The post-World War II emergence of the linguistic phenomenon called ‘World English’ has given rise to seemingly endless discussion and much speculation among scholars and the lay public alike. The topics of discussion range from horrified exclamations at the mysterious apparition (like Horatio's ‘Look my Lord it comes! It beckons you to go with it, as if it some impartment did desire’, in Shakespeare's Hamlet), to what exactly we should call it or how at all should we otherwise identify it or make it identify itself (as in ‘Stay, speak, speak, I charge thee speak!’) and, finally to an attitude of familiarity breeding – for a change – conviviality and comfort (as in the somewhat resigned ‘Custom hath made it in him a property of easiness’).

For the time being at least, I shall continue to use the expression ‘linguistic phenomenon’ and well-advisedly, I think, because I believe it has some attributes that make it sui generis. Like an amoeba, it is amorphous, at best a semblance of language that is, as it were, still in the making! From the point of view of conventional thinking, many would refuse to call it a language properly speaking, since it is spoken today mostly by people who cannot lay a claim to it as its ‘native speakers’ and exclusive proprietors. To be sure, thus, we are confronted with a phenomenon the like of which man has never seen before. ‘The time is out of ioynt: Oh cursed spight,/That ever [we were] borne to set it right’!

Newness as mélange

Now, how did this strange phenomenon at all emerge and take the world linguistic scenario by storm? To answer this, I think we should first of all confront another more basic question: How does newness at all come into the world? In his booklet In Good Faith, Salman Rushdie reminisced about the circumstances in which he had written his ill-fated novel The Satanic Verses and, during his ruminations, defined newness as a ‘mélange, hotch-potch, a bit of this and a bit of that’. Confessing to be a bastard child of history himself, he went on to claim that most certainly we all are, all of us without exception, bastard children of history. And Rushdie singles out the ‘apostles of purity’ as the ones most intolerant of the ones that do not carry the stamp of 24-carat purity and ‘have wrought havoc among mere mixed-up human beings’. In other words, mélange and hotch-potch are not the problem; purity and what Rushdie called ‘total explanation’ are. Talk of purity is a political project and a nefarious one at that.

It does not take one a long stretch of the imagination to recognize that Rushdie's remarks about mélange and hotch-potch apply not only to men and women of flesh and blood but to the languages they speak as well. As a matter of fact, it applies to all cases where purity and authenticity are brandished as political weapons against perceived threats of ‘contamination’. That threat of contamination and morbid fear of the agents causing it were just what a great historian and philosopher of the caliber of David Hume gave vent to when he spoke of ‘the inundation of Barbarians’ (cited in Bailey Reference Bailey1985: 3) from which he thought the United States, thanks to its geography, was luckily exempt. Ironically, history was to prove him utterly wrong by triumphing over geography touted as a bulwark against ‘impurity’!

When David Crystal (Reference Crystal2005: 63) wrote, in a response to Aysha Viswamohan (Reference Crystal2004) ‘Purists hate code-mixing, of course’, I take it that he was treating as beyond any contestation the idea that code-mixing is the linguistic counterpart of racial/ethnic miscegenation and that purism in relation to language is analogous to racism and just as abhorrent. Furthermore – and I am in full agreement here – there seems to be the additional assumption that what the purists are averse to is of the natural order of things, namely, intermixing, be it of human beings belonging to different racial identifications, or of languages (or forms of speech) belonging to different ‘families’. It might be useful here to recall that this is precisely the one enduring myth that Emeneau (Reference Emeneau1956) famously and convincingly exploded when he put forward the thesis of ‘India as a linguistic area’ whereby a group of languages, including genetically unrelated ones, pass on characteristics amongst themselves thanks to long periods of co-habitation in the same or contiguous speech communities.

Rearguard action from purists

In Rajagopalan (Reference Rajagopalan2004), I made a brief reference to Max Müller's celebrated remark Es gibt keine Mischprache (in English, ‘There is no such thing as a “mixed language”’) as an empirically irresponsible claim. Coming as it does from a great linguist and a widely respected Indologist, such a claim is all the more intriguing because he must have known more than anyone else that, towards the end of the 19th century when he made that categorical assertion, mixed languages par excellence called pidgins were springing up right across the world in their hundreds. How could one find a rationale for such a blatantly inaccurate statement? I can only think of a possible explanation along the following lines. Thanks to the pioneering work of the philosopher J. L. Austin (1962), we now know that many sentences that appear to make straightforward statements that are either true or false are in fact anything but fact-stating claims; they are in fact expressions of speech acts like promising and threatening, and sometimes unwittingly express secret desires or deep-seated wishes that their speakers would rather keep to themselves otherwise. Now, intermixing of races was anathema to the 19th century mindset, thanks, among other things, to the colonialism that was the order of the day. Colonialism drew its sustenance and its only justification from the myth of the racial superiority of certain races over others.

