The edited volume Modeling World Englishes: Assessing the interplay of emancipation and globalization of ESL varieties asks how well existing models in the field of World Englishes capture English in the twenty-first century. The volume is dedicated to a scholar who strongly influenced model-building in World Englishes as the co-founder of the ‘Extra- and Intraterritorial Forces’ (EIF) Model: Alexander Kautzsch, who sadly passed away in the year of its publication.
In her thematic introduction, ‘Modeling World Englishes in the 21st century’, editor Sandra C. Deshors describes how English has spread far across the globe due to increased globalization and digitization, and that this expansion of English has led to an even stronger diversification. She stresses that modeling this complex reality has become one of the big challenges in the field. Older models such as Kachru's (Reference Kachru, Quirk and Widdowson1985) or Schneider's (Reference Schneider2007) do not seem to be able to faithfully depict English in the twenty-first century any longer due to their strong emphasis on colonization as the process behind the global spread of English. Deshors claims that this is why new models were proposed in the 2010s such as Mair's (Reference Mair2013) ‘World System of Englishes’, Schneider's (Reference Schneider2014) concept of ‘Transnational Attraction’ (TA) and Buschfeld & Kautzsch's (Reference Buschfeld and Kautzsch2017) EIF Model, which integrate the effects of increasing globalization on English today. This sketch of the status quo in modeling World Englishes sets the scene for the following chapters.
The first contribution, by Sarah Buschfeld, Alexander Kautzsch and Edgar W. Schneider, ‘From colonial dynamism to current transnationalism: A unified view on postcolonial and non-postcolonial Englishes’, presents supporting evidence for their EIF Model and tests its applicability to digital Englishes. In case studies on the role of English in Southeast Asia, Namibia, Germany, Cyprus, Greece, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, they show the continual blurring of the traditional ESL and EFL categories. The authors subsequently proceed to discuss whether their EIF Model is also applicable to digital Englishes. They describe language use on Facebook by Germans and Singaporeans, in fanfiction writing and in multiplayer online games. They claim that similar factors play a role in the formation of nation-based and non-nation-based (‘digital’) varieties of Englishes, which supports the application of their model to digital Englishes. These include the emergence of a new identity, intravarietal differences and the combined effects of external and internal forces acting on these two types of Englishes.
In ‘Stabilising domains of English-language use in Germany: Global English in a non-colonial languagescape’, Christian Mair describes how different varieties of English form part of speakers’ multilingual repertoires in two ‘non-elite’ contexts in Germany. Against the background of his ‘World System of Standard and Non-Standard Englishes’ and the concept of ‘languagescapes’, Mair presents two case studies. The first investigates linguistic practices in German hip-hop, a genre that shows strong influence from the super-central non-standard variety AAVE. The analysis reveals the close interweaving of English and German in, for example, the use of hybrid forms such as English verbs with German inflections. The second case study examines the use of English and German by African refugees through language-biographical interviews. It shows in what way features of the peripheral standard variety Gambian English may cause misunderstandings in the German ELF context and how the acquisition of German as an L3 is influenced by English spoken as a second language.
Bertus van Rooy and Haidee Kruger also deal with multilingualism and hybridity but apply these concepts to linguistic practices in digital spaces in a chapter entitled ‘Hybridity, globalization and models of Englishes: English in South African multilingual digital repertoires’. They investigate user comments to blogs that deal with the content of South African soap operas. In a corpus-driven analysis, they show that the overwhelming majority of users’ responses to ‘soapie teasers’ are in Standard English, with only a small fraction in non-Standard English and indigenous languages. Given their rarity, they argue that these features clearly stand out and can be employed for identitary functions. In the concluding part, van Rooy and Kruger propose that their findings can best be accounted for by applying the concept of ‘the feature pool’ (Croft Reference Croft2000; Mufwene Reference Mufwene2008) to the dynamic process of (digital) text construction as users select from a rich repertoire of forms and combine them to craft their identities.
