Applied Linguistics, sociolinguistics and world Englishes

Abstract

The world Englishes perspective, especially as expressed within Kachru's formulation of the Inner, Outer and Expanding Circles of Englishes, provides a flexible and coherent model of the historical spread of English. While the model has had a profound influence on various subfields of applied linguistics, variationist sociolinguistics (especially with its exclusive focus on English in the Inner Circle) has had little interaction with the model. At the same time, scholars working from the world Englishes perspective often fail to account for variation in the Outer and Expanding Circles. Three fallacies resulting from misconceptions of the Circles model – the proficiency fallacy, the prestige fallacy and the prescriptive fallacy – account for much of the divide between variationist sociolinguistics and world Englishes.