Shiroza, S. (2024, January 28). Do WE still matter? Changes and continuity in research on world Englishes. JACET ELF-SIG/JAFAE joint symposium. Meijo University, Nagoya, Japan.

1. Do WE still matter?
Changes and continuity in research on world Englishes
Saran SHIROZA, Ph.D.
International Christian University
Jan. 28, 2024
JAFAE-ELF SIG Symposium

2. Decoding my title
• World Englishes: Kachruvian framework
• world Englishes: regional/social/cultural varieties of
English
– Kachru’s preference:
“Englishes” more important than the “world” (D’Angelo, 2021)
• WE:
– The journal World Englishes
– Kachru’s approach
– Academic field of studies of Englishes
+ 1st person plural: Emphasis on us

3. Key questions
• Where are WE now?
• How did WE get here?
• Where do WE go from here?

4. Key questions
• Where are WE now?
– An overview of the field of WE
• How did WE come here?
– Historical accounts to contextualize Kachru’s work
• Where do WE go from here?
– Current/future directions for WE research
à For a common ground for scholarly discussions

5. Where are we now?
Google N-gram

6. WE as an academic discipline
• Listed under linguistics and languages in Wikipedia’s
list of academic fields
• “The emergence of world Englishes studies as a
discipline within the context of education is
reflected in the proliferation of textbooks, courses
of study, specialist journals, and other teaching and
research-related resources that are now available.”
(Seargeant, 2012, p. 120)

7. Major platforms for WE studies
Journal Title Since Publisher Founding
editor
Editorial
base
English
World-Wide
1980 John Benjamins Manfred
Görlach
Continental
Europe
World
Englishes
1981 Wiley
(formerly
Blackwell)
Braj B. Kachru
& Larry E.
Smith
US
English Today 1985 CUP Tom McArthur UK
Asian
Englishes
1998 ALC Pressà
Taylor & Francis
(2014-)
Honna
Nobuyuki
Asia

8. Textbooks of WE studies
• Jenkins (2003, 2009, 2015
[renamed Global Englishes)
• Melchers & Shaw (2003, 2011,
2019 with Sundkvist)
• Kirkpatrick (2007)
• Mesthrie & Bhatt (2008)
• van Rooy (2023)

9. WE Handbooks and encyclopedia
Title Year Editors
The Handbook of World Englishes
(Wiley Blackwell)
2006,
2020
Kachru, Kachru, & Nelson;
Nelson, Proshina, & Davis
The Routledge Handbook of World
Englishes
2010,
2021
Kirkpatrick
The Oxford Handbook of World
Englishes
2017 Filppula, Klemola, & Sharma
The Cambridge Handbook of World
Englishes
2019 Schreier, Hundt, & Schneider
Bloomsbury World Englishes 2021 Saraceni (Schneider, B.
& Heyd; Rubdy & Tupas;
Bayyurt)
The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia
of World Englishes (vol. 1-6)
2024 Bolton

10. How did WE get here?
• 1978: Birth of the term
“world Englishes”
– Hawaii conference: English for
cross-cultural communication
(Smith, 1981)
– U. of Illinois conference: The
other tongue (Kachru, 1982)
• WE did not emerge from a
vacuum.

11. Kachru’s three “incarnations”
1. Education at Allahabad
2. Edinburgh days
3. Career at U. of Illinois
(Kachru, 1983) Source: Wiley

12. Who’s quote?
“if American English has established itself, not merely as
a respectable form of English, but as a potential world-
language, with a very considerable literature and
prestige of its own, the form of English that has already
developed in India, and may henceforth develop even
more rapidly and uninhibitedly, may well be recognized
by serious students of English as at least a legitimate and
not altogether unacceptable form of the language.”
(Dustoor, 1956 [1968], p. 276)

13. Dustoor, a true pioneer
Phiroze Edulji Dustoor [1898–1979]
• Professor of linguistics at Allahabad University
(History of English, early English literature)
• Interest in “indigenous flavour about our
English” (Dustoor, 1958 [1968], p. 126)
• Encouraged Kachru to work on Indian English
• Supported English as an official language of
independent India & its use in various forms to
represent Indian-ness.

