World Englishes and Culture Wars

by Braj Kachru — border crossing

A spotlight on the relentless expansion of the global lingua
franca

There have been nearly 700 attempts to create a synthetic global language, the best known
being Esperanto. None has made much headway — and now none is needed. Humanity’s long-
held dream of a language that people could speak to each other regardless of their nationality
or culture has come true. Over the past 50 years, English has spread more widely and
penetrated more deeply than any language. None of the previous cross-frontier lingua francas
— Greek, Latin, Sanskrit — had anything like its currency.

How many people speak English? Although the British Council has suggested a figure of close
to 2bn, Braj Kachru, the author of this book, says we cannot really know. What, after all, do we
mean by speaking English? What command would someone need to elevate them from a
semi-knower to a knower of the language?

What is certain is that there are many more people speaking English as an additional language
than as a native tongue. Non-natives outnumber native speakers possibly by as much as four
to one. It is, Kachru says, “a unique phenomenon in the history of language diffusion”. Kachru,
one of the great chroniclers of the rise of English, completed this book just before his death
last year at the age of 84. Born in Srinagar, India and a native Kashmiri speaker, he spent much
of his career teaching linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

He is known particularly for his description of English’s three “circles” — the Inner Circle of the
UK and the transplanted British communities of the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand;
the Outer Circle made up largely of former British colonies, such as India, Malaysia and Nigeria;
and the Expanding Circle, which takes in the rest of the world, including China, continental
Europe and Latin America, where the ambitious, whether in business, science or academia, see
English as the key to advancement.

As a child of the Outer Circle, Kachru saw himself as writing on behalf of “those of us who
represent the developing world”. He does not go as far as some in accusing a vast conspiracy,
headed by the British Council and supported by the World Bank and the World Trade
Organisation, of imposing English on the world.

But he does bristle at how the spread of English has resulted in “an attitude of triumphalism
about the language”. Few in the UK and US realise how far English has spun out of their
control.

Those who speak English in Kachru’s Outer and Expanding circles did not learn it so that they
could communicate with Brits, Americans or Australians.

Most learnt it to talk to each other, either within their vast multilingual countries in Asia or
Africa or to people in their continental region — Kenyan to Ghanaian or Singaporean to
Pakistani.

Kachru says that not only do these English users hardly ever learn English from a native
speaker; they rarely encounter them. There is substantial movement between these countries
not just of doctors and engineers, but of English teachers too. “Sri Lankans, Malaysians and
Indians . . . are now involved in academic planning and teaching of English in, for example,
Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, the Gulf countries and Southeast Asia, in addition to their own
countries,” he says.

These world Englishes are often markedly different from those spoken in the Inner Circle. At a
local level, in Nigeria or India, for example, as people go about their daily business, they
incorporate local words and switch between tongues in ways that make their languages
incomprehensible to outsiders.

As people move up the ladder of prestige, and interact with English speakers elsewhere, they
adopt the internationally comprehensible world language of today’s global business, scientific
and cultural exchanges. But that is often markedly different from British and American English.

Kachru spent years describing how others took hold of and adapted English. With the UK
preparing to retreat from the EU and Donald Trump promising to clamp down on free trade,
we could see the rest of the world taking even greater control of the language they have
adopted, changed and made their own.