a diverse range of other subjects (Bolton & Davis 2006). More recently, substantial space in the journal has been accorded to topics related to creativity, cultural linguistics, linguistic landscapes, media, popular culture, and many other issues intellectually distinct from the sole focus on geographically defined “varieties” in the classic sense. Notwithstanding this, research on world Englishes in specific geographical contexts continues to appear, documenting both well‐known contexts as well as new frontiers of investigation and research, as, for example, with the publication in the World Englishes journal of several recent articles on English in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, or with the recent publication of Proshina and Eddy’s (2016) landmark volume on Russian English: History, Functions, and Features. In my own view, the WE approach as it has developed has been intrinsically dynamic and remains open both to debate and to new perspectives in research, scholarship, and theorization. Indeed, I would see this flexibility, diversity, and openness as a crucial element of the “ethos” of WE (Bolton 2005).
Saraceni’s (2015) recent review of WE scholarship identifies at least two new challenges to the WE enterprise. He argues that, despite the obvious strengths of the Kachruvian approach and the success of the WE paradigm shift, WE research has recently been outpaced by the effects of globalization, and their impact on linguistic ecologies worldwide. Thus, he suggests:
[T]he World Englishes framework has been feeling “pressure,” as it were, from two separate fronts of scholars: on the one hand those who have been engaged with research aimed at providing insights into the forms and functions of English as a lingua franca (ELF) … [and] on the other hand those who have concentrated their attention on phenomena related to globalization, such as “superdiversity,” language “hybridity,” “translanguaging,” “metrolingualism” … In some ways, it could be said that both ELF and the sociolinguistics of globalization have “eroded” some of the scope of World Englishes.
(Saraceni 2015: 4)
Saraceni’s views are constructive in highlighting the impact of globalization, and I would agree that what is new here – with reference to the study of language and globalization – are the palpable impacts of economic, political, and cultural globalization over the past 50 years (Martell 2017).
One major example of this has been the impact of increased migration and the movements of peoples. In the case of Europe, in the last three decades in particular, the effects of multiculturalism and multilingualism have been felt everywhere as a result of the expansion of the European Union (EU) and the movement of Europeans across national boundaries, but also as the result of large‐scale immigration into Europe from outside the EU (seen most dramatically in the recent waves of immigration from the war‐torn Middle East). Given the relative openness of European higher education, this has also had a major effect on academia, across the EU and even the UK. Whereas four decades ago the vast majority of students in European university classrooms would have been domestic students “native” to particular European nations, today French, German, Scandinavian, and British universities are populated by substantial numbers of foreign students, and continental European universities have experienced increasing pressure to provide curricula for such students through English. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that early attempts to provide theorizations and descriptions of “European English” soon gave way to a more considered attempt to describe the lingua franca English of multicultural students in European classrooms (Seidlhofer 2011; Jenkins 2013). I have suggested elsewhere that it was these educational and sociological conditions that provided the direct impetus for the emergence of ELF as a distinct field of inquiry, and it may be further helpful here to understand ELF studies as in the first instance a European phenomenon, or, at least, as a European response to the shifting demographics of the EU as well as European universities (Bolton 2011).
With reference to the second challenge identified by Saraceni, that of “superdiversity” studies, there can be little doubt that recent work by Blommaert (2010) on the sociolinguistics of globalization has a strong potential to expand our understanding of language contact and multilingualism in the contemporary world. However, here I would suggest that a major stimulus for such studies has again been the European response to the changing demographics of European cities and societies as a direct result of immigration. To take one example from Scandinavia, until the 1970s Sweden was very largely racially and linguistically homogeneous, but by the early 2000s, as a result of the country generously accepting large numbers of international refugees, over 150 different languages were recorded as “home languages” for Stockholm schoolchildren (Bolton & Meierkord 2013).
Blommaert has persuasively argued that “globalization forces sociolinguistics to unthink its classic distinctions and biases and to rethink itself as a sociolinguistics of mobile resources,” while further arguing that “[w]e need to replace it [traditional sociolinguistics] with a view of language as something intrinsically and perpetually mobile, through space as well as time, and made for mobility” (Blommaert 2010: 1, xiv). Thus, whereas traditional sociolinguistics is concerned with the use of “languages” or “varieties” within or between stable “speech communities,” or with “code‐switching” or “code‐mixing,” super‐diversity studies focus on multilingualism in a globalizing world where individuals engage in “polylanguaging” and “translanguaging.” In Europe, this has now resulted in rethinking sociolinguistics in at least three areas of research: (a) face‐to‐face communication, as in recent studies of multicultural urban dialects in the UK; (b) Internet‐based communication, including blogging, gaming, social media, and YouTube; and (c) linguistic landscape studies, which are concerned with displayed public languages, commercial signage, street signs, posters, and shop names (Parkin & Arnaut 2010).