14. Edinburgh days (1958-62)
• Influence from J.R. Firth & M.A.K. Halliday
– “Context of situation” (Kachru, 1965, 1966 reprinted in 1983)
– Language mixing and collocations (Kachru, 1983)
– Pluralistic view of English
• Educated English with variation in usage, pronunciation,
and accent traceable to familiar/local speech habits
• All English speakers “have a right to their own form of the
language” (Firth, 1930 [1964] p. 197)

15. Multiplicity of English
“English is no longer the possession of the British, or
even of the British and Americans, but an international
language which increasingly large numbers of people
adopt for at least some of their purposes, without
thereby denying (at least in intention) the value of their
own languages; and this one language, English, exists in
an increasingly large number of different varieties.”
(Halliday et al., 1964, p. 293)

16. Toward theorization of WE
• Academic career at University of Illinois a t
Urbana-Champaign from 1962
• Descriptive studies of Indian English
à Theorization about nativization and
institutionalization of the non-native
Englishes

17. Communicative competence and WE
• Communicative competence (Hymes, 1965)
• Focus on “appropriateness”: “what to talk about with
whom, when, where, in what manner” (Hymes, 1965)
• Application to multilingual/multicultural postcolonial
nations
• The idealized native-speaker norms?
à no longer tenable
à irrelevant to the judgment of what is appropriate,
acceptable, and intelligible

18. The original Kachru model
Three concentric circles
(inner, outer, and expanding
circles) represent “the types
of spread, the patterns of
acquisition, and the
functional domains” of
English (Kachru, 1985, p. 12)
(Kachru, 1988, p. 5)
(Kachru, 1992, p. 356)

19. Three circles popularized & criticized
• Concentric circle model popularized by
Crystal (1997 [2003]) & Graddol (1997)
• Criticisms
– Native-speaker centricity
– Static model
– Nation-based categorization
(e.g., Bruthiaux, 2003; Pennycook, 2004; Saraceni, 2010) Wikimedia Commons

20. WE: alive and well
• Kachru’s model suggested “mobility and flux”
and allowed for “all manners of shadings and
overlaps among the circles.” (McArthur, 1993, p. 334)
• Kachru’s model: “a robust, productive tool”
(Berns, 2019, p. 8)
• WE remains “a vibrant and active field”
(Sadegbhpour & D’Angelo, 2022, p. 218)

21. Where do WE go from here?
• Bibliometric studies of world Englishes
• Arik & Arik (2015)
– SSCI & AHCI of Web of Science
– 153 publications (86 articles, 52 book reviews)
– Striking increase in publications since 2005
– Limited data: WE from 2008, EWW from 2009
• Li (2021)
– Analyzed publications in 4 journals (EWW, WE, ET, AE)
– 1,053 articles published between 2010 and 2020
– Exponential increase in publications

22. Landmark WE articles (Li, 2021)
1 New reflections on the evolutionary dynamics of world
Englishes
Schneider (2014) WE
2 The World System of Englishes: Accounting for the transnational
importance of mobile and mediated vernaculars
Mair (2013) EWW
3 English in China today Bolton & Graddol (2012) ET
4 Repositioning English and multilingualism in English as a Lingua
Franca
Jenkins (2015) Eng. in
Practice
5 Language attitudes and linguistic features in the ‘China English’
debate
He & Li (2009) WE
6 English as an international language of scientific publication: A
study of attitudes
Ferguson, Pérex-
Llantada, & Plo (2011)
WE
7 Expanding horizons in the study of World Englishes with the 1.9
billion word Global We—based English Corpus (GloWbE)
Davies & Fuchs (2015) EWW
8 The statistics of English in China: An analysis of the best
available data from government sources
Wei & Su (2012) ET

23. Four emerging foci (Li, 2021)
1. Descriptive/comparative studies of Asian
Englishes
2. Ideologies, perceptions, and attitudes regarding
the use of Englishes
3. Englishes in the social media and popular
culture
4. English language teaching with WE/ELF
perspectives

24. My ProQuest Search
• ProQuest One Academic
• Subject: Englishes (case-insensitive, excluding
singular “English”)
• Resource types: Books, Academic journals
• Publication year: All
• à 179 books (1980-2024), 438 articles (1990-
2024)

25. Book titles with “Englishes”
6
23
2
7
1 9
22
76
0
20
40
60
80
100
120
1980-1989 1990-1999 2000-2009 2010-2019
Books titled with "Englishes" (ProQuest One Academic)
World Englishes Global Englishes * Englishes

26. Journal articles on “Englishes”
25 33
54
26
138
1
1
1
6
6
1
9
43
64
141
165
0
50
100
150
200
250
300
350
1990-1999 2000-2004 2005-2009 2010-2014 2015-2019 2020-2024
Journal Aritcles on "Englishes" (ProQuest One Academic)
w/World Englishes Global Englishes (translingual, translingualism, translanguaging) * Englishes

