Exploring Attitudes towards English as a Lingua Franca in the East Asian Context

Abstract

It is a well-established fact that during the past four centuries, the English language has spread around the world, and that as a result, it is used for a wide range of purposes by many millions of people for whom it is not a mother tongue in the traditional sense of the term. This means that there are more English users nowadays in the Outer Circle (i.e. in the countries colonized by the British in the ‘second diaspora’, see B. Kachru 1992) than there are English users in the Inner Circle (i.e. in Britain and the mother tongue English countries colonized by the British in the ‘first diaspora’). English in the individual countries of the Outer Circle, meanwhile, has become Englishes: nativized varieties of English each with its own flavour and characteristics appropriate to its speakers’ local social and professional uses and to local institutionalized functions. Thus, we can talk of Indian English, Malaysian English, Singapore English, Nigerian English, and so on.