World Englishes

This paper investigates the role of English in Japan, outlining its current status and use. The paper begins with a critical review of the World Englishes model as it relates to the categorization of Japan within the expanding circle of English use and continues with a brief history of English language contact with the country. It then examines the changing role of English in the Japanese education system and media. This is followed by a discussion of the influence of English on the Japanese language as well as the role which the English language plays within the discourses of nihonjinron and kokusaika. The paper concludes with a call for empirical research to be conducted investigating the spread, acquisition and attitudes towards English in Japan.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the subjunctive in modern English is on its deathbed. It has been described variously as “a vestigial survival” (Strang 1968), “a rather feeble and restricted device” (Foster 1976:220), “a literary trick” (Jespersen 1962: 294) and even “probably simply a conspiracy” (Coffey 2000). Most grammar books published before 1975 concur: the subjunctive will soon no longer be. And yet, as early as the 1950s linguists had begun to highlight some curious goings-on in American English. Barber (1964: 133) notes “a surprising reversion” during and after World War II to older subjunctive forms and by the 1970s many studies were being carried out into subjunctive usage in American and British English, most indicating that the subjunctive was not so moribund as previously thought (e.g. Johansson 1979, Haegeman 1986). Interesting divergences were found to exist in its use in the two varieties. It would not be until Peters’ work in 1998 that the status of the subjunctive in Australian English would be examined in detail. This study offered clear evidence of the subjunctive in this variety also, but revealed that Australian usage differs from that of both American and British English. This thesis explores the status of the subjunctive in all its manifestations in contemporary Australian English. The scrutinising of data retrieved from the Australian component of the International Corpus of English allowed for quantitative analyses of subjunctive usage as well as a detailed investigation into the forms this usage takes. The study is intended to be both diachronic and synchronic; corpus data is both compared with previous findings on the use of subjunctive in Australian English and collated with data from parallel corpora representing usage in other World Englishes (namely British, American and New Zealand English). By examining not only cases where the subjunctive is employed, but also cases where an alternative structure is attested, this study aims to elucidate the factors influential in speakers choosing the subjunctive.

Introducing Global Englishes provides comprehensive coverage of relevant research in the fields of World Englishes, English as a Lingua Franca, and English as an International Language. The book introduces students to the current sociolinguistic uses of the English language, using a range of engaging and accessible examples from newspapers (Observer, Independent, Wall Street Journal), advertisements, and television shows. The book:

Explains key concepts connected to the historical and contemporary spread of English.
Explores the social, economic, educational, and political implications of English’s rise as a world language.
Includes comprehensive classroom-based activities, case studies, research tasks, assessment prompts, and extensive online resources.
Introducing Global Englishes is essential reading for students coming to this subject for the first time.

In the thirty-two years since the Islamic Revolution occurred in Iran, economic and cultural globalization have affected the role of English in multiple domains in the country. Within the domain of advertising, shifts have occurred throughout the history of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Persian scholars have attributed the source of these shifts to tension between local and global identities and to shifts in government advertising policy. This paper explores a data set of 335 advertisements taken from magazines from the period 2006-2008. We contrast borrowings and language display and explore language use in the six parts of the advertisements. In roughly half of the ads, language display was evident. None of the ads were English only, although many of the Farsi 2 ads were Farsi only. The targeted audience appeared to affect how much English appeared in ads along with the type of product or procedure advertised. Given the current status of English-knowing Iranians, the authors conclude that English is likely to continue to have a vibrant presence in certain types of advertisements even as the government continues to promote the ideal of a modern Muslim linked neither to the West nor the East.

This study aims to explore the feasibility of teaching critical reading—a practice based on critical language awareness—in local English language classes where learners tend to be receptive about the contents, and to describe the pedagogical applications of the theoretical framework of critical reading to English reading classes in the settings where English serves as a lingua franca. Through the action research in my critical reading practices at a Japanese university, critical reading activities could serve as a catalyst to change learners’ passive attitudes towards texts: they did not uncritically accept the contents and value of texts from an anglophone country, but rather willingly expressed their own opinions and values towards the texts. This study concludes that critical reading could be a feasible pedagogy for English language classrooms, although some modifications to fit local settings would be required.

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This paper presents observations from an agro-pastoral village in the Andes, at the periphery of Lima and from an upper-class shopping area, and discusses attitudes toward the state-driven promotion of English. In these communities, a nearly universal ideology in Peru manifests itself in the belief that``hard currency'' cultural capital in the form of English competence is needed for technological advancement, employment opportunities, national progress and international travel. In education, there are increasing but ineffectual investments in public schools and a mushrooming private school industry. The struggle for linguistic distinction generates a low level language war, where colonially rooted anxieties about race and class come into conflict with popular aspirations for social mobility.

