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C2,IRCLES
Vol. 13, THE 2003 159
PAUL BRUTHIAUX
Texas A&M University
Introduction
For the best part of the last two decades, commentators on English worldwide
have taken as their theoretical premise the model consisting of three concentric
circles originally proposed by Braj Kachru (1984, 1985, 1989). In this model, the
Inner Circle comprises locations where English is the language of a substantial,
often monolingual majority (e.g. USA, UK, Ireland, Australia, etc.). A major
characteristic of varieties spoken in these locations is that they are largely
endonormative, that is, they nd within themselves the norms of correctness and
appropriateness to be propagated through language education and language
planning. By contrast, the Outer Circle represents locations that typically
came under British or American colonial administration before acceding to
independence and where English continues to be used for interethnic communica-
tion and as a dominant language by those at the top of the socioeconomic ladder.
These English-speaking or at least English-knowing communities range in size
and geopolitical importance from India to Nauru through Nigeria, Kenya, the
Philippines, Singapore, Fiji, and many more. Post-colonial New Englishes tend
to generate ambivalence among commentators. While some stress the role played
by these varieties in perpetuating socioeconomic divisions between those who
have English and those who do not (e.g. Canagarajah 1999; Ramanathan 1999),
others emphasize the way in which they encapsulate aspirations to modernity
through participation in worldwide trade, access to technology, and the tying
together of new and typically multilingual nations (e.g. Kanyoro 1991). Despite
increasing linguistic self-reliance and a gradual shift from exonormative to
endonormative attitudes (Banjo 2000), these Englishes continue to be affected
by conict between linguistic norms and linguistic behavior, with widespread
perceptions among users that Anglo-American norms are somehow superior
and that their own variants are therefore decient. The Expanding Circle,
meanwhile, represents societies where English is not passed on to infants natural-
istically across generations but is taught in schools to an increasing number of
learners and is used by some, at least in activities involving members of
other linguistic local communities and in international trade or tourism. Given
that English it can be safely assumed is now taught to someone somewhere in
every nation on earth, the Expanding Circle presumably comprises every nation
not included in the Inner or Outer circles. Randomly selected names include
Brazil, Italy, Thailand, Morocco, and many more. In these locations, English
tends to be exonormative in that speakers, educators, and policy-makers have
traditionally looked to American or British models for linguistic norms.
Judging by the number of scholarly sources in which reference is made to
the Three Circles of English, the model has clearly had a major impact.
Introduced at a time when the duopoly of American and British English was
unquestioned and metropolitan attitudes to postcolonial variants often ranged
from amused condescension to racist stereotyping (for reviews, see de Beaugrande
1999; Canagarajah 1999; Bhatt 2002), the model broke new ground in raising
awareness of the very existence of dynamic varieties of English with growing
populations of speakers and increasingly vibrant media, literatures, and popular
cultures. Startling though it may have seemed to many at the time, the very act
of pluralizing English and encouraging serious debate regarding the nature
and role of New Englishes denoted both imagination and courage. Indeed,
the enterprise was far from innocent. In Kachrus own words (reported in
Prendergast 1998: 229), this terminological choice constituted nothing short of
an insurgent linguistic weapon. Though potentially a double-edged sword,
the characterization of the enterprise as liberation linguistics (Kachru 1991),
with English and Zulu speakers without having signicant competence in either
language, at least initially. The result is a variety that is distinct from both White
and Black South African Englishes as well as from mainland Indian varieties
because it was inuenced by a specic set of social conditions, namely prolonged
interactions with native and non-native speakers and teachers of English (often
other Indians) in South Africa. Overall, as de Kadt (2000) argues, South Africa
ts neither the Inner nor the Outer components of the model.
One response to this conundrum has been to focus on the relatively stable
White variety of South African English and to list it alongside less problematic
Inner Circle varieties, an approach followed by Graddol (1997: 10). The other
is simply to omit all reference to South African English in relation to Inner
Circle varieties, as does Yano (2001). Clearly, listing White and Black South
African Englishes as part of the Inner and Outer circles respectively would be
politically divisive. Yet, even if we accept the characterization of Black South
African English as rapidly evolving and therefore not amenable to classica-
tion, there is a case for identifying a White South African variety of English on
the same basis as, say, an Australian or even an American variety in that these
are spoken natively by most descendants of European immigrants and the
descendants of other, more recent immigrants who adopted those speech norms.
