The Handbook of World Englishes, 2nd Edition

41World Englishes: Current Debates and Future Directions

KINGSLEY BOLTON

1 Introduction

Over the last three decades, World Englishes (WE) has become an established subfield of linguistics, with particular reference to sociolinguistic and applied linguistic approaches to language.¹ Since the 1980s, the world Englishes turn has succeeded in effecting a paradigm shift in the academy, transforming English studies as an area of international research and scholarship, and in the process, relexifying the language we use to talk about the spread of English worldwide. Before the 1980s, discussions of English worldwide usually employed a normative vocabulary which foregrounded a distinction between “native” versus “nonnative” speakers and employed such terms as English as a Native Language (ENL), English as a Second Language (ESL), and English as a Foreign Language (EFL), in order to classify particular varieties of English. Since the early 1980s, however, world Englishes, with its inclusive plural, has increasingly become the standard term to refer to varieties of English worldwide.

Debates about the status, functions, and features of varieties of English may be traced back to the mid‐1960s and the work of Halliday, McIntosh, and Strevens, who asserted that “English is no longer the possession of the British, or even the British and the Americans, but an international language which … exists in an increasingly large number of different varieties” (Halliday, McIntosh, & Strevens 1964 ...