The Future of World Englishes

The Future of World Englishes

Two scenarios have been advanced about English's future status as the major world language: it will ultimately fragment into a large number of mutually unintelligible varieties (in effect, languages), or it will converge so that differences across groups of speakers are largely eliminated.

English as the language of ‘others’

If English is, numerically speaking, the language of ‘others’, then the center of gravity of the language is almost certain to shift in the direction of the ‘others’. In the words of Widdowson, there is likely to be a paradigm shift from one of language distribution to one of language spread:

"When we talk about the spread of English, then, it is not that the conventionally coded forms and meanings are transmitted into different environments and different surroundings, and taken up and used by different groups of people. It is not a matter of the actual language being distributed but of the virtual language being spread and in the process being variously actualized. The distribution of the actual language implies adoption and conformity. The spread of virtual language implies adaptation and nonconformity. The two processes are quite different."

In this new paradigm, English spreads and adapts according to the linguistic and cultural preferences of its users in the Outer and Expanding circles (refer to Kachru's Three Circles of English). However, if English is genuinely to become the language of ‘others’, then the ‘others’ have to be accorded – or perhaps more likely, accord themselves – at least the same English language rights as those claimed by mother-tongue speakers. However, it remains to be seen whether such a paradigm shift will take place.

Another world language?

The other potential shift in the linguistic center of gravity is that English could lose its international role altogether, or, at best, come to share it with a number of equals. Although this would not happen mainly as a result of native-speaker resistance to the spread of non-native speaker Englishes and the consequent abandoning of English by large numbers of non-native speakers, the latter could undoubtedly play a part.

As evidence that English may eventually give way to another language (or languages) as the world’s lingua franca, David Crystal cites Internet data:

"When the internet started it was of course 100 percent English because of where it came from, but since the 1980s that status has started to fall away. By 1995, it was down to about 80 per cent present of English on the internet, and the current figures for 2001 are that it is hovering somewhere between 60 percent and 70 percent, with a significant drop likely over the next four or five years."

On the other hand, there are at least 1500 languages present on the internet now and that figure is likely to increase. Nevertheless Crystal predicts that English will remain the dominant presence.