Expanding on the Expanding Englishes of the Expanding Circle

Abstract

Abstract Issue after issue of such journals as World Englishes and English Today deliver insights into and an understanding of the nature of the world's Englishes. Most of these scholarly contributions rely upon the Concentric Circle Model of World Englishes, a central feature of the Kachruvian paradigm since 1985. While the Englishes of each circle are covered in each issue, my interest in this paper is the Expanding Circle. I give attention to its representation in these two journals and to the model's integrity as a tool for investigating the sociolinguistic reality of English worldwide. I first report on two studies which I conducted that examined the representation of the Expanding Circle in the forenamed journals. Each study, conducted in two separate time periods, recorded the number of articles that appeared in each issue, listed the regions and countries covered, and tallied how often each region or country was the focus of an article. I then consider some implications of the findings and apply them to an analysis of the strength of claims made about alleged weaknesses in the Concentric Circles Model. I argue that the more that is known about Expanding Circle Englishes, the more that the model proves to be a robust, productive tool for description and analysis, even as varieties change and develop and users acquire new identities.

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