27. “Global Englishes” in titles
AntConc

28. “other” Englishes in titles
• Asian
• New
• More
• Non-native
AntConc

29. Frequent keywords
• Pedagogy-related
• Asia-related
• Attitude-related
Rank W.Type ct. Rank W.Type ct. Rank W.Type ct.
29 23students 23 27china 24 25attitudes
30 23teaching 27 24chinese 56 13perspectives
33 21teachers 31 22asian 64 11identity
45 14acquisition 53 13hong 68 11perspective
48 14education 54 13kong 86 9perceptions
50 14learning 83 9korean 126 6awareness
59 12learners 95 8indian 151 5attitude
63 11elt 104 8singapore 165 5identities
76 10teacher 137 6japan 85
109 7classrooms 186 5singaporean 1453
119 7pedagogical 196 4asia 5.8%
144 6textbooks 355 3taiwanese
150 5assessment 142
180 5pedagogy 1453
188 5textbook 9.8%
207 4curriculum
250 4tesol
251 4test
252 4testing
268 3assessing
196
1453
13.5%

30. Translingual turn?
25 33
54
26
138
1
1
1
6
6
1
9
43
64
141
165
0
50
100
150
200
250
300
350
1990-1999 2000-2004 2005-2009 2010-2014 2015-2019 2020-2024
Journal Aritcles on "Englishes" (ProQuest One Academic)
w/World Englishes Global Englishes (translingual, translingualism, translanguaging) * Englishes
translingual,
translingualism,
translanguaging

31. Conclusion
• WE, the Kachruvian framework, the research field, and the
community of scholars: alive and well
• WE viable as an umbrella term
• Need to understand a conceptual history of WE (Shiroza,
2014) and contextualize it in the broader field of linguistics
• Need to appreciate the expanding scope of WE without
reducing Kachru’s contribution to the concentric circle
model
• Robustness of pluralism, multicanonicity, centrifugal
forces in WE framework continues to provide a strong
ground to expand our scholarly horizons.

32. References
Arik, B.T, & Arik, E. (2015). World Englishes from a citation index perspective. The
Journal of English as an International Language, 10(1), 1–19.
Berns, M. (2019). Expanding on the expanding Englishes of the Expanding Circle. World
Englishes, 38, 8–17.
Bruthiaux, P. (2003). Squaring the circles: Issues in modeling English worldwide.
International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 13(2), 159-178.
Crystal, D. (1997 [2003]). English as a global language (2nd ed.). CUP.
D’Angelo, J. (2021). Conclusion. In A.F. Selvi, & B. Yazan (Eds.), Language teacher
education for Global Englishes: A practical resource book (pp. 265–271).
Routledge.
Dustoor, P.E. (1956 [1968]). The world of words. Asia Publishing House.
Firth, J. R. (1930 [1964]). Speech. Reprinted in P. Strevens (Ed.), Tongues of Men and
Speech (pp. 139-211). OUP.
“Google Books Ngram Viewer”. (December 16, 2010). Retrieved from
https://books.google.com/ngrams/info
Graddol, D. (1997). The future of English?: A guide to forecasting the popularity of the
English language in the 21st century. British Council.
Halliday, M.A.K., McIntosh, A., & Strevens, P. (1964). The linguistic sciences and
language teaching. Indiana U. Press.
Hymes, D. (1965 [2000]). On communicative competence. In A. Duranti (Ed.), Linguistic
anthropology: A reader (pp. 53-73). Blackwell.
Kachru, B.B. (1983). Indianization of English. OUP.
Kachru, B. B. (1985). Standards, codification and sociolinguistic realism: The English
language in the outer circle. In R. Quirk & H. G. Widdowson (Eds.), English in the
world (pp. 11-30). CUP.
Kachru, B. B. (1988). The sacred cows of English. English Today, 16, 3-8.
Kachru, B. B. (1992). The other tongue: English across cultures (2nd ed.). U. of Illinois
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Li. Q. (2021). A bibliometric review of world Englishes (2010-2020). International
Journal of Linguistics, Literature, and Translation, 4(11), 47–54. DOI:
10.32996/ijllt.2021.4.12.6
McArthur, T. (1993). The English language or the English languages? In W. F. Bolton &
D. Crystal (Eds.), The English language (p. 323-341).
Pennycook, A. (2004). The myth of English as an international language. English in
Australia, 12(1), 26-32.
Sadeghpour, M., & D’Angelo, J. (2022). World Englishes and ‘Global Englishes’:
competing or complementary paradigms?, Asian Englishes, 24(2), 211-221, DOI:
10.1080/13488678.2022.2076368
Saraceni, M. (2010). The relocation of English: Shifting paradigms in a global era.
Palgrave Macmillan.
Seargeant, P. (2012). Disciplinarity and the study of world Englishes. World Englishes,
31(1), 113–129.
Shiroza, S. (2014). WE and Us: The Transplantation and Transformation of the World
Englishes Paradigm in the Japanese Context. Unpublished PhD Thesis. The
University of Tokyo.