The concept of ‘World English’ and

its implications for ELT

Kanavillil Rajagopalan

World English (WE) belongs to everybody who speaks it, but it is nobody’s
mother tongue. Although today ever more people accept the idea that there is
such a thing as WE, very few of them seem to have realized that the full
implications of admitting it are much more far reaching than they had
hitherto imagined. It may be that some of these implications will nowhere be
felt so strongly in the foreseeable future as in the sphere of language teaching.
At present, we are at best in a position to make some wild guesses concerning
the kind of changes in store for us, and I would suggest that ELT is poised to
undergo some dramatic changes as native varieties of English give way to WE
as the most coveted passport to world citizenship.

Introduction It has become more or less a cliché these days to refer to English as a
world language. At the 1984 conference to celebrate the 50th anniversary
of the British Council there was a debate between Sir Randolph Quirk
and Professor Braj Kachru on the (literally) million dollar question of
‘who owns English’, and hence whose English must be adopted as the
model for teaching the language worldwide (Quirk and Widdowson
1985). Since then, much has been written on the role of English as a
language of international communication, and the desirability or
otherwise of adopting one of the Inner Circle varieties of English (to all
intents and purposes, either British or American) as the canonical model
for teaching it as a second or foreign language. The position vigorously
defended by Quirk in that debate—succinctly captured in the phrase ‘a
single monochrome standard’ (Quirk 1985: 6)—no longer appeals to the
majority of those who are involved in the ELT enterprise in one way or
another. Instead, Kachru’s equally spirited insistence that ‘the native
speakers [of English] seem to have lost the exclusive prerogative to
control its standardisation’ (Kachru 1985: 30), and his plea for a paradigm
shift in linguistic and pedagogical research so as to bring it more in tune
with the changing landscape, have continued to strike a favourable chord
with most ELT professionals. And the idea that English belongs to
everyone who speaks it has been steadily gaining ground.
Though still resisted in some quarters, the very idea of World English
(henceforward, WE) makes the whole question of the ‘ownership’ of
English problematic, not to say completely anachronistic. Widdowson
expressed the idea in a very telling manner when he wrote ‘It is a matter

ELT Journal Volume 58/2 April 2004 © Oxford University Press 111
 of considerable pride and satisfaction for native speakers of English that
their language is an international means of communication. But the
point is that it is only international to the extent that it is not their language.’
(italics mine) (Widdowson 1994: 385).

Unpacking the full One of the objectives of this paper is to explore the full signi>cance of
import of WE Widdowson’s contention, which I believe has not yet been adequately
appreciated by the ELT community across the world. In pursuing
Widdowson’s line of reasoning, I want to argue that, with the advance of
English as a world language, the whole idea of ‘native speaker’ has been
rendered somewhat blurred, if not hopelessly meaningless—except
perhaps in an ideological sense which, incidentally, was always there,
although seldom noticed (Rajagopalan 1997), and hence increasingly
questionable as far as ELT practices are concerned. A logical corollary to
Widdowson’s thesis is this. In its emerging role as a world language,
English has no native speakers. Now, this is no doubt a bold claim, and to
the extent that it can survive critical scrutiny, it will have far-reaching
consequences not only for ELT , but also for the way we have become
accustomed to thinking about natural languages.

The need to Lest I should be misunderstood here, please note what it is that I am not
distinguish WE from claiming. I am not saying that there are no native speakers of English any
familiar varieties of more—if by native speakers we mean persons who were born and
English brought up in monolingual households with no contact with other
languages. Indeed, that would be an absurd thing to say. As with every
other language, there will—for the immediately foreseeable future at
least—continue to be children born into monolingual English-speaking
households who will, under the familiar criteria established for the
purpose (Davies 1991), qualify as native speakers of English. But what we
are interested in at the moment is WE, not the English language as it is
spoken in English-speaking households, or the Houses of Parliament in
Britain. WE is a language (for want of a better term, that is) spoken
across the world—routinely at the check-in desks and in the corridors
and departure lounges of some of the world’s busiest airports, typically
during multi-national business encounters, periodically during the
Olympics or World Cup Football seasons, international trade fairs,
academic conferences, and so on. And those who speak WE are already
legion, and their numbers are currently growing exponentially.

