World Englishes by Gunnel Melchers and Philip Shaw

Review of Chapters 1 to 3

The book World Englishes by Gunnel Melchers and Philip Shaw presents an insight into the
differences and similarities in grammar, lexis, pragmatics, and phonology of English. It is further
divided into chapters starting from the roots of English, how it has spread, and the variations,
namely the inner and outer circles of varieties, as well as the expanding and beyond the circles. It
provides and summarizes numerous different aspects of the language using the examples of
diverse use of the language from fiction, popular culture, newspapers, electronic media and
recordings and its transcriptions, including all the key areas of the world in which it is spoken are
epitomized.

The first chapter presents a discourse about the origin and the roots of the English language and
the languages it is closely related to from the year 1476 up to latter half of the 19th century when
the standardized pronunciation of English language came into existence. The important aspect of
the influence on the language is that it has not borrowed much from the Celtic population as it
was believed. Rather, there is a heavy and persistent influence of Latin on English language,
which writers believe is due to the fact that ‘Latin was not the language of conquered people but
of a higher civilisation, from which the Anglo-Saxons had a great deal to learn’. Another
interesting fact about English language is that it is comparatively easy for an Englishman and a
Scandinavian to communicate, for example, due to the fact that English has become ‘ending-
less’ language. This is in result to the simplification of the language, for example, by ‘dropping
quite a few inflectional endings’.

The subsequent chapters focus on the spread of English as well as the variations. According to
the book, it was recorded in 2006 that the English speakers will reach ‘2 billion in the next 10-15
years’. In contrast to the statement of Richard Mulcaster, a school head and a linguist by
profession, made 400 years ago who said ‘The English tongue is of small reache, stretching no
further than this island of ours, nay not there over all’. When this statement was being made by
Mulcaster, English was spreading in the USA and its colonies, like Jamaica and Trinidad.
English was, in fact, introduced in Canada when she came under the British procession.
Similarly, Australia and New Zealand became the English speakers when British settlers arrived
on the shores in the 18th century. However, English did not become the first language of South
Africa until 1806. English was brought to the Indian subcontinent through British trading and
colonialism as a second language, and to other colonies like Nigeria and the Philippines.

Figure 1 Kachru's Circles Model

English became so dynamic that Braj Kachru’s circles model (Figure 1) became a beneficial
‘schema for understanding uses of English’, which also gave a thorough reasoning of why
English has been deemed as a ‘Lingua Franca’ and due to this fact there are over 2 billion users
of English with number of varieties for communication.