CECIL L. NELSON, ZOYA G. PROSHINA, AND DANIEL R. DAVIS
This second edition of The Handbook of World Englishes is an updated presentation of the conditions, contexts, and functions of major varieties of English across the world. Its structure follows closely that of the first edition, with the exception of Part IX, now Outlook for the Future. The stance of the present editors, drawn from the school of thought founded by Braj B. Kachru and Larry E. Smith, is summed up in a sentence from the first edition’s introduction:
One major aim of The Handbook of World Englishes is, then, to represent the cross‐cultural and global contextualization of the English language in multiple voices. (Kachru, Kachru, & Nelson, 2006: 1)
It is perhaps still not an easy thing to comprehend, over a decade since the publication of the first edition, that Englishes exist not only in each variety’s local and regional contexts, but also in a global context.
The 42 chapters of this Handbook are distributed across nine parts, each of which addresses a broad construct of fundamental importance to the study of the world’s Englishes.
The fifteen chapters of Part I are divided into subparts that reflect the major waves of the global expansion of English, broadly designated.
In its beginning (as we demarcate it) in the British Isles in the fifth century, English crowded out or assimilated with other languages, those that were in situ when the Germanic tribes arrived, the Celtic ones, and those that came afterward, the Norse varieties brought in by the Vikings (Robert D. King). A major example of this unequal coexistence of English with new peoples, languages, and cultures is presented in Chapter 2 (Fiona Douglas), which treats the development of English in Scotland in “two key strands: …Scots (SC); and…Scottish Standardized English (ScSE), which was the result of contact with standardized varieties of English English during the eighteenth century.” This expansion across linguistic and cultural boundaries, but not yet oceans, has come to be known in world Englishes studies as the First Diaspora, the initial “widespread scattering” (perhaps better “strewing,” or even “sowing”) of the language farther and farther across the earth.
What is commonly referred to (however slightly inaccurately, given the developments in the First Diaspora) as the colonial expansion of English began when populations of English speakers carried the language to farther parts of the world in the Second Diaspora: to what is now North America (Edgar W. Schneider and Stefan Dollinger), Australia and New Zealand (Scott F. Kiesling), and the Caribbean area (Michael Aceto). These Englishes took firm root and became the major, if not the single most important language in the nations and areas discussed in chapters 3 through 6. The users and, for convenience of discussions, nations where English has continued from these incarnations constitute, in a designation coined by Braj B. Kachru (1985), the Inner Circle of Englishes.
In the phase of the Third Diaspora, English was carried by relatively tiny minorities of English users into nations and indeed, continents populated by speakers of many other tongues. In South Asia (Ravinder Gargesh), Southeast Asia (Ee Ling Low), and Africa – here represented, given the limitations of a work such as this, by the topics of chapters 9 and 10, Englishes in southern Africa (Nkonko M. Kamwangamalu) and in wider African creative writing (Eyamba G. Bokamba) – colonial administrations, politics, and economics planted English where it was in competition with numerically superior languages, as had not been the case before. In these situations, English has continued to the present day to have important roles in governments, education systems, and virtually all technical and creative fields. English has become part of a dynamic linguistic environment with other languages in each of these multilingual contexts. As Professor Braj Kachru was sometimes heard to remark, “Today you cannot read an English newspaper in India unless you can read Hindi, and you cannot read a Hindi newspaper unless you can read English.” Englishes in these contexts are referred to in the literature as constituting the Outer Circle of the worldwide English‐using community.
The spread of English did not stop with the end of the colonial era. The language can be said to have taken on a life of its own, as people all over the world have found it to be increasingly a language of access to desired changes in their personal lives and their societies. In its Fourth Diaspora, peoples with perfectly workable access to languages in their own lands adopted and adapted English where one would think it unnecessary for them to have done so. The chapters in this section of the Handbook present profiles and characteristics of English as exhibited in South America (Patricia Friedrich), across Europe (Suzanne K. Hilgendorf), in Russia (Zoya G. Proshina), in East Asia (Nobuyuki Honna), and in China (Wei Zhang, Kingsley Bolton, and Werner Botha). English was not brought to these parts of the world by colonial activity in its usual sense, and their varieties fall into the category Expanding Circle.
The three chapters in Part II present major exemplars of how Englishes have been modified by their users in response to various pressures and reasons for their utility. As Kahane (1986: 495) succinctly put it, English has become “the great laboratory of today’s sociolinguist.” Chapter 16 (Rajend Mesthrie) treats English broadly in its position as a “contact language.” Chapter 17 (Salikoko Mufwene) presents an overview of the rethinking of the traditionally received notions of pidgin and creole; and Chapter 18 (Walt Wolfram) interprets features and functions of the most written‐about English variety, African American English.