The specific linguistic effects of globalization in the European context are not necessarily duplicated elsewhere, as the linguistic realities of Europe have been specifically shaped by the transnationalism of the EU, high levels of immigration, and the increasing awareness of multilingualism. In Asia, the sociolinguistics of many societies have been determined by very different influences, including tension between ongoing national projects and the demands of globalization, resulting in a shift away from traditional linguistic diversity associated with regional and local varieties of languages towards a restricted combination of the standard national language, very often in combination with English.
In the US, it might be argued that such dynamics are again different from those in Europe for a number of reasons, where notions related to English as a Lingua Franca, for example, have gained little traction in systems that have long promoted English as a Second Language, with distinctly American characteristics. Despite the large influx of overseas students into US universities and colleges in recent years, it is still expected that the vast majority of such students wish to acquire a command of a standardized (or standard‐like) variety of US English as part of their educational experience. To meet such demands, most universities have relatively well‐established ESL and academic writing programs in place (Liou 2012). In this context, as in others, it may also be argued that the power of the US variety of English continues to parallel the continuing economic, cultural, military, and political power of the US in many other spheres worldwide (Demont‐Heinrich 2010).
There are many reasons for rejecting the rescripting of world Englishes as “global Englishes,” which might be better left to a much longer discussion elsewhere, but two important points should be mentioned here. First and foremost, to baldly assert, as Galloway and Rose (2015: xii) do, that “Global Englishes includes the concepts of World Englishes” seems at best an attempt at the (mis)appropriation of preexisting discourses, and at worst a crude takeover bid of an existing academic discipline that has its own specific history, associated with diverse and open‐ended approaches to the field, that have all contributed to a newly emergent discipline bearing the name of world Englishes. Second, this attempt at renaming the field, for which Galloway and Rose (2015) provide only slight scholarly justification, evidently attempts to marginalize or misrepresent at least 50 years of scholarship in the WE field, not least that of Braj B. Kachru (1932–2016). More specifically, such a rhetorical move (conscious or otherwise) represents, I would argue, a grave assault on decades of groundbreaking and innovative empirical research by numerous distinguished scholars.
One important starting point for the WE enterprise was the completion of Kachru’s PhD thesis on Indian English in 1961 (awarded 1962) under the supervision of Michael A. K. Halliday at Edinburgh University. While at Edinburgh, Kachru (in the company of fellow graduate students Ayọ Bamgboṣe, Ruqaiya Hasan, and Rodney Huddleston) also took classes with such other major linguists as David Abercrombie, J. C. Catford, M. A. K. Halliday, Peter Ladefoged, Angus McIntosh, and Peter Strevens, as well as J. R. Firth, who was visiting professor during that time (Nelson 2012). In 1963 Kachru took up a post at the University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign and served in the Department of Linguistics full time, until becoming professor emeritus in 2002. At Illinois, Kachru played a major role in promoting linguistics through a wide range of research and publications covering such diverse fields as multilingualism and sociolinguistics, Kashmiri language and literature, Indian linguistics, and WE, as well through his academic leadership as the Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences and director of the Center for Advanced Study. It is no exaggeration to state that Braj B. Kachru changed the history of English studies through his theorization of the WE paradigm in the 1980s and 1990s (Sridhar 2016). In his endeavours at the University of Illinois from 1965 onwards, Professor Kachru was encouraged and supported by Professor Yamuna Kachru (1933–2013), herself an eminent linguist, whose publications spanned such areas as Hindi linguistics, Indian languages (including Bengali, Marathi, Urdu, and Kashmiri), applied linguistics, discourse analysis, literary analysis, Asian Englishes, and World Englishes. Her contributions to the field of WE went far beyond research and publications. At Urbana‐Champaign she was an influential and inspirational educator who supervised more than 40 PhD students. In 2006 she was also the recipient of India’s Presidential Award for her research and publications on Hindi language studies (Bolton & Davis 2015: 3–4). A third foundational figure in the history of WE is Larry E. Smith (1941–2014), whose academic career at the East–West Center at the University of Hawai’i ran parallel to and complemented that of the Kachrus at Urbana‐Champaign. Their early collaboration at two 1978 conferences is often seen as the beginning of their long and fruitful personal and professional relationship and as another milestone in the creation and promotion of the WE paradigm, which also involved the renaming of the World Englishes journal in 1985 (previously titled World Language English) and the establishment of the IAWE in 1992. Any history of the discipline of WE needs to acknowledge that Braj B. Kachru and Larry Smith played a decisive role in the foundation and early development of the field, not least through their insistence that their approach to the subject was pluralistic; this was deliberately and iconically captured in the title of their journal, as they explained in the editorial for the first issue:
The term “Englishes” is significant in many ways. “Englishes” symbolizes the functional and formal variation in the language, and its international acculturation, for example, in West Africa, in Southern Africa, in East Africa, in South Asia, in Southeast Asia, in the West Indies, in the Philippines, and in the traditional English‐using countries: the USA, the UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. The language now belongs to those who use it as their first language, and to those who use it as an additional language, whether in its standard form or in its localized forms.
