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DOI: 10.1017/S0266078408000072 28 English Today 93, Vol. 24, No. 1 (March 2008). Printed in the United Kingdom © 2008 Cambridge University Press

English circling the globeRAJEND MESTHRIE

A commentary on a seminal ET article by Braj Kachru

LINGUISTIC interactions in English are now ofthree types: native speaker and native speaker;native speaker and non-native speaker and non-native speaker and non-native speaker. Thenon-native speakers not only outnumber thenative speakers; they also increasingly use English of different varieties in cultural contextsnot traditionally associated with the language.

In this situation, then, any speaker of English(native or non-native) has access to only a sub-set within the patterns and conventions of cul-tures which English represents. A variationistlooks at this diversification and its implicationsas a blessing. However, for a purist or a peda-gogue it is a nightmare. And both have theirreasons. The sociolinguist may derive satisfac-tion from the fact that, at last, we have an inter-national language which provides access acrosscultures and national boundaries. The puristsview the diversity as a mark of divisiveness, as asign of the decay of the language, and perhapsmore upsetting, as a threat to the Eurocentric,Judeo-Christian ethos of the language. Andtherein lies the controversy.

The spread of English

In recent years, a large body of literature hasbeen written analyzing the underlying reasonsfor the spread of English. However, very littlehas been said on how the spread has beeninstrumental in slaughtering sacred cows of different types: acquisitional, sociolinguistic,pedagogical and theoretical.

Some of the sacred cows are accepted onfaith, and others, hydra-like, have a way of van-ishing and then reappearing in one form oranother. Whatever their nature, such sacredcows have relevance to the issues related to the

spread of English, and to our understanding ofthe daunting questions concerning diversityand standards.

In discussing decline in proficiency, a com-parison is made with an idealized past of theEnglish language in the Outer Circle. Thehypothesis that the standards of acquisition andteaching have gone down is faulty on manycounts – the major point is that there is noempirical evidence to prove the point. In fact,the contrary may be true. With the unprece-dented diffusion in education, the core of theEnglish-knowing and English-using populationhas substantially increased during the post-

Excerpt from Braj B. Kachru, The sacred cows of English (ET16, 1988)

BRAJ B. KACHRU is Center forAdvanced Study Professor ofLinguistics and JubileeProfessor of Liberal Arts andSciences Emeritus, at theUniversity of Illinois atUrbana, IL, USA, where he hastaught since 1963. He headedthe Department of Linguistics(1968–79), directed the

Division of English as an International Language(1985–91) and was director of University’s Centerfor Advanced Study (1996–2000). He is the co-founding editor and advisor of ‘World Englishes’(Blackwell, Oxford). He was director of theLinguistic Institute of the Linguistic Society ofAmerica (1978), president of the AmericanAssociation for Applied Linguistics (1984) andpresident of the International Association for WorldEnglishes (1997–99). In 1998 he was named SirEdward Youde Memorial Fund Fellow in HongKong, and in 2001 an Honorary Fellow of theCentral Institute of English and Foreign Languagesin Hyderabad, India. His latest co-edited ‘Languagein South Asia’ has just been released by CUP.

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IT IS unfortunate that Braj Kachru is unable toprovide a retrospect to his article ‘The SacredCows of English’, because of ill-health. But it isan opportunity that I am glad to grasp, as onewho has worked within the sphere of ‘WorldEnglishes’, as the field has since come to beknown, and – more importantly – as one whohas accordingly had to keep abreast of Braj’s

thoughts as one of the acknowledged pioneersof that field. The ‘Sacred Cows’ article hasbeen a seminal piece for many reasons. Itintroduced the world to Braj’s famous ‘ThreeCircles of English’ model. At roughly the sametime, in the late 1980s, three pioneers in thefield which was then known as ‘English as aWorld Language’ or ‘New Englishes’ came up

ENGLISH CIRCLING THE GLOBE 29

colonial period, as has the number of semi-proficient speakers and ill-equipped English‘teaching shops’. Learning of English is nolonger restricted to the privileged urban seg-ments of society. All social classes are now keento learn English and have access to some kind ofEnglish instruction.

Is there decay in international intelligibility?There is, of course, merit in the argument that ifEnglish is needed for international interaction,the users of English should have internationalintelligibility. However, defining the variablesfor intelligibility is not easy and one has toaccept it with several caveats. First, in the OuterCircle, English is primarily used in intranational

functions. The domains for international func-tions are restricted. Second, even in suchdomains, the interaction takes place mostlybetween non-native users of the language (e.g.Japanese with Indians, Singaporeans with SriLankans). Third, the burden of intelligibility is ashared undertaking in which education must beimparted about ‘variety tolerance’. Finally,there is a paradox in this concern. On the onehand, international uses of English are consid-ered desirable, but on the other hand, greatconcern is expressed about the international-ization of the language. The linguistic reality isthat internationalization of a language comeswith nativization and acculturation. �

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independently with the idea of representingthe spread of English in terms of concentriccircles. Tom McArthur’s ‘wheel model’appeared in ET July 1987 (see Figure 1).

Manfred Görlach, then editor of the journalEnglish World Wide came up with a similarmodel, with some minor changes in a confer-ence paper of 1988. It was only fitting that theco-editor of the third journal in the field,World Englishes, should have his own say (seeFigure 2).

And it is in fact Braj’s model that has comebe the most widely accepted as the model withthe best ‘fit’ for English as she has beenspreading. As is now well known, the model

proposes an Inner Circle of the historicallymother-tongue varieties of USA, UK, Canada,Australia and New Zealand. Looking back atthe original diagram, I am struck by someinteresting issues. It is notable that USA wasput first in a list that is clearly unalphabetical,in clear contrast to the examples in the othertwo circles. This seems to put number ofspeakers first, rather than historical move-ments. The model avoids mention of SouthAfrica – always a problem child – where Eng-lish had a sizeable mother-tongue presence inthe 1980s. But was it enough to exert a largeenough influence over an even larger multilin-gual populace to warrant Inner Circle status?

