40 INTRODUCTION: KEY BASIC CONCEPTS
the internet and therefore the dominant form of all different types of computer-
mediated communication. Academic courses and degree programmes devoted solely
to World Englishes have also emerged, along with numerous publications on the topic.
The term World Englishes can thus legitimately be seen as a sub-disciplinary area of
English language enquiry in its own right.
The ‘circles’ model
In the 1980s, Braj Kachru (1986), now commonly perceived as the most influential
global figure in the field, produced a framework for conceptualising World Englishes.
This has proved to be the most influential approach which researchers use as an entry
point to studying World Englishes. Kachru argued that instead of thinking about ‘English’
in singular form, the language should be seen as a pluralised concept. The socio-
linguistic make-up of the whole range of different types of Englishes around the world
should be perceived as belonging within one of three concentric circles, which he termed
the Inner, Outer and Expanding circles.
The Inner Circle refers to the UK, Canada, the United States, New Zealand and
Australia, where the English language has its linguistic basis and where it is associated
with longevity, tradition and culture. This inner circle loosely corresponds with the
acronym ENL, English as a Native Language. The Outer Circle refers to contexts where
English has become an official language due to colonisation, which Kachru maps onto
the category of ESL: English as a Second Language. Examples of this include Nigeria,
Singapore, Malaysia and India. Finally, the Expanding Circle refers to situations where
English is used as a foreign language, commonly referred to as EFL contexts.
Prototypical examples of the third circle are the use of English in China and Japan
(see D10 for further details on Kachru’s model).
World Englishes should thus be viewed as a collective, all-encompassing term which
includes all of these different circles. Kachru’s model of multiple Englishes poses a
range of complex questions, especially when we are considering issues surrounding
the teaching of the English language. These issues gain further prominence when viewed
in light of the fact that for well over a decade now it has been consistently reported
that there are more ‘non-native’ English speakers than there are native speakers in

Old Town Square, Prague, one of your book’s authors observed a group of Spanish
native speakers approach one of the Czech waiters. The group were engrossed in con-
versation (in Spanish) and were deciding on nominating one of their group members
to ask the waiter for directions to the famous Charles Bridge. One woman eventually
came forward and immediately code-switched from Spanish into English, thus select-
ing English as the perceived common language in order to communicate with the waiter:
Tourist: Excuse me where is Carlos Bridge?
Waiter: Straight on then turn left at the corner and follow to the river
Tourist: Thank you
In the tourist’s initial utterance one lexical item, the proper noun ‘Carlos’ from her
native language, was still present. It is clear from the waiter’s response that this ‘splicing’
together of language varieties, known in sociolinguistics as code-switching, had not
hampered his understanding – the conversation was completed with all relevant
information disseminated.
When English is operating in the role of lingua franca, from the perspective of
pragmatics Firth (1996) has argued that there is a ‘let-it-pass principle’ in operation:
providing that conversationalists can basically understand each other they will let any
mistakes pass without comment, in an effort to communicate effectively, in a manner
that displays consensus and co-operation.
However, despite the successful nature of the above encounter in terms of infor-
mation dissemination and maintainance of co-operation and consensus between
speakers, this did not prevent an aside from a British woman at a nearby table to her
companion once the interaction had finished who clearly would not ‘let-it-pass’, even
though she had played no part in the conversation apart from being another over-
hearer. She rather sarcastically commented the following: ‘Funny that I thought it was
Charles Bridge not Carlos Bridge. Who’s this Carlos?’
This British woman’s comment, and the rather snide laughter that followed from
her and her interlocutor, can arguably be seen as a prime example of native-English-
speaker monolingual superiority and a negative attitude towards code-switching.
The sharp-eared waiter could not resist responding to this and took great delight in

