English circling the globe

Abstract

Starts with an excerpt from Braj B. Kachru, The sacred cows of English (ET16, 1988). The ‘Sacred Cows’ article has been a seminal piece for many reasons. It introduced the world to Braj's famous ‘Three Circles of English’ model. At roughly the same time, in the late 1980s, three pioneers in the field which was then known as ‘English as a World Language’ or ‘New Englishes’ came up independently with the idea of representing the spread of English in terms of concentric circles. Tom McArthur's ‘wheel model’ appeared in ET July 1987. Manfred Görlach, then editor of the journal English World Wide came up with a similar model, with some minor changes in a conference paper of 1988. It was only fitting that the co-editor of the third journal in the field, World Englishes, should have his own say. And it is in fact Braj's model that has come be the most widely accepted as the model with the best ‘fit’ for English as she has been spreading.