These poems, composed in Somali and in English, provide a poetic reflection of the recently emerged debate on the theme of Caddaan Studies which means "White Studies". The criticism and counter-criticism contained in the debate dug so deep into life nerve of Somali Studies that over a thousand people participated. The poems, under the title "Inaugurating Caddaan Studies" were composed with a critical observation of the debate.

The English used in the Netherlands, a European Union country, is classified by many linguists as an ESL variety, or, within Kachru's (1985) Three Circles model, as an Outer Circle variety, or as being between an Outer and an Expanding Circle variety. This paper investigates the status of English in the Netherlands through a systematic application of the six criteria used by Kachru (1985) to classify the position of English in a country. The study is based on recent quantitative and qualitative data and shows that English in the Netherlands should be classified as an Expanding Circle variety.

English holds an unparalleled place in the world as a lingua franca; no language before has been spoken by so many people. Research has found that students believe learning English is vital to their job prospects (Saraceni, 2010, p.116; Ustinova, 2011, p.72 ) and this study aimed to test whether a knowledge of English rewarded its speakers with higher wages in a non-English speaking country; Spain. Until now, there had been a lack of empirical research on the role of English for the individual in a first world country where English was not the first language; previous research had focused on the influence of English on the economy, and more specifically the relationship between proficiency as a whole and GDP, or the knowledge of English of immigrants to America and their resulting wage levels. Consequently, this study attempted to test whether English as a foreign language in Spain resulted in a higher wage for individuals.

In order to conduct the research, 398 adverts from the Spanish job site www.infojobs.net were collected; 199 were adverts that did not specifically ask for a language to be spoken and the other half of the sample specifically stated that English needed to be spoken and the wage or salary range was taken from the adverts. The research was conducted by selecting the new jobs tab. The same research method was used in a study by Marchal and Rieucau (2005) because language was not covered in their original study and it can test the linguistic imperialist hypothesis (Phillipson, 1992; Kachru, 1986) empirically. The Spanish also addressed a limitation of other studies which had used developing countries to assess the impact of English (Ramaswami et al., 2012) and in a country, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) (2006), with very low education inequality, compared to studies conducted in America (Saiz, 2002; Levitt, 2014).

The study found little suggestion that English holds a disproportionate place in Spain. The adverts which did not require English or any other language yielded an average wage of €21,193.62 at 100% and €19,586.86 at 80% compared to €20,322.18 for 100% and €19,283.65 for 80% of the sample for jobs that require English. The hypothesis that different proficiencies were rewarded with different salaries (Tupas, 2008) showed some sign of being true. The results show that the fluent proficiency category paid more than the high proficiency category, which in turn paid more than the medium proficiency category.
Accordingly, using the Common European Framework of Reference for Language (CEFR), this equates to the difference between a C1, B2 and B1 (Intermediate) qualification being €2,000 a year in salary per proficiency level. This result is challenged by the highest proficiency level, bilingual, which was the most poorly paid of all the proficiencies in the data set. The adverts which asked for a third language in addition to Spanish and English dropped the average also to €18,229.21 from €20,860.62. The same trend was true for those who spoke French, where the mean was €17,010.53. However, for those who speak German, the average was highest of all at €21,365.44.

В настоящей статье дано краткое описание истории, фонетических, морфосинтаксических и лексических особенностей, а также современного положения пакистанского регионального варианта английского языка. Ключевые слова: пакистанский английский, Pakistani English, индийский английский, Indian English, региональные варианты английского языка, world Englishes.

This article sets out to  give  a brief overview of phonetic  and phonological aspects of Caribbean varieties of English. Specifically, it  provides a general description of similarities and differences between  Caribbean varieties with regard to  select vocalic, consonantal, and prosodic features.

Ch. 1 introduces the study's methodology and organization and explains the exigency prompting the study. Powerful contributors to that exigency are the increasing dominance of English-medium research journals among those indexed by the ISI (Institute for Scientific Information) in its Science Citation Index (SCI), Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), and Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI) and, concomitantly, the increasing practice of using these indexes to evaluate the performance of individual scholars, their departments, ...

PhD thesis investigating implicit and explicit attitudes towards non-native (Asian) speakers of English in China, Japan and South Korea using a cross-cultural research instrument for direct comparison. The study also investigates factors on social judgements such as nationality, gender, and identification rate. The research uses a verbal guise experiment, a free classification task and an adapted perceptual dialectology task in order to measure judgements towards speakers of English from Hong Kong, India, Japan, Mainland China and South Korea.

