World Englishes and learner lexicography: View from the expanding circle

Abstract

This article analyzes a World Englishes paradigm shift in four monolingual English-language learner’s dictionaries designed to meet the reference needs of people learning English as a non-native language in the Expanding Circle. The study investigates the question of how modern learner’s dictionaries reflect the current global status of English. The dictionary focus on educational learner needs exclusively seems to ignore the today’s range and depth of the socio-cultural functions of global English. The authors examine the dictionaries’ coverage of non-Inner Circle varieties of English and, in particular, analyze culture-loaded borrowings from Northeast Asian countries (China, Japan, Korea, and Russia) where English is widely used for intercultural communication. The particular interest is in the way the dictionaries define such entries and represent non-English cultures and identities of their speakers from the Expanding Circle through borrowings. Analysis of the wordlists of learner’s dictionaries reveals an ethnocentric approach in compiling the dictionaries. This is manifested both in the patchy coverage of non-Inner Circle varieties of English in the dictionaries and in the inexplicable selections of borrowings to be included. Words associated with the Northeast Asian countries tend to be selected arbitrarily and according to Western rather than regional culture priorities. Anglocentricity is also evident in the definitions of the headwords related to Northeast Asia. The majority of the borrowings are defined in British or American terms without any perspective of the culture from which the words arise. The authors conclude that the representation of non-English cultures in learner’s dictionaries is ideological and ethnocentric and therefore cannot meet the challenges of the globalized world.