needed source so that knowledge of the linguistic features, including phonological,
lexical, grammatical, discoursal and pragmatic features that constitute different vari-
eties of English, can be shared.
However, it is important to highlight that, once a standard variety develops
and undergoes codification, this does imbue this one variety with prestige at the
expense of all other varieties, which will become stigmatised variants in comparison.
The standard variety is the one that has the most social, political and economic
power attached to it. The standardisation process places an uncomfortable control
upon the natural process of language evolution. As emphasised in the previous unit,
variations and changes are a completely usual and expected part of the life course
of any variety of language, be it a newer variety of English, such as those in the
outer and expanding circles, or any other variety of English circulating in the inner
circles.
Therefore, despite the advantages of codifying particular varieties, it is important
to bear in mind that fixing a language goes against its natural evolution. Any stan-
dard variety that has been selected by appropriate authorities is not inherently more
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STYLISTICS 43
complex, ‘correct’ or ‘pure’ – it is simply the version that has been imbued with the
most societal power and prestige.
So, how many different types of World Englishes dictionaries are there, and when
did they first emerge? World Englishes researcher Kingsley Bolton (2006) reports that
the first was Webster’s Dictionary, published at the beginning of the nineteenth cen-
tury (1806) in the United States, followed by a revised and expanded version in 1826.
Further versions of American dictionaries were also published during the twentieth
century. The first Canadian dictionary was published in 1967, but this has been replaced
by publication of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary in 1999; Australia had its first dic-
tionary in 1981, entitled The Macquarie Dictionary, and a New Zealand dictionary first
appeared in 1997.
India has a history of glossary and word-list publications dating back to the late

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44 INTRODUCTION: KEY BASIC CONCEPTS
any of the other numerous possibilities in which it could have been realised quickly
reveals differences in meaning, different emphases of meaning, different tones and evalu-
ative shading, different perspectives and different senses of emotion, commitment
and value. In other words, although it has been convenient in the past to separate form
(the linguistic patterning as structure) and content (its interpreted meaning), in prac-
tice form and content are indivisible.
The discipline of stylistics explores the relationships between language patterns
and interpretation. Though stylisticians examine the whole range of texts in the world,
stylistics has a particular interest in literary works, as the most prestigious examples
of language use.
Style as choice
For example, imagine in a literary text a person contemplating whether it would be
a good idea or not to commit suicide. The crux of this person’s existential dilemma
can be articulated in a variety of ways:
q ‘Should I kill myself or not?’ Here, a self-oriented interrogative is framed as a moral
imperative in the foregrounding of the modal ‘should’, and the act of suicide is
rendered semantically as a killing. The realisation of ‘kill’ and the negation and
elision of its contrary (‘or not’) places the act of killing in the foreground – the
opposite version would be something like ‘Should I carry on living or not?’
q ‘Euthanasia is an option for me.’ Here, the lexical choices are much more formal
and emotionally distanced, which is rather odd given the subject-matter. The
dilemma is cast in a declarative form rather than as a question.
q ‘There’s no point in going on!’ Here the choice is more exclamatory than the last
example, and here it captures direct speech more closely (the elided ‘There’s’, the
informal lexical choices, and the graphology of the exclamation mark).
Furthermore, the grammatical form begins with an existential ‘There’, which is
ironically apt in the circumstances. The negation is by the particle creating a neg-
ative noun-phrase (‘no point’) rather than by a verb-negation (‘There isn’t any

It should be clear how it is possible to connect these close stylistic observations of this
single line with significances of characterisation, theme and motive in the play as a
whole, especially if placed within a longer analysis of the entire speech that follows.
This is the basic craft of the stylistician.
Of course there are complications to be considered. One difficulty for stylistics is
that the literary text does not present all of the alternative versions that were poten-
tially available, as we have rather more usefully done above. Unless numerous drafts
and revisions of a writer’s manuscript exist, the literary work is singularly what it is.
Furthermore, if the subject-matter is fictional, or even articulated with poetic licence,
there is not in fact any pre-existing event that can be regarded as giving rise to the
linguistic articulation: the language is the event.
Of course, the exercise we have sketched out above allows a comparison of the
possible alternatives that were not taken to illuminate the choices that actually were
taken by the writer. This creative intervention as an analytical method is a useful one
for the stylistician. And the fact that there is no pre-existing version of a literary arti-
culation is of course actually a powerful argument for the significance of analysing the
language of the literary text in detail and professionally.
Style as patterning
It should also be apparent in the very brief stylistic analyses above that an important
concept in stylistics is the notion of prominence or foregrounding. Texts are not even;
some parts are more noticeable than others. This unevenness of texture is a con-
sequence of different linguistic choices, it underlies the existence of style itself, and it is
what allows stylistics its validity and power. Foregrounding depends on a sense that
the particular feature that you have noticed is doing something noticeably different
from the previous co-text or from what you might ordinarily have expected in that
context. It thus relies on deviance or deviation from a norm. Of course, it is not
simple to specify exactly what that norm is – whether in the language system in general
or in the prior establishment of the literary work in particular or genre in general.
However, we can at least talk of characteristic patterns in texts that are recognisable
and available for analysis.