30 ENGLISH TODAY 93 March 2008

Figure 1 Tom McArthur’s Circle of World English

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The model is prudently silent. The next over-lapping circle was of former colonies whereEnglish had second language status, called theOuter Circle, made up of (in alphabeticalorder, Bangladesh, Ghana, and the jewel inthe circle, India, and so forth). It is historicallyinteresting that Braj gave this circle an alter-native name back in 1988, the Extended Cir-cle, which has since been quietly forgotten.The third circle of what used to be called EFLusers comprises China, Egypt, Indonesia, etc.Interesting that Braj labelled it ‘The ExtendingCircle’, only to rechristen it (if one may usethis term from the sacred Judeo-Christian stable) later ‘The Expanding Circle’. The last

entry – another Southern African problemchild – Zimbabwe actually doesn’t belonghere. Zimbabwe (formerly Southern Rhode-sia) in fact belonged to the other two circles,with its fairly large (but now diminished) Eng-lish settler population, and a large segment ofESL users. But these are matters of detail. NoWestern European country is mentioned in the‘Extending Circle’ (though the USSR doesmake an appearance). Today we would haveto signal the inroads that English has madeinto continental Europe more strongly byincluding Germany, Sweden, Norway, Hollandetc., as principal users of the language in edu-cational, tourist and international (especially

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Figure 2 Kachru’s model of World English

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EU) communication. It is not that the Circlesmodel discounts the Englishes of Europe,since the list is exemplary, not definitive; butback in 1988 it was possible not to mentionthem as being that high up on the ladder. Isometimes think that the educated users ofEnglish in Europe which I encounter call intoquestion the dichotomy between Outer andExpanding Circle. The German graduate stu-dents I taught in the cold Bavarian winter of2005 seemed to be thoroughly at home inEnglish – a language if not just up the road,then certainly accessible in two hours’ flyingtime, and affordable for holidays, and semes-ters and years abroad. Or if not affordable inthis way, then there is always the possibility ofau pairing to improve one’s English.

So is English in Germany an Outer Circlevariety? Not exactly. Everyone knows – orought to know – that, give or take a few excep-tions, the real difference between Outer Circleand Expanding Circle is whether you playcricket or not. Malaysia from the Outer Circle,however, appears not to play much cricket. Soto the Phillipines, but at least they have theexcuse of having being colonised by the Amer-icans. Conversely, Holland from the ExpandingCircle has rather taken to the game – a case ofself-inflicted colonization if ever there wasone. But I digress – the point I was trying toraise was the blurring of the circles in thetwenty-first century.

To return to some of the themes raised in‘Sacred Cows’. Braj mentions the problematicstatus of the native speaker, predicated on amonolingual society of English users. Thatdebate continues today (there was a confer-ence in Mysore in early 2007 devoted entirelyto this theme). If the world is still largely hap-pily multilingual, then a construct built uponthe exceptional monolingual is rather suspect.In multilingual societies different languagesmay be acquired up to similar levels of fluencyin an ordered sequence. Should one privilegethe first learnt one? Or the one acquired ineducational contexts and used in widespreadcommunications in the less informal domains?One always had the sneaking feeling that,despite the fluency and ease with which manyOuter Circle citizens used English, the fact thatit was not generally used for their most inti-mate moments – when being secretive, lovingand dreamy, or cursing under their breath –was of relevance to the native speaker debate.The second language, in other words, is not

always applied to a full range of registers. Onthe other hand, it seems that when Outer Cir-cle speakers do adopt English as a language ofthe hearth and home, there is little or no struc-tural change in the variety. There are manyreports now that English is becoming a lan-guage of some Singaporean homes. The ques-tion that researchers should pursue is whetherthis is accompanied by any linguistic changes,or whether there is continuity between theolder fluent speakers and the new generation.I have some relevant anecdotal evidence fromrecently observing a youngster from Bangalorebrought up in Tanzania, on account of his par-ents having extended teaching contracts there.The child played with Swahili-speakingfriends, using English as a lingua franca. ThisEnglish had all the hallmarks of ‘Outer Circle’Indian English phonetics and syntax: itsretroflex consonants, its syllable-timedrhythms, its uninverted questions, invariantquestion tags and so forth. In discussing hisbackground with his parents, it became clearto me that this was in fact his mother tongue.Because of his English-based schooling inBanagalore and his subsequent moving home,his parents’ language, Kannada, had becomevery much his second language. If this is tohappen on a wider scale within India (and inthe Outer circle generally), then that would beeven stronger evidence for the end of the tradi-tional conception of the native speaker as thesacred, Judeo-Christian, Eurocentric, monolin-gual Westerner.

Braj wisely stressed in his 1988 piece thatspread and internationalization of a languagecould not involve the language alone, but drewon social and cultural forces: ‘Internationaliza-tion of a language comes with nativization andacculturation’. He also drew timely attention tothe ‘culture bomb’ effect of English, citingNgugi wa Thiong’o. Many societies are indeedbifurcating along lines drawn by the degree ofadoption of English as a primary language forsocial purposes. Typically, it is a younger, mid-dle class which shows its economic and socialdifferences from the rest of society by adoptingWestern-based patterns of consumption,leisure, knowledge systems and the Englishlanguage that is most associated with it. Post-apartheid South Africa is certainly headed thisway, leading to lively debates about the mean-ing of being Black, African, a South African cit-izen and so forth. Such debates are no doubtset to continue the world over. �

32 ENGLISH TODAY 93 March 2008