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Full text available at: http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/18036

Keywords: language attitudes; EFL; ELF; Asian Englishes; World Englishes; verbal guise; speaker identification; speech perception; folk linguistics; sociolinguistics

This research reports evaluation of tertiary learners’ spoken English fluency. The evaluation was done after explicit teaching of idioms to tertiary learners. The present study was conducted over a period of time and it was consisted of experiment. Ten speakers’ speech fluency was evaluated in the present study. The participants of the study were undergraduate students. This study proposed a criterion for the evaluation of spoken English and the same criterion was used for the evaluation of learners’ spoken fluency. This paper has explored the correlation between the explicit teaching of idioms and spoken fluency of the learner. The study analysed qualitative and quantitative data. It also discussed and presented the results.

Understanding English varieties other than native-speaker norms has been regarded as necessary for effective communication in contexts where English is used as a lingua franca. In Vietnam, however, English language teaching remains focused on Standard English, which is somewhat out of step with the role of English in communication in the region. This exploratory study aims to uncover Vietnamese English teachers' perceptions of World Englishes (WE) in their English teaching. An online questionnaire, five individual follow-up interviews, and one focus group interview were conducted. A broad range of perceptions of Vietnamese English teachers at the university / college level towards English varieties was found. Introducing these was noted as having various benefits and challenges for teaching and learning. Suggestions for incorporating WE into teacher training, teaching, and materials development were deduced from the study, as were participants' imagined plans and implications of these plans for English teaching in Vietnam. Understanding varieties of English, or World Englishes (WE), is considered a crucial task in language teaching and learning to prepare English users for effective and intelligible communication. In light of WE, English is argued to have become a denationalized language which is no longer tied to native speakers in terms of linguistic usage (Jenkins, 2006; Seidlhofer, 2004; Widdowson, 1994). Introducing these Englishes to language learners parallels the ongoing increase in the number of non-native English speakers and communication among non-native speaker communities (

This article considers Jalal Al-Ahmad and Elizabeth Braddon as writers whose fictions voiced attitudes towards poverty and motherhood. Two women, to get rid of poverty, have to get rid of their children in order to remarry. These two women consider remarriage as their only way to happiness and each one deems her child as an obstacle and gives up her motherly affection for her child. The study of this common subject in two different cultures is justifiable from the theory of comparative literature. Thus, aim of this paper is to examine these two English and Persian works from the theory of confluence so as to show the differences and similarities. The method of this paper is based on comparative literature ofَ American School which regards confluence as point of investigation and does not deem direct influence of one author on another as a point of departure. That the two authors have used one similar subject is a condition for their study and comparison in this school.

The ideal description of a variety of English is one that is constructed within the terms of the variety itself. This paper discusses a number of issues involved in such a description in relation to the distinctive vocabulary of Hong Kong English. Attention to semantic and pragmatic relationships internal to the variety and the sociocultural context in which it operates is urged. These are illustrated with examples related to underlying definition, taxonomies, semantic opposition and the productivity of localised words.

A study of the limits of multilingual literary expression in print culture. Beginning with the insight that multilingual literature defies simple translation, Brian Lennon examines the resistance multilingual literature offers to book publication. Looking closely at the limit of multilingual literary expression and the literary journalism, criticism, and scholarship that comments on multilingual work, In Babel’s Shadow presents a critical reflection on the fate of literature in a world gripped by the crisis of globalization.

this article approaches two repositories of lexical items, the Dictionary of American Regional English and the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles, as repositories of historical dialectology. Starting with a detailed comparison of the two historical dictionairies in letter T, the authors discuss and illustrate ways to tap these resources for uses for which they were originally not intended but can be fruitfully exploited. As both dictionaries were edited by teams headed by dialectologists, frederic Cassidy and Walter S. Avis, respectively, it is not surprising that the approach outlined here seems worthwhile of pursuit not just for the historical linguist, but also for those working on various aspects of present-day North American english. After giving recommendations for the use of the two repositories for such work, the authors highlight areas for future revisions and conclude with a section on the use of social networking in dialectological research. recent developments in the study of varieties of english worldwide have resulted in general reference tools that facilitate cross-comparisons of english (and english-based) varieties. one repeated view often recalls what called the "inner Circle" varieties:

In this paper the authors discuss the themes of autonomy and creativity as they have been expressed in this special issue. At a linguistic level, the emergence of Hong Kong English has been clouded by a cluster of language ideologies within a localised complaint tradition. This has included discourses relating to`monolingualism', the`invisibility' of Hong Kong English, and`falling standards'. Parallel discourses have also constrained creative writing in Hong Kong, but the appearance of new Hong Kong writers points the way to a fresh and energetic future for literary creativity. One example of this is the new journal Yuan Yang, largely written and edited by creative writing students at The University of Hong Kong.

