Extending the Scope of World Englishes: Interactions across Englishes in Post-Protectorates and at the Grassroots

Abstract

purchases, a signifi cant settler strand in the sense of Schneider (2007) was crucially missing.Whilst Uganda, despite having a low settler strand, attracted British administrators and colonial personnel, the Maldives did not have any British personnel until 1941, when a military base was established on the island of Gan.And whereas English was quickly established as a medium of instruction (MOI) in Uganda, this domain has only been occupied by English in Maldives since the 1960s.Contrary to these histories, it seems that today there has been a reversal in that English seems to spread more easily at all levels of society in Maldives.In both countries, speakers of English, both from the societal elites and from the grassroots, typically do not interact with speakers of the same variety of English.Rather, they engage in what Meierkord (2012) models as Interactions across Englishes, either with their fellow country people or with individuals (e.g., migrants, expatriates, or tourists) from abroad. Interactions across EnglishesCrucially, the enormous spread of English to every part of the world and increasingly into all spheres of societies involves interactions between individuals who speak diff erent varieties of English.Graddol (1999: 57) argued more than two decades ago that, in the future, English would be "used mainly in multilingual contexts as a second language and for communication between non-native speakers." In fact, over the last decades, interactions between speakers for whom English is not their fi rst language (L1) have come to be the majority of all those interactions that are conducted in English.Meierkord (2012) envisages these as Interactions across Englishes (IaEs).Th e core assumption of the model is that the Englishes spoken by the individual participants potentially merge in these interactions and that this, also potentially, results in an array of new emergent linguistic systems (cf., Meierkord 2012: 2).Depending on how frequent and regular such interactions occur, these outcomes may be stable linguistic patterns that involve accommodation to each other's ways of using English or more ad-hoc communicative solutions that are characterized by processes of simplifi cation and regularization as well as pragmatic strategies employed to cope with the diversity of and unfamiliarity with participants' patterns and conventions of using English.Generally, IaEs involve communication between two or more speakers who use English as their L2 or as an FL 3 , either in a standardized form or in a pidginized or a more or less stable learner language variety.Examples include speakers of Pakistani English, speakers of Cameroon Pidgin English, Turkish or Chinese users of English who may interact in a local Cameroon market place.Similarly, there are intranational interactions, for example in Uganda, between speakers of Ugandan English, who have a Bantu or Nilotic L1, and speakers of Ugandan Indian English.Finally, a Polish and a Philippina nurse may interact in a London hospital.Th e individual speakers of these diff erent varieties of English will, albeit to varying degrees, use forms of pronunciation and grammar as well as lexical items and pragmatic strategies that are characteristic of their variety.More generally speaking, individual

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