But to see the connection between the 19th century Zeitgeist and Max Müller's reservations concerning mixed languages, we need to take one more step. It is important to recognize that the very idea of language serves all too often as a proxy for manifesting some of our deep-seated beliefs and indeed prejudices that we would, once again, much rather repress. When we use adjectives like elegant, classy, beautiful, civilized, primitive or whatever in reference to languages, they are in fact being used as transferred epithets. Languages are never ugly or beautiful, civilized or primitive, in and of themselves. Such epithets at best announce our attitudes to those who speak them. Once we put together the two theses, viz. Austin's idea of presumably fact-stating statements being actually speech acts, often expressing our deep-seated desires and wishes, and the very idea of language itself often serving as proxies for expressing our stereotypical views about persons and peoples, it becomes fairly easy to see that even a great scholar like Max Müller could have unwittingly ended up synthesizing the colonial – unashamedly Eurocentric – spirit at its best and the constant fear that haunted it when he bluntly stated Es gibt keine Mischprache (Rajagopalan, Reference Rajagopalan2007).

The fact remains, however, that hybridity is viewed with suspicion by many who are themselves a victim of the politics of purity and its discourse, nay propaganda, against ‘contamination’ by elements from outside, giving rise to what has been called ‘the discourse of monoglot normality’ (Love, Reference Love2009: 31). In the living memory of many, Adolf Hitler not only preached the sermon of purity but practiced a campaign of racial cleansing on a gigantic scale. Incidentally, he prepared the grounds for his nefarious campaign of racial cleansing by first persuading the German public that a national reawakening from the shambles of World War I could only happen if they first cleansed their language of all foreign influences. The Nazi rhetoric, in other words, made utmost use of the underlying link between language and nation-state that, curiously enough, still dominates much of contemporary thinking. Pfalzgraf (2006, cited in Onysko Reference Onysko2009: 25) identifies a typical argument used by contemporary purists in Germany: ‘Anglicisms (as mixing of English and German) are generally considered as bad style. They violate the aesthetic integrity of German.’

The pot calling the kettle black

But there is a profound irony in all this. History has proved time and time again that no language, no nation, can thrive on its own, in blissful isolation from the rest. Rather, endogeny spells disaster for societies as well as their languages. Both languish and wither away, unless they receive a fresh fillip from the outside every once in a while. That is to say, the vitality of a living language is only guaranteed by inter-animation with other languages. From a historical perspective, it is fairly easy to argue that the languages that have best weathered the times are the ones that have had no qualms about inter-mixing with the others they come into contact with.

The best example of a language that has benefited from contact with other languages is of course none other than English. When Robert King (2006: 19) referred to the English language as ‘this supple, economic, subtle instrument of communication, commerce and belles lettres’, he was alluding to the fact that the real strength of English owes a good deal to its fundamentally ‘hotch-potch’ character. It has borrowed literally hundreds, nay, thousands of words, from languages as wide apart as French, Hindi-Urdu and Nahuatl. To quote King (p. 24) again, ‘[in] depth and mass of linguistic imprint on the English language … all else pales into insignificance in comparison with the French influence that followed upon the Norman Conquest’. As for Hindi-Urdu, every English-speaking person who has a hot bath at night and shampoos their hair before slipping into a pair of pyjamas as a prelude to hitting the sack is making an unconscious linguistic trip to the Raj. If he or she has for dinner sliced tomato salad and some chocolate dessert to guarantee sweet dreams, they renew, perhaps unbeknownst to themselves, their linguistic indebtedness to Nahuatl, though they may not have even heard of ‘Aztec’ or may not even be sure as to whether or not it is the name of some new-fangled ‘high-tech’ gadget.

