Abstract
‘The functional equality of all languages’, according to Hymes (1985, p. v), ‘has been a tenet of the faith from the founders of structural linguistics to most practitioners of linguistics today’. This faith has been ‘the progressive force’ that has resulted in ‘the appreciation of the marvelous variety of forms taken by human linguistic creativity’ (p. v). This volume argues that it is the same faith in linguistic equality that has served as political and ideological anchor for much of the work on the development and spread of the English language around the world. It is ‘progressive’ in the sense that it has repudiated and unmasked practically all deep-seated beliefs about what constitutes the nature of English today. There is no one English, but many Englishes. No one has exclusive rights to the language; anyone who speaks it has the right to own it. The norms of use are multilingual norms and the strategies to teach English are also multilingual in nature. The English language is deeply embedded in the multilingual and multicultural lives of its speakers— so who are the native speakers of English today? To insist that those who can be called native speakers are only those who come from Inner Circle countries, especially the United States and the United Kingdom (where users of English are typically described as ‘native speakers’), is to disenfranchise the majority of English speakers today.
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© 2015 Ruanni Tupas and Rani Rubdy
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Tupas, R., Rubdy, R. (2015). Introduction: From World Englishes to Unequal Englishes. In: Tupas, R. (eds) Unequal Englishes. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137461223_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137461223_1
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