Part III addresses the all‐important topic of what happens to English in its adaptations in new settings. Far from very old notions of one language for all users in all times and places, the sociolinguistic realities of language accommodation are made evident in the development of varieties of English. Chapter 19 (M. A. K. Halliday) offers a working out of real, observable development set against notions of a “standardized” language. Chapter 20 (Yamuna Kachru) explicates striking examples of what goes on when people are “using a shared medium with different sociocultural conventions of language use and different cultural messages.” Chapter 21 (Vijay K. Bhatia) examines genres across Englishes, showing that the functions ascribed to Englishes vary from context to context, as do the expressions of those functions.
It has become a truism that users shape languages in their cultures; we do not expect expressions, “idiom,” lexical connotations, and so forth to remain stable across time and geography. The chapters in Part IV draw on literary creativity (Edwin Thumboo), language play (Alexandra A. Rivlina), and cross‐variety intelligibility (Larry E. Smith and Cecil L. Nelson) to point out that users may declare they are speaking “English” to one another but may soon find that they have to cooperate in finding workable meanings and interpretations in each other’s code. In Chapter 25, Braj B. Kachru takes us into the realm of culture writ large in its “multiplicity and pluralism,” in whose expression “English has become a global ‘access’ language.”
Focusing on language itself, naturally not to the exclusion of cultural influences, the chapters in Part V address the controversies that have arisen in studying English in its varieties. Chapter 26 (Linda C. Mitchell) informs us in close detail that such controversies are not by any means new. Chapter 27 (John Algeo) takes us through such controversies within one of the Inner Circle countries. Chapter 28 (Daniel R. Davis) emphasizes that in this area, as in all others, context is of the greatest importance: “Even the most basic grammatical terms are set within an intellectual tradition, and have political implications.” Chapter 29 (Gerald Nelson) explicates the compiling and examination of large bodies of text: “the corpus‐based approach has become firmly established as a methodology for linguistic research.”
Perhaps no terms in the modern lexicon of public affairs are more frequent and often argued over than ideology and identity, and the chapters in Part VI lead us to encounter those constructs in specific ways. Chapters 30 and 31 (Pradeep A. Dhillon and Wimal Dissanayake) invoke postcolonial theory, in Dissanayake’s words, “a style of thinking, a form of imagination, a mode of analytical representation that focuses on issues of epistemology.” Within identity, gender is a widely addressed topic, which Chapter 32 (Tamara M. Valentine) speaks to forcefully. Valentine points out the similarities between the study of world Englishes on the one hand, and “the social construction of identity through linguistic action” characteristic of gendered linguistic practice, on the other.
A few outliers notwithstanding, it cannot reasonably be denied that we now live in a world‐wide society, and the chapters in Part VII draw on media (Elizabeth Martin), advertising (Tej K. Bhatia), and commerce (Stanley Van Horn) in examining what roles Englishes play in these global contexts, and how they shape their Englishes.
If academic linguistic pursuits are to have any effects and utility in the world, theory must come out of laboratories and language professionals’ offices and find areas and means of application in people’s lives. Chapter 36 (Ayọ Bamgboṣe) addresses the politically fraught area of national language policy, which calls for a great deal of unprejudiced focus be it overt or covert. Chapters 37 through 39 dispel many ingrained myths in areas of English teaching and learning, perhaps the longest‐standing area of applied linguistics: communicative competence (Margie Berns), pedagogy generally (Aya Matsuda), and language testing (James Dean Brown). Chapter 40 (Fredric Dolezal) takes a wide‐ranging look at dictionaries, traditionally powerful tools of description and prescription, “artifacts that represent the cultural, bibliographic, and linguistic heritage of a language community.”
Futurology is a natural if intimidating extension of present knowledge and awareness: “What does the future of Englishes look like?” Chapter 41 (Kingsley Bolton) articulates how English and Englishes got where they are today and how we might expect them to develop. Chapter 42 (Yamuna Kachru and Larry E. Smith), written by two of the most thoughtful and thought‐provoking people in the World Englishes community, is a fitting coda to this volume. Its title invokes the considerable weight and responsibilities that English has come to bear – its karma – and its evolution and continuing development – the cycle.
This second edition of The Handbook of World Englishes is, then, a continuation of, or a sequel to, the first: “just one further step toward the understanding of this unfolding of the history and contextualization of the world of world Englishes” (Kachru, Kachru, & Nelson 2006: 14).