(Kachru & Smith 1985: 210)
Arguing for a “new international perspective” in English studies, the editorial added that “[t]his new perspective entails questioning the prevalent dichotomies and reevaluating the ‘sacred cows’ in literature, language, and language teaching methodology” (210–211). At the time, the Kachruvian approach to WE was nothing less than revolutionary, not least through the pluralization of “English”, a designation now taken for granted, which was hotly disputed at the time. The field of world Englishes can be seen in both wider and narrower perspective. In wider perspective, the boundaries of the field of inquiry may be drawn large to include all those approaches listed in Table 41.1 at the beginning of this chapter. In a narrower perspective, world Englishes was originally associated most closely with the theorizations and publications of Braj B. Kachru, Yamuna Kachru, Larry Smith, and associated scholars, but over the last 20 years, given the large number of textbooks and monographs devoted to the subject, the reach and inclusivity of the label has expanded to include a large range of researchers approaching the field with diverse perspectives and methodologies. Indeed, one reason why this diverse field has developed in such a rich fashion may be linked to the founding vision of Kachru and Smith, and the inclusive and pluralistic ethos of the intellectual movement that they founded (Bolton 2005: 78–79). The founding fathers and founding mother of the Kachruvian approach to WE have now sadly and rather suddenly passed on, but whatever else, the firm wish of many of their colleagues and students is that their legacy should not be forgotten, and the cooperative and humanistic vision of the founders of this field should endure into the future.
Whatever the challenges that World Englishes now faces, I would strongly argue that the WE paradigm is sufficiently robust and dynamic to meet such challenges. Two major strands of continuity throughout the development of WE have been its inclusivity and pluricentricity, its inclusivity of subject matter, and the pluricentricity of languages and views on language that a global perspective allows. Much of the criticism of the WE approach focuses narrowly on the geographical approaches to varieties of English adopted by some researchers in the field. Actually, if one goes back to look at Braj B. Kachru’s own theorization of the field, very little space, relatively speaking, was given over to the discussion of regional varieties as such. A major publication compiling Kachru’s writings from the 1970s to the present, comprising three volumes of collected articles, has recently been published (Webster 2015). A reading (or rereading) of such essays reminds one at once of the breadth of vision that helped shape Kachruvian linguistics as it developed in the 1980s and 1990s. For example, Volume 1 of the collection includes essays on “Models of English for the Third World,” “The pragmatics of nonnative varieties of English,” “The power and politics of English,” and “The spread of English and sacred linguistic cows.” Volume 2 covers such issues as “Transcultural creativity in world Englishes,” “The paradigms of marginality,” and “World Englishes and culture wars,” and Volume 3 includes chapters on “Code‐mixing as a communicative strategy,” “Bilingualism,” and “Multilingualism and multiculturalism.” A common thread that runs through almost all these essays is the strong awareness of the multilingual contexts of Englishes worldwide, and the need to situate WE research within a sociolinguistic approach to issues within the field. For example, nearly 20 years ago, Kachru and Nelson wrote:
It is imperative that teachers and students be aware of the sort of presence that English has in the world today … The concept of a monolithic English as an exponent of culture and communication in all English‐using countries has been a convenient working fiction that is now becoming harder and harder to maintain. What we have now in reality is English languages and English literatures … To understand the pluralism of English, it is therefore vital to see its spread, uses, and users in sociolinguistic contexts.
(Kachru & Nelson 1996, in Webster 2015, vol. 2: 81)
The emphasis here on the “sociolinguistic contexts” of English(es) was a major strand of WE theorization for Kachru and also helps explain the major and enduring impact his work has had on the field, and on the later work of other scholars whose work has focused on issues related to code‐mixing, critical linguistics, linguistic imperialism, multilingualism, the politics of language and much else. It is also salutary to consider that Kachru himself published an article titled “English as a lingua franca” as early as 1996, some years before the recent interest in ELF studies began to gather momentum (Kachru 1996). Elsewhere, I have suggested that theoretical challenges in relation to globalization may find some resolution with the recognition of the role of WE in an expanded understanding of the changing and dynamic “language worlds” of people in diverse communities around the world, where the “worlds of Englishes” are ineluctably linked to the multilingual realities of language use (Bolton 2013). This again resonates with Kachru’s pioneering theorizations of the WE field, and the maxim that the description and analysis of WE should be centrally concerned with the “sociolinguistic realities” of language use in multilingual societies worldwide (Kachru 1992b: 11).