English as a ‘hoover language’

English has been called, among other things, a ‘decorative language’ (Dougill, Reference Dougill1987) ‘the most chameleon of languages’ (Maley, Reference Maley1985), ‘the gateway to dreams and faraway places’ (Dougill, Reference Dougill2008: 19), a ‘semi-sacred language’ (Asker, Reference Asker2006), a ‘glottophagic language’ (Mesthrie, Reference Mesthrie2008), a ‘Trojan horse’ (Qiang and Wolff, Reference Qiang and Wolff2007), a ‘lingua frankensteinia’ (Phillipson, Reference Phillipson2008) and a ‘killer language’ (Price, Reference Price1984: 170, Skuttnab-Kangas, Reference Skuttnab-Kangas2000) but I believe it is also appropriate to call it a hoover language: it sucks in and devours everything it comes across in its way. And since it has been around the world quite a bit, its bag is already bulging, but keeps on bloating! Indeed, that is what makes the whole thing so very ironic. The hybrid identities and the mongrel selves that post-colonialist writings enthusiastically celebrate and ecstatically bandy about were always already there in the very constitution of the ‘master race’ and the language of the Metropolis! The only difference is that it was cleverly camouflaged and presented as though of pure, noble and unalloyed lineage.

Thus when Gabriel (Reference Gabriel, Ray and Kundo2006: 87) writes so confidently in respect of Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh that ‘the text's construction of the “mongrel” genealogy of its narrator writes back to the ethic of ‘racial purity’ privileged by colonial discourse', care should be taken to read it as implying that the putative purity is not only privileged but literally constructed by colonial discourse, a fact partially made explicit in the sentence that immediately follows that says: ‘More crucially, this “impurity” is foregrounded in the text as a positive signifier of the mixed and plurality inherent in national and cultural identity formations.’ Once again, things could be made a lot clearer if we made it clear that all national and cultural (including linguistic) identity formations, including that of the colonizers, are subject to the claim being made.

Transcending post-colonialism

In the final analysis, then, there is an urgent need to realize that, sooner or later, we have to learn to overcome and transcend the ‘us versus them’ binary logic that underlay much of the post-colonial rhetoric. Some of the differences that were deemed unbridgeable must be dissolved into matters of mutual indifference and the hierarchies of yesteryear must be deconstructed i.e., turned on their heads, in order to expose the ideological construction of ‘purity’ out of pervasive ‘impurity’ right across the board. In an increasingly shrinking world, people from different parts have to learn to live together. To do this we must learn to talk to another. To do this, we must bury their old linguistic hatchets and forge new ways of getting across to one another. This was very much the gist of an important paper by Ramanathan and Pennycook (Reference Ramanathan and Pennycook2007) in which the two authors, both postcolonial in some sense, but raised to look back from different angles at their partially common and intertwining personal histories, come to the realization that there is an urgent need to not just let bygones be bygones, but to reframe the bygones in ways more conducive to dealing with the present and preparing for the future. As they put it: ‘We believe it is time to counter this [long drawn-out] antidialogism, since it is precisely the breakdown of dialogue that seems to characterize colonialism and much of postcolonialism’ (p. 5).

Commonalities in the spread of English

The editors of the landmark volume The Handbook of World Englishes (Kachru et al., 2006) make a powerful point when they deal with the spread of English world-wide in terms of four successive diasporas, beginning with Wales, Ireland and Scotland, through North America, Australia and New Zealand, and reaching out to Asia, Africa and Latin America and, finally, to every remaining imaginable spot in the world. But what such a decision also underscores is the fact that there is no qualitative difference amongst the different waves of the diasporic spread. If anything, the difference is only of how recent or remote one wave is in relation to another.

It is, however, also useful to bear in mind the important observation made by Bolton (Reference Bolton2008: 3) that ‘[even] here [meaning many Outer Circle countries themselves], however, the distinction between Outer Circle and Expanding Circle may be somewhat blurred’. But then it is equally important to recognize that, as Gupta (Reference Gupta, Rubdy and Saraceni2006: 95) puts it,

Now, how do we reconcile the two claims, made by Bolton and Gupta respectively, that seem to guide us in different directions? The answer, I think, may lie in the fact that Bolton's claim is more attentive than Gupta's to the disparities within and among many of the Outer Circle countries, where knowledge of English is often confined to a small minority of people, although their numbers have been growing at a breath-taking speed.

