ABSTRACT:

The world Englishes perspective, especially within Kachru’s (1985) 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 profound influence on various subfields of applied linguistics, variationist sociolinguistics — especially with its exclusive focus only on English in the Inner Circle — has not been heavily influenced by the model. At the same time, scholars working from the world Englishes perspective often fail to account for variation, especially in the Outer and Expanding Circles. Three fallacies resulting from misconceptions of the model account for much of the divide between variationist sociolinguistics and world Englishes: the proficiency fallacy results from a misconception that the circles represent English proficiency levels; the prestige fallacy results from a misconception that the circles are developmental; and the prescriptive fallacy results from a misconception that varieties within the circles are not variable. Third-wave sociolinguistic approaches have successfully developed performance theories that can account for stylistic shift, a phenomenon that Kachru (1985) had identified much earlier as variety shift. The central role of norms with the world Englishes perspective allows theorists to explain shifts between endonorms and exonorms across all three circles of Englishes.

Bionote:

Andrew Moody is a sociolinguist and specialist in ‘world Englishes’ who publishes extensively on two topics: (1) language in Macau and (2) English in popular culture.

He has published in journals like World Englishes, American Speech, English Language Teaching Journal and English Today, he has also contributed chapters to the following handbooks and books: The Cambridge Handbook of World Englishes, The Routledge Handbook of World Englishes, World Englishes: Critical Concepts in Linguistics (Routledge), The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics (Wiley),  The Routledge International Handbook of Language Education Policy in Asia, and the Handbook of Asian Englishes (Wiley). He is the author of a chapter in both the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of EMI in Higher Education and the forthcoming Handbook of Language Policies in East Asia (Brill), as well as entries in the forthcoming Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of World Englishes.

Andrew is the author of Macau’s Languages in Society and Education: Planning in a Multilingual Ecology (Springer, 2021). The volume is the first to examine the details of Macau’s multilingual language ecology throughout the territory’s nearly 500-year history, first as a Portuguese enclave to the 1999 establishment of the Macau Special Administrative Region, and since.

Since 2018, Andrew has served as the chief editor of the SSCI (WoS) journal English Today (Cambridge). In addition, Andrew has served as an Associate Editor of the forthcoming Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of World Englishes (expected September 2024) and the Oxford Handbook of Southeast Asian Englishes.

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The 7th Linguistic Society of the Philippines International Conference (𝐋𝐒𝐏𝐈𝐂𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟓) which is happening on 𝗔𝗽𝗿𝗶𝗹 𝟮𝟰-𝟮𝟲, 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟱 at 𝗣𝗦𝗨 𝗟𝗶𝗻𝗴𝗮𝘆𝗲𝗻 𝗖𝗮𝗺𝗽𝘂𝘀, is jointly hosted by the Linguistic Society of the Philippines (LSP) and the Pangasinan State University (together with the LGU of Lingayen and the Provincial Government of Pangasinan).