The trouble with World Englishes

Ever since the 1980s, when research interest in the field of ‘World Englishes’ began to gather speed, the view of the English language around the world has been largely dominated by the construct of so-called ‘varieties’ of English. These varieties are usually given a geographical label (‘Singapore English’, ‘Welsh English’, ‘South African English’, ‘Fiji English’, etc), and are described in terms of their pronunciation, their grammar, and their vocabulary. The resulting anthologies (see e.g. Wells, 1982; Trudgill & Hannah, 1982; Kortmann et al., 2004) have contributed a lot to our understanding of how English varies globally, as well as to raising the profile of non-inner circle (Kachru, 1985) varieties, which had previously not benefited from as much attention.