Mikko Laitinen's ‘Placing ELF among the varieties of English: Observations from typological profiling’ investigates the structural profile of ELF in comparison to ENL, ESL and EFL varieties, taking into account measures developed in dialect typology. His investigation is based on data from VOICE for spoken ELF, a subpart of the Written ELF in Academic Settings (WrELFA) corpus, and the Corpus of English Texts in Sweden (SWE-CE). His findings indicate that spoken ELF is structurally different from spoken British English in that it is less analytic and less synthetic, reflecting ELF's characteristic of establishing meaning through contextualization. By contrast, written ELF adheres to structural characteristics of written ENL varieties and is clearly distinct from written learner data, which approximate norms of spoken British English. Zooming in on individual written genres in ELF and British English on the basis of the older BNC, Laitinen reveals striking similarities in their structural parameters.
Moving on from dialect typology to linguistic typology, Peter Siemund writes about ‘Modeling World Englishes from a cross-linguistic perspective’. He proposes to integrate insights from language typology in variation studies. He lists several examples of morphosyntactic variation in World Englishes demonstrating that the structure of non-standard varieties of English conforms more closely with tendencies in the world's languages. For instance, his examples show that non-standard varieties adhere to the implicational hierarchy in their use of reflexive pronouns and to the accessibility hierarchy in their relativization strategies while Standard English does not. Non-standard variation is also aligned with well-established patterns in the world's languages in the cases of subject–verb agreement, negative concord and zero copulas. Despite their cross-linguistic pervasiveness, Siemund argues that these non-standard features will not enter hyper- and super-central Standard Englishes because of the hierarchical structure of the World System of Englishes (cf. Mair Reference Mair2013).
Alison Edwards’ contribution, ‘I'm an Anglophile but …: A corpus-assisted discourse study of language ideologies in the Netherlands’, broadens the perspective of the edited volume from language production to perception. She analyzes 724 open comments about the role of English in the Netherlands with a mixed-methods approach, combining corpus linguistics and discourse studies. She uses Schneider's TA Model as her point of departure to critically assess whether English is considered to be used ‘as a ‘‘mere” tool’ (p. 165) for international communication in the Netherlands, in line with its status as an Expanding Circle variety. Her thematic analysis of the respondents’ comments discloses critical discourses about English in the Netherlands addressing the excessive use of English in intranational communication and poor English language proficiency. Based on these findings, Edwards suggests that English is perceived to fulfill a local function in the Netherlands, transcending its former instrumental function as some (proficient) Dutch people use English ‘to make themselves appear cool, clever or cosmopolitan’ (p. 181).
Gaëtanelle Gilquin writes about ‘American and/or British influence on L2 Englishes – Does context tip the scale(s)?’. Her study empirically investigates the status of American English as the ‘hub variety’ in the World System of Englishes by measuring the Americanness rate of twenty corresponding American and British forms on the basis of GloWbE and the EF-Cambridge Open Language Database (EFCAMDAT). Her findings reveal that ENL varieties are still more strongly influenced by British norms, whereas ESL and EFL varieties show stronger Americanization. Quite surprisingly, her findings indicate that the ratio of Americanness is even higher for EFL than that for ESL varieties. However, a fine-grained item-based analysis reveals that EFL varieties behave less consistently with regard to their norm orientation than ESL varieties. She suggests that the choice of American forms may not be related to a conscious move towards an American norm in EFL but may represent a choice of the more ‘learnable’ form, whether it is because the forms are less complex or more similar to structures in learners’ L1s.
Next, Marianne Hundt's ‘It is time that this (should) be studied across a broader range of Englishes’ takes her readers on ‘A global trip around mandative subjunctives’. She investigates the alternation between mandative subjunctive and modal verb (the title of her chapter offers an example) with data from ICE and GloWbE. Her investigation shows that the mandative expression (‘trigger’) is the most important predictor for the alternation, followed by the predictor ‘variety’. She reveals that only British English is marked by a preference for periphrastic should, that Irish English, Hong Kong English and Indian English are marked by fairly equal distributions of the two variants, while Canadian English, the two Antipodean varieties, Philippine English, Singapore English and Jamaican English show a clear preference for the subjunctive in line with its American English norm of use. She argues that this regional distribution cannot easily be explained by traditional models of World Englishes or the concept of ‘Americanization’ and tentatively proposes a network of local centers as a model for World Englishes.