On this basis, especially once comparable populations in neighboring countries
such as Zimbabwe or Namibia are taken into account, the total number of
speakers of what might be labeled White Southern African English is probably
greater (approximately 4 5 million) than the entire English-speaking populations
of Ireland or New Zealand. On demographic grounds alone, this makes leaving
this population and the variety of English it sustains out of the Inner Circle
untenable. On theoretical grounds, there is a case for questioning the validity of
a model that stresses the common nature of varieties of English descended from
a colonial power that exported its language and saw it gain additional speakers
in at least ve locations (Ireland, USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand)
while leaving out an obvious candidate on the grounds of political sensibilities
or simply poor t with other varieties within the nation-state in question. In
effect, the very reliance of the model on nation-states as its principal conceptual
base is called into question.
set out to counteract. At a relatively trivial level, this is apparent in some of the
odder attempts at grouping countries on the basis of the native or non-native
competence of their populations. Graddol (1997), for example, lists two nations
with largely bi-ethnic populations born of the earlier practice of importing
Indian laborers: Fiji, and Trinidad and Tobago. Yet, while Trinidad and Tobago
is listed alongside India and others as having both native and non-native
populations of English speakers, Fiji is not, despite the fact that its Indian
population (still numbering close to 50% of the total) displays a similar con-
tinuum from English-dominant bilinguals to those with little or no knowledge of
English, and every shade in between (Siegel 1992).
At the root of this lack of typological systematicity is a sense of ambiguity
encouraged by the model. Clearly, there is a crucial sociolinguistic difference
between what languages users know and what they do with what they know. Put
another way, the language needs of adults do not necessarily require that they
possess native or native-like competence across the entire system. However, this
purely instrumental perspective bypasses the psycholinguistic underpinnings
of multilingual competence. In practice, it should be uncontroversial to note
that locations of the Outer type are characterized by a vast spread between
those who know and use English in preference to any other language in their
repertoire and those who know or use no English whatsoever. Unlike most
speakers in Inner Circle locations, many Outer Circle residents cannot be said
to share a reasonably stable linguistic system broadly recognizable as English
with the rest of the population because they do not communicate with each
other extensively in that language and thus do not expose their children
primarily to input based on that shared system.
This fundamental distinction and its consequences for the nature and scope of
Outer varieties of English cannot be glossed over without encouraging misleading
perceptions of each sociolinguistic setting, often based on oxymoronic references
to non-native varieties (Singh, in Prendergast 1998), as well as unrealistic
expectations of the social and educational potential of English in Outer Circle
locations. Just as South African Indian English evolved in response to interac-
tions between Indian migrants and speakers of local languages as well as native
and non-native teachers of English (Mesthrie 1996), mainland Indian English
features substantial code-mixing between English and at least one local language
even in supposedly English-medium education, with lower socioeconomic groups
institutionally barred from access to English-medium schooling (Ramanathan
1999). At the syntactic level, it also exhibits substantial and systematic internal
variation between standard and vernacular usage (Bhatt 2000).
A further difculty is that by grouping together nation-states on the basis
of their shared colonial history at the expense of detailed sociolinguistic
analysis, the model fails to discriminate between strongly multiethnic entities
and strongly monolingual ones. For example, in strongly multilingual Nigeria,
Mauritius, or Singapore, English is widely used in a variety of ofcial and
unofcial roles not only for education, administration and for a few, at least
international communication but also for internal communication across
Central American outposts and the key commercial hub of Jamaica were strong
enough for repeated calls to be made for British colonial status to be granted to
the entire Caribbean coast of Central America (Naylor 1989). Indeed, so strong
was the link between these populations and de facto British colonial power that
it was not until the 1948 revolution that the Jamaican residents of the Caribbean
coast of Costa Rica were granted Costa Rican citizenship and thus freed from
the need to turn to British consular authorities for protection and representation
(Harpelle 2001). Yet, only Belize (then British Honduras) succeeded in securing
ofcial British recognition as a crown colony, in part because relatively favorable
geography made the threat of direct control being imposed from neighboring
Guatemala more likely than in countries (especially along the Mosquito Coast of
Honduras and Nicaragua) where British trading presence was conned to isolated
estuary settlements largely inaccessible from the seat of Spanish-speaking power
in remote highlands. Today, despite the inroads made by Spanish into these
English-speaking communities in part as a result of the spread of primary
education, a degree of cultural afnity continues to link the coastal people of
these six nations across regional borders as well as with neighboring English-
speaking Caribbean islands (Harpelle 2001). Yet little of this intricate sociolin-
guistic pattern is captured by a model that maps varieties narrowly onto national
boundaries. Once again, only a focus on accidents of political history, not
sociolinguistic observation, explains why of all speakers of English in Central
America, only those in Belize are mentioned in most discussions of regional
varieties of the language and accorded Outer Circle status.