The uniqueness In other words, WE is a linguistic phenomenon that is altogether sui

of WE generis. It de>es our time-honoured view of language which is structured
around the unargued assumption that every natural language is typically
spoken by a community of native speakers, and exceptionally, or
marginally (that is to say, from a theoretical point of view, in a none-too-
interesting sense) by a group of non-natives. This means that those of us
who accept the notion of WE need to go back to the drawing board and
rethink our entire approach to ELT , no matter what the speci>c context
we happen to >nd ourselves working in.

112 Kanavillil Rajagopalan

Arguments against Now, it is by no means the case that everyone in the ELT world accepts the
WE and what they notion of WE without demur. Phillipson, for one, has been highly critical
ignore of it on the grounds that those who advocate it simply ignore the highly
unequal distribution of power among its contemporary users. To say that
English belongs to everybody who uses it is, says Phillipson
(forthcoming), to be hopelessly naïve about a world order controlled by
media giants like the CNN and the BBC that do not act as mouthpieces
for everybody but, on the contrary, represent a handful of vested
interests. The basic thrust of such allegations is that, in so far as access to
information is rigorously controlled by a handful of media outlets, and
the corporate interests that maintain them, it is foolhardy to expect that
they will in any way represent all and sundry, or speak on behalf of those
on the margins.
While Phillipson is no doubt right about the unequal distribution of
power as far as linguistic communities in general is concerned, I believe
he is misguided in singling out English or WE as a language burdened
with colonial legacy and the multiple scars of past and present inequities
(Rajagopalan 1999). If anything, all languages bear testimony to the
presence of unequal power distribution, and the power politics that
invariably and inevitably play out in their respective speech
communities. To imagine a speech community entirely rid of such power
politics is to de?ect the whole discussion from the real to an ideal world.
What makes WE an interesting case is that it blows up what is always
already there in any speech community (and is re?ected by the respective
language), thus making it more easily amenable to critical inspection. In
other words, it is my contention that the di=erence between WE and any
other natural language in this respect is quantitative rather than
qualitative. The more widely spoken a language, the greater will be the
visibility of the internal dissensions that mark its speech community. In
other words, by studying WE more closely, we may gain valuable insights
into the workings of all languages, even the supposedly monolithic ones.
In my view, to speak of English as a world language is simply another
way of drawing attention to the fact that it is an arena where con?icting
interests and ideologies are constantly at play—in fact, more so than ever
before in its history. In its passage from a small dialect spoken by a few
thousands of people in good old Albion to its present day status as the
language in which Saddam Hussein signed his treaty of surrender to the
allied troops at the end of the >rst Gulf War, and in which, as an o= duty
BBC reporter, John Simpson was able to strike up a sprightly little
conversation with a shoeshine boy in New Delhi’s Connaught Circus
(Simpson 2001: 166), all that has really happened to English is that the
power politics being played by those who use it for whatever reason, and
in whatever capacity, have become far more complex. And, as noted
already, far more visible.

WE and the need to It was mentioned at the outset that my central aim in writing this piece is
review ELT to press home the claim that ELT practices that have for long been in
practices place need to be reviewed drastically with a view to addressing the new
set of challenges being thrown at us by the phenomenon of WE. Up until
now a good deal of our taken-for-granted ELT practices have been

World English and ELT 113

 threatened with the prospect of being declared obsolete for the simple
reason that they do not take into account some of the most signi>cant
characteristics of WE.