Finally, Stefan Thomas Gries, Tobias Bernaisch and Benedikt Heller provide ‘A corpus-linguistic account of the history of the genitive alternation in Singapore English’. Contrary to what the title may imply, their chapter has a strong methodological focus. The authors criticize the established method of taking synchronic structural differences between the present-day state of the historical input variety and the ESL variety as an indicator of the postcolonial variety's emancipation from its colonial ‘parent variety’. Gries, Bernaisch and Heller use ‘Multifactorial Prediction and Deviation Analysis with Regression/Random Forests’ (MuPDAR(F)) to compare the choices made in the genitive alternation by speakers represented in the British and Singaporean ICE components from the 1990s as well as speakers represented in the 1950 and 1960 sections of the Historical Corpus of Singapore English. Their analysis reveals that the regional contrasts found between the British and Singaporean synchronic datasets from the 1990s do not consistently reappear in the real-time analyses of the Singaporean data. This warns us that we cannot reliably detect the diachronic development of an ESL variety with this conventionalized method.
Sandra C. Deshors and Gaëtanelle Gilquin conclude the edited volume with ‘Modeling World Englishes in the 21st century: New reflections on model-making’. Weaving together the different threads of the individual contributions, they propose a usage-based model for World Englishes, called the ‘communicative event approach’. Taking the communicative situation ‘as a possible “focal point”’ (p. 286), Deshors and Gilquin's model unites many factors that they consider relevant to World Englishes in the twenty-first century. These include digital Englishes, the development of new (non-elitist) genres, new language contact situations, language ideologies and identity constructions. The last factor highlights the fact that their model places considerable importance on the speaker who negotiates his or her multifaceted identity in communicative interactions to align with other speakers. In this way, Deshors and Gilquin's model clearly transcends traditional static nation-based classifications of World Englishes from the 1980s and leads the way towards a dynamic constructivist understanding of World Englishes that can model the changed realities of World Englishes in the twenty-first century more accurately.
The edited volume is thus an important publication for model-building in the field of World Englishes in our modern world. It has an impressive scope that is broader than a narrow reading of the subtitle Assessing the interplay of emancipation and globalization of ESL varieties suggests. It not only includes research on ESL but also studies on ENL, EFL and ELF. The studies are based on a variety of mostly synchronic datasets and adopt quantitative and qualitative methods. The first eight research chapters directly contribute to the overall goal of the edited volume, which is to assess ‘the capacity of theoretical models to reflect the uses, development and dynamics of World Englishes (WEs) in the 21st century’ (p. 281). They outline important models in the field such as the World System of Englishes or the EIF Model, refine and revise parts of certain models for example by integrating the notion of ‘languagescape’ or by critically assessing the concept of ‘Americanization’, apply models to new contexts such as digital Englishes and propose new models such as the ‘feature pool model’ or ‘the network of local centers’. Van Rooy and Kruger's chapter can be considered to represent a central piece of the edited volume because it unites many perspectives from different contributions by integrating core themes such as non-elitist genres, computer-mediated communication, hybridity, multilingualism and the dynamic nature of World Englishes today. Its significance for the volume can also be seen in the fact that many points raised in this contribution are later revisited by Deshors and Gilquin in their proposal of the ‘communicative event approach’. The last chapter by Gries, Bernaisch and Heller is more difficult to place with regard to the overall goal of the edited volume and the concluding chapter, because it evaluates the established method of modeling structural nativization in ESL varieties with linguistic data from the second half of the twentieth century rather than assessing models of twenty-first century Englishes. Nonetheless, the contribution adds an important meta-level to the collection.