From the point of view of our discussion in the foregoing paragraphs, what interests us specifically is the implication that what we are today observing as so characteristic of the spread of English in the so-called ‘Outer Circle’ – namely hybridity – was always already there in the Innermost alcove of the ‘Inner Circle’. Kirkpatrick (Reference Kirkpatrick2007: 39) has gone on record as saying: ‘There is no evidence to support the popular myth that English suddenly appeared as a pure language untouched by others.’ And he cites Crystal's words (Reference Crystal2004: 19) ‘The notion of purity is as mythical then as it is now’ in support of his stand on the issue. In other words, hybridity is of the very essence, not just of English, but probably every other language, on the face of this earth. It is just that, in the case of the putatively monolithic and ‘pure’ languages, their hybrid origins have been carefully disguised. That is what makes the so-called Inner Circle so noticeably different from the Outer Circle, because it is in the Outer Circle countries that the process of hybridization is currently taking place at a rapid rate and is therefore most visible. Referring to code-switching and code-mixing, Viswamohan (Reference Viswamohan2004: 34) says they are ‘common in such multilingual societies as India’. Or, in the words of Meierkord (Reference Meierkord2009: 3): ‘In most areas where English is spoken today, it is part of a multilingual context. English is one component of the sociolinguistic profile of many nations.’

What the Expanding Circle can learn from the Outer Circle

The spread of English (or for that matter, of any language) to communities that were not originally hosts to it invariably entails, as we have seen, contact and accommodation with other languages already spoken in them and, furthermore, situations of contact among languages constituting the ideal breeding ground for the emergence of new, hybrid languages or linguistic phenomena (that lack some of the features that traditionally were credited to all full-fledged languages). In fact, there are good reasons for making a case that it is the presence of societal multilingualism existing in many parts of the world that is a key factor in the emergence of new ‘Englishes’. These new ‘Englishes’ are, in other words, nothing but World English getting new local colorings as it moves to and eventually takes roots in new settings. Crystal (Reference Crystal2008: 6) hit the nail on the head when he wrote that ‘[…] as the non-native group is the primary source fostering the emergence of “new Englishes”, there are going to be implications for the future character of the language’.

The important thing is to take these developments in their stride and not lament over how things have come to pass or get hysterical about how the English language, a lone damsel in dire distress, is ready to be pounced upon by the unruly band of Barbarians that David Hume spoke of. Furthermore, these multilingual settings call for an ecological approach to language and foreground the need to emphasize the symbolic competence of the speakers, rather than their narrow linguistic competence in any or all of the languages that make up their overall linguistic repertoire (Kramsch and Whiteside, Reference Kramsche and Whiteside2008).

Now, if it is indeed the case that World English progresses and gains new speakers by learning to cohabit with other languages already spoken in the new geographical spaces it enters into rather than by stifling them or edging them out of existence, then it may be the case that countries in the Expanding Circle must look to the experience of the ones in the Outer Circle as their role models in devising their language policies. On an informal, unplanned level, this is already taking place. There is a burgeoning trend of people from the Expanding Circle thronging to the Outer Circle countries like India, Singapore, South Africa etc. for job opportunities and also higher education (a growing number of people in this latter category for also picking up some English in the bargain) (Lowenberg, Reference Lowenberg2002; Graddol, Reference Graddol2006; Coetzee-Van Rooy, Reference Rooy2008). What has not been adequately appreciated in the literature is, I think, that, in light of the arguments marshaled above, there is a rationale for people from the Expanding Circle to look to those in the Outer Circle as role models in their ambition to learn English – a rationale Halliday (Reference Halliday, Kachru, Kachru and Nelson2006: 363) alludes to when he says: ‘Rather than trying to fight off global English, which at present seems to be rather a quixotic venture, those who seek to resist its baleful impact might to do better to concentrate on transforming it, reshaping its meanings, and its meaning potential, in the way that the communities in the Outer Circle have already shown it can be done.’

Given that learning English has become a must in this globalized world, it is important that language policy makers and language planners across the world, and especially in the Expanding Circle, make it clear once and for all why it is in the interest of these people to learn English and, more importantly, what sort of attitude people ought to develop vis-à-vis English. It is of paramount importance for people in the Expanding Circle to realize that it is up to them to decide whether to master the language or, instead, allow themselves to be mastered by it. The countries from the Outer Circle may offer those in the Expanding Circle some useful tips to go by in this regard.