As WE develops in the future, it is likely that the diversity of the wider field will continue, with scholars working on a wide range of linguistic and sociolinguistic issues. In Bolton (2005), I argued that three broad approaches to WE studies exist, at least if one considers the approaches of scholars working in the field in terms of their objectives. These were (a) WE approaches which are largely linguistic in orientation (for instance, English studies and corpus linguistics); (b) approaches that share both linguistic and sociopolitical concerns (many sociolinguistic studies and the WE approach); and (c) those approaches that are largely sociopolitical and political in orientation (e.g. critical discourse analysis and linguistic imperialism studies). The latter two strands of WE scholarship have been broadly concerned with various aspects of the sociolinguistics of English worldwide, and it is perhaps from sociolinguistics that we might expect WE to draw its theoretical inspiration. Sociolinguistics continues to motivate much of the current research in the World Englishes journal, where important topics in recent years have included contact linguistics (including code‐switching and ‐mixing), critical linguistics, language and religion, linguistic landscapes, multilingualism, popular culture, and ELF. While the journal still publishes articles of areal interest, many of the articles in the journal also resonate with key issues linked to the sociolinguistics of globalization, with special issues on such topics as “Perspectives on English as a lingua franca,” “Creativity and world Englishes,” “World Englishes and linguistic landscapes,” “World Englishes and international call centres,” “World Englishes and language contact,” and “World Englishes and second language acquisition.” One important challenge here has been from advocates of reimagined “mobile” sociolinguistics, distinguished from traditional linguistics by “a view of language as something intrinsically and perpetually mobile, through space as well as time, and made for mobility” (Blommaert 2010: 1, xiv). This new sociolinguistics has also brought with it new terminology to describe a range of processes associated with a mobile sociolinguistics, including such notions as “superdiversity,” “translanguaging,” “translingual practice,” “transglossia,” “polylingual languaging,” and “metrolingualism” (Pennycook 2016). The relevance of sociolinguistic theory to WE is centrally important. In the 1980s and 1990s, the WE paradigm represented a fresh, innovative and pluralistic vision of English studies, at a time when the English language was spreading rapidly, particularly throughout the education systems of former Anglophone colonies. As WE studies developed, however, they were never merely focused on English alone but were more broadly concerned with describing and analysing how the spread of English affected multilingual societies and cultures around the world, as well as the related processes of language contact, hybridization and cultural negotiation. For Braj B. Kachru, the Englishization of African and Asian languages was as much a concern as the nativization of the English language worldwide. Kachru’s work on such issues preceded and anticipated recent conceptualizations of “translanguaging” and “translingual practice.” Looking back at Kachru’s publications in the 1980s and 1990s, it is interesting to see how many of today’s sociolinguistic debates were anticipated in Kachru’s early writings on the sociolinguistic dynamics of multilingual societies (Webster 2015). One point to note here is that the relationship between WE and sociolinguistics has never been one way. Sociolinguistics may have provided the initial inspiration for the WE turn, but over the last three decades, WE perspectives have directly influenced sociolinguistic perspectives on language change, contact, and variation. The WE approach has always been intrinsically dynamic and open to debate and new perspectives in research, scholarship, and theorization, and this flexibility, diversity, and openness has been a crucial element of the “ethos” of WE as it (Bolton 2005). One key and enduring feature of WE research has been this openness to new ideas and innovation, and this, one trusts, will continue.
From the 1980s to the present, the World Englishes project has contributed to a major theoretical shift in English studies worldwide, in large part through the pioneering foundational work of Braj B. Kachru, which from the outset argued for a paradigm shift of two types: (a) “a paradigm shift in research, teaching, and the application of sociolinguistic realities to the functions of English,” and (b) “a shift from frameworks and theories which are essentially appropriate only to monolingual countries,” involving a pluralism which is “reflected in the approaches, both theoretical and applied, we adopt for understanding this unprecedented linguistic phenomenon” (Kachru 1997: 237). At this point in its development, the WE enterprise might be regarded as having reached a point of maturity or even orthodoxy, but, nevertheless, the study of world Englishes remains a diverse and pluralistic field, open for new directions, new insights, and new energies.