The Handbook of World Englishes, 2nd Edition

35World Englishes and Global Commerce

STANLEY VAN HORN

1 Introduction

In his perceptive and influential study, the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942) described the Trobriand Islanders in a way perhaps apt for human kind as a whole: “The whole of tribal life is permeated by a constant give and take” (Malinowski 1922: 167). Give and take in commerce is critical to survival, success, and enrichment, and, for many, English plays an increasing role in it. At the same time, language itself is a symbolic good with its own principles of give and take.

English is identified, however much in reality or in myth, as “the” language of worldwide commerce of the twenty‐first century – with an attending implicit model of a single international standard. More or less well meaning and more or less profitably, English language textbooks for business prescribe “best practice.” In doing so, they frequently subscribe to a single native‐speaker recipe for linguistic success, which B. Kachru has termed a “nativist mono‐model” of English – standing in contradistinction to a “functionalist polymodel” of world Englishes (1990: 7). Studies in world Englishes differ from prescriptivist models of English in aiming to account for multilinguals’ creativity within a linguistic repertoire and within a plural sociolinguistic context, (B. Kachru 1986a, 1986b, 1986/1990, 1990, 1992a, 1992b, 2005; Bolton 2004).

The functions of English and Englishes in the world marketplace are many: in consumer‐oriented ...