The role of the As already pointed out, the question of the native speaker is one such. No
native speaker one can deny that language teaching in general, and ELT in particular,
historically evolved around the notion of the native speaker. Theories
about language learning typically posited the >gure of the native speaker
‘as the ultimate state at which >rst and second language learners may
arrive and as the ultimate goal in language pedagogy.’ (Van der Geest
1981:317). Even when the focus shifted from the Chomsky-inspired ideal
of ‘linguistic competence’, to the Hymesian, presumably more liberating,
notion of ‘communicative competence’, it was the >gure of the native
speaker that invariably served as the yardstick with which to measure the
adequacy of policy decisions, the e;cacy of methods and authenticity of
materials, the learner’s pro>ciency, and so on. In other words, the
native’s authority—nay, his or her God-like infallibility—was preserved
even in the seemingly more libertarian approaches to language teaching
that accompanied the process by which language teaching freed itself
from its subservience to theoretical linguistics as its sole feeder
discipline, and instead began looking at a host of disciplines for insights
to inform its own practice (Rampton 1995, Rajagopalan 2003).
Some of the consequences of conducting ELT practices around the
central >gure of the ‘omniscient’ native speaker—elevated to the status of
a totem—have been profoundly deleterious to the whole enterprise.
Among other things, it has bred an extremely enervating inferiority
complex among many a non-native speaker learner/teacher, and helped
spawn unfair and discriminatory hiring practices.
Why is it incumbent upon us to undertake a radical rethinking of our
past practices in respect of the native speaker-centred approaches to ELT
in light of the new role assumed by English as it metamorphosed into a
world language? Here is one obvious reason. Our past practices were
premised on the key belief that someone who wants to learn English as a
second or a foreign language does so in order to be able to communicate
with the so-called native speakers of English. He or she wants to be able
to order a pint of beer in a London pub or hail a taxi on the southern end
of Manhattan. Furthermore, it was tacitly assumed that, in order to be
able to do all these things and much more, all that a tourist needed was
some ‘neutral’ variety of English or, to use Quirk’s phrase, ‘a single
monochrome standard’. Now, perhaps some >fty years or so ago, the
chances were that the visitor could indeed hope to do these things with
the help of the kind of English (mostly some standard variety, such as the
Queen’s English or the General American) they picked up in their EFL
lessons. But not so any longer, as anyone who has been through these
experiences in more recent years has learnt the hard way. A person
unable to cope with the Punjabi or Greek accent of the waiter or the taxi
driver is communicatively de>cient and ill-equipped to that very extent. It
is WE at work, whether we like it or not. And part of the price we have to
pay if we decide to pay more than lip service to the concept of WE is to be

114 Kanavillil Rajagopalan

 prepared to cope with a wide variety of accents, both native and non-
native.

Is WE a language? Closer inspection reveals that WE is a hotchpotch of dialects and accents

at di=erent stages of nativization (or, contrariwise, fossilization) where
there are no real rules of the game; if anything, the rules are constantly
being revised or reinvented even as the game progresses. And with the
digital revolution under way, according to some doomsday pundits the
situation is threatening to go awry once and for all. Heim (1993: 2), for
one, gives vent to his apprehensions thus: ‘What is the state of the
English language? No state at all. It is in process. Our language is being
word processed. If languages have states of health, sick or well, then ours
is manic.’
With even the crudest guestimates pointing to the existence of twice as
many non-native speakers using English for whatever purposes in their
daily lives as their native counterparts, the day is not far o= (if it has not
come already) when more and more people across the globe will be using
the language for communication between non-English speakers than for
linguistic encounters involving at least one native speaker, considered the
stereotypical case by most curriculum planners and course designers.
This new WE, which is already a fact of the matter, is nobody’s mother
tongue. Now, faced with this unusual linguistic phenomenon, a linguist
may be tempted to jump to the smug conclusion that WE is a pidgin par
excellence. Dismissively characterized as ‘contact languages’, or forms of
speech that ‘spontaneously’ spring up when people from mutually
unintelligible speech communities >nd themselves all of a sudden
having to communicate to one another, while pidgins constitute a ragbag
category of makeshift languages that are, by de>nition, unstable and
ephemeral. But such an argumentative tack will hardly help us get any
purchase on what WE is really all about. Because to call WE a pidgin is to
entertain the vain hope that some day it will evolve into a full-?edged
language and that the present di;culties are only a passing phase. It is,
moreover, to deny the possibility of there ever existing mixed languages
the way linguists in the 19th century used to. Max Müller, the great
German linguist and man of letters, is on record as having made the
con>dent claim ‘Es gibt keine Mischsprache’—in English, ‘There is no
such thing as a mixed language’, not realizing, of course, that fear of the
loss of the putative ‘purity’ of individual languages that such claims
harbour is part of a wider ideological agenda that also spurns
miscegenation, thereby endorsing the putative purity of races.
WE and the place of
If we took the notion of WE seriously, it would follow that the so-called
the ‘native speaker’
native speaker of English, whose presumed one-upmanship in relation to
of English
non-natives (that is to say, so long as discussion was con>ned to speaking
English in one of the native environments) primarily rested on his/her
having been brought up in a monolingual environment, is at a clear
disadvantage vis-à-vis the large mass of people performing routine tasks
in it. Any head start he or she may be claimed to have in virtue of a
privileged command of the linguistic code is o=set by the indisputable
fact that WE itself is at best code-referenced rather than code-bound.