Having established the world's first undergraduate college of world Englishes, and in an ‘Expanding-Circle’ setting, we have created the pilot environment for a new type of ELT curriculum. We must address the creation of a curriculum that is pervasively informed by the philosophy of world Englishes at both a macro and micro level. Certain program-wide decisions have been implemented from the outset, such as having all freshmen take a required class in World Englishes Studies and attend a three-week overseas seminar in Singapore, and hiring teachers from ‘Outer-Circle’ countries. Nevertheless, the philosophy of world Englishes must also be incorporated into all aspects of our ‘foundation’ communication-skills classes. Acting on the premise that developing a broader spoken lexicon will be more desirable and useful than learning colloquial American English, this paper presents an experiment in expanding Japanese students’ core aural/oral vocabulary as a means to contributing to the development of an ‘educated variety of Japanese English.’ It is hoped that the results of this study will help serve as a guide to further research, and eventually, to the type of components that should be included in a ‘world Englishes compatible’ oral communication curriculum.

This paper investigates the prosodic strategies used by Malaysian speakers of English to mark the information status of new and given discourse elements. Thirty speakers of Malaysian English were recorded both when playing a game designed by Swerts, Krahmer, and Avesani (2002) to elicit semi-spontaneous speech and when reading out a 179-word story. Pitch accent placement in the semi-spontaneous speech was analysed auditorily, while six given and new word pairs in each reading passage were analysed acoustically in terms of the phonetic realisation of the pitch accent (following Atterer and Ladd 2004). In addition, 11 speakers of Malaysian English participated in a perception experiment testing their identification of new and given discourse elements in these recordings. Results show that Malaysian speakers of English do not mark given and new information with distinct pitch accent placement and that it is not possible to categorise these utterance elements unambiguously according to their information status. The acoustic analysis showed that given information is marked by a later pitch trough and a smaller rise than new information. No difference between the two, however, was found in terms of pitch peak alignment.

Pichi, an Afro-Caribbean English-lexifier Creole spoken on the island of Bioko, Equatorial Guinea, features four types of reiteration. Amongst them, reduplication and repetition can be distinguished on formal and semantic grounds. Reduplication is a derivational operation consisting of self-compounding and tone deletion. It is restricted to dynamic verbs and yields iterative, dispersive and attenuative meanings. Repetition occurs with all major word classes, renders more iconic meanings and is analyzed as semi-morphological in nature. A comparison with verbal reiteration in a cross-section of West African languages and two of its sister languages in the Caribbean allows the conclusion that Pichi reduplication reflects an areal pattern. I conclude further that Pichi reduplication is not exceptionally iconic nor specifically “creole” in nature.

The book "World Englishes and Culture Wars" is a novel collection of issues and concepts, past, present, and future that have (and will still continue to) shape intellectual debates and discussions about the narratives of the contentions in the history, development, and future of World Englishes, which, according to Kachru, are a metaphor for a window to see the fierce but subtle competition among the World Cultures to remain at or move from the periphery to the center. One veritable weapon to sustain the battle is to effectively and efficiently play the game of the politics of language, which in this book, is the politics of the English language, past, present, and the future. The fourteen chapters in the book are grouped into six sections representing World Englishes Today, Context and Creativity, Past and Prejudice, Ethical Issues and the ELT Empire, World Englishes and the Classroom, and Research Areas and Resources. The first section of the book consists of five chapters. Chapter 1, The Agony and Ecstasy discusses two different reactionary perceptions of the spread, uses and functions of the English language in the present global age. According to Kachru, there are two camps, whose attitudes, reactions, and perceptions of the spread and status of the English language can be identified as the agonising camp and the ecstasying camp. The agonising camp, such as Ngugi Wa Thiongo, agonises that the continued spread of the language is tantamount to the death of their local languages, cultures, identity, ideologies, and sensibilities, all of which sum up into the loss of future for the people and their societies. The ecstasying camp, according to Kachru, thus includes those who see nativisation and institutionalisation of English not only as liberation but as an opportunity to express and export to a global audience those cultural milieu, identities, and ideologies that the local languages had no opportunity to do. Also, the ecstasying camp rejoices at the opportunity to abandon the classical canon, and create a new canon which promotes and controls the ideological tenets of the society. Of course in this camp is the likes of Wole Soyinka, who won a Nobel Prize for Literature on a literary career exporting African (Yoruba) ideologies to a global audience via the English language (Akinlotan 2019b). Chapter 2 The Second Diaspora revisited how English language as colonial tool came to Africa, Asia, and beyond. The first diaspora is the spread of the language from Britain to the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. The Second Diaspora is characterised by expansion of the canon, a conscious creation of a distinct African and Asian canon, which means a repudiation of the shackles of canon from the colonial English. Moreso, a new linguistic order began to emerge in these places, such as the creation of form and meaning that are not shared with native speakers from the established varieties. The growth and development of English in the second diaspora has brought about different varieties in each country, which is often classified along 'an educated variety and a range of subvarieties'.