The Rise of Global Englishes

Ask who English belongs to, and a generation ago most people would have given an unhesitating answer: the British and the Americans, with the Australians, Canadians and others as junior shareholders. Everyone else was a learner, measured by how closely they could imitate a speaker from London or Chicago. That answer has become very much harder to defend. By most estimates, people who speak English as a second or additional language now comfortably outnumber those who learned it from birth, and the gap is widening.

In 1985 the linguist Braj Kachru proposed a model that has shaped the debate ever since. He imagined the English-speaking world as three concentric circles. The inner circle contained the countries where English is the main native language, such as Britain, the United States and Australia. The outer circle consisted of countries, many of them former British colonies, where English plays an official or institutional role alongside other languages: India, Nigeria, Singapore, Kenya and the Philippines, among others. The expanding circle took in the rest of the world, from Brazil to China to Spain, where English is learned chiefly as a foreign language.

Kachru's crucial argument was that the varieties of the outer circle were not failed attempts at British English but legitimate Englishes in their own right, with their own norms and their own creativity. Indian English has given the world prepone, the logical opposite of postpone, and the bureaucratic do the needful. In Nigerian English, a go-slow is a traffic jam, and to flash someone is to call their phone and hang up before they answer, so that they will call you back. Such usages are not mistakes; within their communities they are simply correct.

Singapore offers a particularly instructive case. Alongside a standard English used in schools and government, many Singaporeans speak Singlish, a colloquial variety influenced by Malay, Hokkien and Tamil, famous for discourse particles such as lah, which can soften or strengthen a statement depending on the tone. The government has long been ambivalent about it. In 2000 it launched a Speak Good English Movement to encourage standard usage, yet many Singaporeans regard Singlish as a marker of national identity, something that no outsider could imitate convincingly.

Perhaps the most radical shift has come from research into English as a lingua franca, the English used between speakers who share no other language, such as a Brazilian engineer and a Korean client. Scholars including Jennifer Jenkins and Barbara Seidlhofer have argued that such conversations follow their own patterns and should not be judged against native-speaker norms. Successful lingua franca speakers tend to avoid obscure idioms, check understanding and adapt their accent for clarity. Some researchers have even observed, with a certain mischief, that native speakers can be among the least intelligible participants in an international meeting, precisely because they never learned to make those adjustments.

None of this means that standards have disappeared. Exams, employers and universities still expect accuracy, and some critics fear that celebrating variation could disadvantage learners who need a widely accepted model. The more modest claim is that the native speaker is no longer the only possible target. For a learner in Madrid or Mexico City, the realistic goal may not be to sound as if they had grown up in Oxford, but to be clear, flexible and confident in an English that is now, unmistakably, everybody's.