World English and ELT 115

The native speaker If the native speaker’s status in the context of WE is markedly di=erent
and the teaching of from that which he or she enjoyed in their regional variety, it is
the four skills in WE interesting to consider separately each of the four skills that are widely
believed to collectively make up one’s command of a given language, and
ask if there are any di=erences among them with regard to the changes
under way.
To begin with, let us note that even in their own ‘mother-tongue’ the
native speaker is never equally at home in all four of the skills, if by
‘native’ we mean what one is in virtue of one’s native endowment (as
professional linguists are wont to remind us). The sense in which the
native speaker was said to be a consummate speaker of the language was
an incredibly impoverished sense, one from which the whole idea of
speaking for a real purpose or speaking with a view to getting things
done (often competitively and under adverse circumstances—which is
what many non-native learners are ultimately interested in) had been
systematically subtracted so as to concentrate on the purely grammatical
competence of producing an in>nite number of sentences ad nauseam.
Even granted that the native is the ultimate yardstick to be considered in
speaking, the same was never true—not at least in the same sense—to
listening. The native speaker-hearer is not, in other words, automatically a
native speaker-listener.
As for the remaining two skills, namely reading and writing, the
situation gets even more complicated. From the native as a speaking
animal (which is what theoretical linguistics has always concentrated on)
to the person who is a skilled reader or a talented writer, it is a long road
indeed. It stretches from the purely linguistic through the communicative
all the way to the discursive/rhetorical, the cognitive, and the logical.
Success along this path was never guaranteed by genetics or birth right
alone, but by training and practice.
We have already seen how WE is only quantitatively di=erent from its
earlier stages. If the native’s claims to one-upmanship when it came to
speaking the language rested on a notion of speaking in a none-too-
exciting sense of the term, imagine how he or she is likely to be judged in
the context of WE. What Rampton (1990: 97) called ‘the whole mystique
of the native speaker and [his/her] mother tongue’ becomes totally
irrelevant as we contemplate the scenario unveiled by the spread of WE.
This is because, for all we know, being a rigorously monolingual speaker
of English may actually turn out to be a disadvantage when it comes to
getting by in WE. If that claim is not convincing enough, consider the
following. If the native-speaker’s supremacy is already under threat from
the currently attested native/non-native ratio of 1:2, imagine their lot
when the ratio reaches 1:10 in the not-so-remote future, thanks to the
millions of people in Asia, Africa, and Latin America eager to learn the
language.

WE and the status If, as we have seen, a native speaker of English is not thereby a privileged
of native-speaker user of WE, an obvious follow up question we need to raise is: ‘Does the
teachers native speaker continue to retain his/her former privileged status as an
EFL professional?’ The answer is, I think, a resounding no. For, to begin

116 Kanavillil Rajagopalan

 with, the native is no longer a model speaker of WE. If anything, the
native speaker may even be handicapped when it comes to performing
some of the routine tasks in WE. Communicative competence in WE is
in large measure of an interlingual or even multilingual nature, and
therefore, far from being an asset, being a monolingual may actually turn
out to be an encumbrance. Indeed, the day may not be all that far o=
when native speakers of English may need to take crash courses in WE,
in order to be able to cope with the demands of an increasingly
competitive world market. A native speaker of English who is not well-
versed in WE is most likely to >nd him/herself left out in the linguistic
cold. In a way, this is already happening, as anyone who has taken time to
study the kind of English used in instruction manuals accompanying
computer software, electronic gadgets, and the like, has had the
opportunity to verify for themselves.

Conclusion WE is a linguistic phenomenon the like of which we have never seen

before. Many of its long-term implications still evade our most fertile
imagination, but if our initial speculations are in the right direction, they
may turn out to be even more staggering than any we have so far
encountered.
Revised version received February 2003
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in the World: Teaching and Learning the Language The author
and Literatures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Kanavillil Rajagopalan is Professor of Linguistics at
Press. the State University at Campinas (Unicamp),
Rajagopalan, K. 1997. ‘Linguistics and the myth of Brazil. He was born in India, and has studied in
nativity: comments on the controversy over India, Britain, the United States, and Brazil. His
“new/non-native” Englishes’. Journal of Pragmatics research interests include the philosophy of
27/2: 225–31. language, linguistic pragmatics, poststructuralism,
Rajagopalan, K. 1999. ‘Of EFL teachers, critical linguistics, and English language teaching.
conscience, and cowardice’. ELT Journal 53/3: He is co-editor of DELTA , Brazil’s leading journal
200–6. of theoretical and applied linguistics.
Email: [email protected]

World English and ELT 117