Varieties of English

World Englishes

The 20th century will still be the century of the men who speak English

Theodore Roosevelt

English is no longer the possession of the British, or even the British and the Americans, but... exists in an increasingly large number of different varieties... But the most important development of all is seen in the emergence of varieties that are identified with and are specific to particular countries from among the former British colonies. In West Africa, in the West Indies, and in Pakistan and India... it is no longer accepted by the majority that the English of England, with RP as its accent, are the only possible models of English to be set before the young. (pp. 293)

Randolph Quirk 1962
The Use of English

I myself came from the Inner Circle of Englishes, the OVEs (Old Variety of Englishes) as they are called in South-East Asia; so I would like to start by reminding you that within this circle there are and always have been many different Englishes around. I’m not talking about the relatively recent worldwide varieties – British, North American, South African, Oceanic; but about the old dialects within Britain itself, Northumbrian, Mercian, Wessex, and Kentish at one period in the language’s history.

M.A.K. Halliday

l language spread -- a process during which the uses and/or users of a language increase, often under conditions of political expansionism, prestige or technological influence.

Quirk’s (1988) analysis is considerably more complex, dividing the spread of English into three separate varieties – imperial, demographic and econocultural.

Varieties of English

The term “variety” is an academic term used for any kind of language production, whether we are viewing it as being determined by region, by gender, by social class, by age or by our own inimitable individual characteristics.

The concepts of language variety and variation lie at the heart of the world Englishes enterprise:

l “varieties of English,”

l “localized varieties of English,”

l “non-native varieties of English,”

l “second-language varieties of English,” and

l “new varieties of English.”

l The issue of linguistic variety is also central to both traditional dialectology and contemporary linguistics, where it is often subsumed into the study of language variation and change.

l Global Englishes

l International Englishes

l New Englishes

l World Englishes

Many historians and sociologists ask a question how it happened that in 1600 England – second-rate country, in the 19th c. the British Empire dominated in the world.

Well-known phrase “The Sun never sets in the British Empire” was transformed into “The Sun never sets in the empire of the English language “. To put things metaphorically, whereas once Britannia ruled the waves, now it is English which rules them

Among the varieties of English, there is a division into

l the “Old Englishes” (usually British, American,Australian, Canadian and a few others) and

l the “New Englishes” that have emerged in such nations as India, Nigeria,Singapore, and the Philippines.

l It has become customary to use the plural form ‘Englishes’ to stress the diversity to be found in the language today, and to stress that English no longer has one single base of authority, prestige and normativity.

Tom McArthur’s Circle of World English (1987)