Reading the edited volume from cover to cover, one cannot help but notice compelling parallels in theory-building with neighboring research fields (and social sciences more generally). The edited volume tells a story that reminds us of the social constructivist turn in sociolinguistics (cf. Eckert Reference Eckert2012; see Röthlisberger Reference Röthlisberger and Sandra2019 for a similar observation). The parallels are most apparent in van Rooy and Kruger's contribution and in the concluding chapter by Deshors and Gilquin, which emphasize the way in which World Englishes are socially ‘made’ in daily interactions by agentive speakers who select features from a repertoire of forms and recombine them for purposes of identity alignment. This model of World Englishes resonates with the move away from static broad social categories to stylistic practices in sociolinguistics. In this conceptual reorientation phase, sociolinguistics has been preoccupied with similar descriptive problems that trouble the field of World Englishes today, such as the issue of describing fluid and dynamic variation without risking reification. This has, for example, figured prominently in discussions surrounding the term ‘ethnolect’ in sociolinguistics (see Benor Reference Benor2010). In a similar vein, contributions to the edited volume have shown that large abstract categories such as ‘Outer Circle’, ‘Expanding Circle’ or even regional labels such as ‘South African English’ are problematic because they presuppose homogeneity where heterogeneity exists in reality. As in sociolinguistics, this heterogeneity was often commented on but ultimately glossed over in favor of ‘more describable’ homogeneity. It has only been in the age of increasing globalization and digitization that researchers can no longer justify pushing heterogeneity into the background and holding on to older descriptive practices. In sociolinguistics, a way out the dilemma has been proposed by Benor (Reference Benor2010) with her concept of ‘the ethnolinguistic repertoire’, ‘a fluid set of linguistic resources that members of an ethnic group may use variably as they index their ethnic identities’ (p. 160). A somewhat similar proposal for the field of World Englishes is made by van Rooy and Kruger when they speak of ‘resources’ and ‘selection’ from a feature pool, and by Deshors and Gilquin's ‘communicative event approach’, which aims at transcending ‘nation-bound, static categorizations’ (p. 289).
The edited volume vividly depicts the ongoing challenge of moving beyond existing models on the way towards arriving at this new understanding of World Englishes. We can sense the urgent need for new models but at the same time feel the lingering effect of older static, essentialist models. Edwards for example speaks about new developments in the Netherlands but still uses the term ‘Expanding Circle’ (p. 166), even though her findings show that the label and its implications do not do justice to her findings. Van Rooy and Kruger use the term ‘hybridity’ in their title, which is grounded in the view of postulating discrete boundaries between varieties and languages, but then develop a model that is closely aligned with a post-varieties approach. Deshors and Gilquin talk about the problems involved in taking Standard British English as the yardstick of comparison in World Englishes (p. 290), while Gries, Bernaisch and Heller take the predicted language use of British English speakers as their reference level against which they assess the choices made by Singaporeans in their statistical models. Deshors and Gilquin emphasize the importance of speakers in new models of World Englishes, whereas Gilquin lacks relevant biographical information about the writers in her dataset. Out of the struggle, a new model is born, i.e. the ‘communicative event model’, which attributes central importance to the context and the speaker.
Even though Deshors and Gilquin mention theoretical and methodological implications of their proposed model, the edited volume leaves open in what way a constructivist model can be implemented in a field that has been strongly shaped by (large-scale) comparative quantitative corpus-based research methods. This productive conflict is clearly apparent when reading the last research chapter and the conclusion consecutively. It could have been at least partly resolved by adjusting the methodological balance of the volume further by including more contributions with a qualitative focus such as attitudinal studies on World Englishes or ethnographic research on World Englishes in digital spaces (e.g. Moll Reference Moll2015). Instead, the conclusion seems to prioritize the need for more sophisticated statistical models over the need for more qualitative ethnographic work (p. 292). Additionally, even though the concluding chapter addresses important consequences for data collection, for example the necessity to collect rich biographical data, it does not comment on the apparent conflict between a ‘post-national approach’ and a ‘post-varieties approach’ to non-digital and digital Englishes (cf. Seargeant & Tagg Reference Seargeant and Tagg2011) and established procedures of corpus compilation along the lines of nation-based varieties (e.g. GloWbE) in World Englishes. As these points show, the edited volume is thought-provoking and opens up many important questions for the research field that go beyond modeling current World Englishes. It therefore constitutes an important step towards ‘updating’ not only models of World Englishes but possibly the field more generally.