As for nearby Panama, its absence from classications such as Crystal (1997)
or Graddol (1997) is doubly puzzling in that, in addition to being home to many
English-speaking descendents of former plantation and canal laborers, this
American-inspired creation and the construction and administration of the canal
that justied it led to the growth of a bilingual administrative cadre of Spanish
speakers with its own localized variety of English as part of its communicative
repertoire. This should have predicted that the country would be accounted for
in much the same manner as Puerto Rico, the American Virgin Islands, or
American Samoa, all of which receive recognition in Crystals and Graddols
taxonomies. In brief, because it bases its coverage on political history (and
inconsistently, at that) as opposed to sociolinguistics, the concept of an
Outer Circle of new varieties of English is severely decient in the explanatory
and predictive power needed to account for the complex ecology of English
worldwide.
The conceptual inconsistency that weakens the concepts of Inner and Outer
Circles of English worldwide is also apparent in discussions of the Expanding
Circle because it is not always clear whether the concept is meant to cover
countries, country-based varieties, speakers, or non- (or barely-) speaking
learners. One consequence of this lack of clarity is that me-too calls are
heard periodically for additional varieties to be admitted to the ever-expanding
family of new Englishes. One such recent call comes from Shim (1999), who
argues that a long tradition of largely standardized English language teaching
and testing in Korea has resulted in an increasingly endonormative local standard
shared by all members of the teaching profession. On closer examination, such
periodic sightings of emerging varieties appear to have more in common with
corn circles than with sociolinguistic ones.
The question of what constitutes a variety of a language is a thorny one. The
key issue is whether there exists in a particular location a core of speakers who
not only know some English (e.g. Shims Korean teachers) but also use it to a
reasonable level of prociency for a substantial part of their daily activities,
whether for internal communication in a multiethnic society, for international
communication with other native or non-native speakers of the language, or for
academic purposes in a location where English plays a signicant role as a
medium of instruction despite not having a substantial presence locally. This is
fundamental because for a variety to emerge, local practices must surely gain
norm value through recurring, spontaneous use across a range of communicative
functions as well as in emblematic domains such as the media, artistic creation,
and popular culture. In other words, idiolects will converge as speakers accom-
modate to each other and gradually evolve a set of norms that most implicitly
recognize as a common bond. However, in countries where English is taught
widely but not used internally, the conditions for the emergence of such norms
are simply not in place. As a result, the kind of English spoken locally among a
narrow professional circle here, teachers no more constitutes the basis for a
variety of English than do restricted profession-based codes such as Airspeak,
the worldwide medium of air trafc control. One example of a restricted speech
form of this type is Thai English, which Smalley (1994) characterizes as
difcult for foreigners to understand and inadequate for communicative needs
beyond classroom practices. Although the increase in transnational communica-
tion across Europe has led to a well-documented claim for variety status to be
accorded to English used as a lingua franca (or ELF) by second language
speakers among themselves (Jenkins 2000; Seidlhofer 2001), the domain of such
language use remains restricted to specialized transactions (business negotiations,
industrial cooperation, tourism, etc.) by a relatively small number of speakers,
and broader variety-creating conditions remain largely absent.
Admittedly, allowance could be made for nations such as the Netherlands or
the Scandinavian countries where English is widely used in higher education. In
addition, the relatively small populations of these countries and their substantial
involvement in international trade mean that at any given time a relatively high
number of people will be involved in transnational communication in English,
and this may provide part of the necessary social platform for norms to develop.
In this sense, there may be a marginal case for speaking of Dutch English or
Norwegian English, though even this scenario is denied by Preisler with
respect to Denmark (in Afendras et al. 1995). If this is the case as regards a
small country with such high and widespread prociency in English as Denmark,
it must apply all the more to much larger nations such as Brazil or China, say,
where those with some knowledge of English have even less motivation to speak
it to each other. Thus, the kind of English occasionally heard in Brazil or China
constitutes English with Brazilian or Chinese characteristics, not Brazilian
English or Chinese English. Interestingly, the point was made earlier by
Kachru himself (in Prendergast 1998) in the context of India, where the presence
of a few Indian speakers of Russian, he argues, does not lead to the emergence
of Indian Russian, because Russian is used exclusively as a foreign language
by very few with the limited goal of communicating with a small number of
native speakers of the language. In addition, there is no creativity in Russian to
speak of within India and therefore little or no systematic local adaptation of
Russian to the Indian context, hence no Indian contribution to any hypothetical
expanding circle of New Russians, as it were.
The difculty, as I argue above, is that the scope of the Expanding Circle
concept is generally left unspecied. In these locations, use of English reects in
part (legitimate) aspirations for a better future among educated, outward-
looking individuals, who see English as a modernizing force operating in con-
junction with other indicators of socioeconomic development such as increased
international trade. In Thailand, for example, a major function of English is to
symbolize being part of a wider, forward-looking world to the point where
commercial names of non-English origin associated with desirable consumer
products such as Este Lauder or Toyota are regarded as English by most
Thais (Smalley 1994). In some cases, the language can be pressed into service
by ofcials charged with presenting an up-to-date image of the country in highly
stage-managed formats. One revealing example of this practice is the Crazy
English phenomenon currently sweeping China and characterized by a blend
of exhortations borrowed in equal part from the quasi-evangelical discourse of
marketing and the Communist Party line (Bolton 2002). However, this creative
and uniquely Chinese linguistic product only represents the stylistic choices of a
handful of script writers, not the spontaneous practices of large numbers of
users that would need to occur in combination with other factors if a new
variety were to be identied.
Here too, the Three Circles model is at fault in that it makes no reference to
prociency and does not attempt to differentiate between degrees of communicat-
ive competence. In Expanding Circle locations, variation in prociency ranges
from native-like ability in a few to the kind of receptive, test-oriented knowledge
promoted through schooling, with many knowing no English at all. This vast
and unanalyzed variation in prociency across Inner, Outer, and Expanding
locations leads to unveriable claims regarding how many users may be said to
belong to each circle. Estimates offered by Crystal (1997) and reproduced by
Graddol (1997: 10) suggest a relatively narrow range for the Inner Circle
(320380 million). However, ranges for the Outer Circle (150300 million) and
especially the Expanding Circle (100 million-1 billion) are so broad as to be
largely meaningless. Little better are numbers based on self-reporting, as in the
I have argued that the Three Circles model has made a valuable contribution
to our appreciation of contexts for English worldwide beyond those varieties
the act of writing ourselves into the language, English, coloring it with the content,
the referential range of our history and experience, and so, possess it. And write
our-selves out of the British Empire. And write ourselves into a dening prole, an
identity that is simultaneously a sense of being restored as a sovereign people, through
constructing a liberating literature in English. A literature that draws from the other
half of the hyphen, the one rooted in our various cultures.
In this sense, the evolution of New Englishes closely parallels the success of
American English in gaining acceptance as a legitimate tool for the expression of
localized cultural experiences, a process that took many decades to unfold and
(incidentally) was long resisted within the USA itself, as witnessed by the ban on
lectures being delivered at Yale in American English, a ruling not lifted until
1929 (Singh 1996).
To sum up, the Three Circles model struggles with the problem of attempting
to account for phenomena that are not strictly comparable. Minimally, the
model refers to sets of locations. Provided we are prepared to ignore mists
such as South Africa along with signicant populations of speakers of non-
standard varieties of English (Mexican-American English in the USA, Jamaican
English in the UK, etc.), the Inner Circle concept more or less coherently
describes locations where the language has long been sustained by relatively
stable English-speaking majorities. For its part, the Outer Circle concept is
based largely in political history in that it represents locations where English
was transplanted within colonial structures that touched multilingual populations
to vastly different degrees. By contrast, the Expanding Circle covers a set of
countries where English is widely taught as a second language while being no
ones primary language. At some basic descriptive level, the model is adequate
enough in that, provided it is not required to account for complex sociolinguistic
phenomena, it offers a useful shorthand for classifying contexts of English world-
wide. At a more sophisticated level, however, a framework based in history and
its geographical legacy cannot accommodate discussions of complex notions such
as language varieties. In other words, the Three Circles concept is a nation-
based model that draws on historical events which only partially correlate with
current sociolinguistic data, an inherent lack of theoretical consistency that
goes back to Kachrus early articulation of the model (1984) through later
renements (1985, 1989). The result of this ambivalence regarding the nature
and scope of the model varieties, countries, speakers, or all three? is that
any explanatory power is lost as the analysis shifts from circle to circle.
To be sure, no model of a complex phenomenon such as language variation
can hope to account for every local twist in the sociolinguistic plot. However, the
Acknowledgement
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Paul Bruthiaux
Department of English
Texas A&M University
College Station, Texas 77843
USA
e-mail: bruthiaux@english.tamu.edu