Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

152 Language Planning and Education
academic journals have shifted to publication in English. In short, it is no longer
just a foreign language but one with significant internal uses, a situation usually
diagnostic of membership of the outer circle.
This returns us to our original point: the three circles schema summarises the
broad context of the use of English worldwide, but in so doing inevitably abstracts
and simplifies a more complex reality. As long as we remain alert to this, it remains
a useful device.
6.2 DEFINING THE NEW ENGLISHES
The term ‘New Englishes’ is usually understood to denote varieties of English
from post-colonial societies (e.g. India, Pakistan, Malaysia, Ghana) whose formal
properties – phonological, lexical, grammatical, discoursal – show a measure of
divergence from British or American standard English. They are distinguished
from what Kachru (1992b) calls ‘performance varieties’, spoken in expanding circle
countries such as Japan, by the following sociolinguistic characteristics (Kachru
1992b: 55):
1. Length of time in use (New Englishes are of long standing, having developed
in the colonial era);
2. Extension in use (In many post-colonial outer circle countries, English has
attained a considerable level of penetration in terms of functions and numbers
of users, for many of whom the localised English expresses a distinct, independent
identity);
3. Emotional attachment of L2 users with the variety (see above);
4. Functional importance (see above);
5. Sociolinguistic status (see above. Also, English is an official language, or serves
official functions, in many outer circle countries).
Relatively clear though this sociolinguistic specification may be, labels for
New Englishes – ‘Singapore English’, ‘Nigerian English’, ‘Indian English’ and so
forth – can mislead if they are taken to refer to homogenous, clear-cut and clearly
individuated entities, for in fact the labels shelter considerable heterogeneity.
Indigenisation has been accompanied by sociolinguistic variation – conditioned
mainly, it appears, by education and occupational status – so that in Nigeria, for
example, there is now a cline of varieties ranging from educated Nigerian English,
which is relatively close to British standard English, to Nigerian Pidgin English, a
linguistically more distinct variety. Similarly, in Singapore a cline of comparable
subvarieties has long been recognised (see Gupta 1999; Platt, Weber and Ho 1989),
ranging from Standard English, through educated Singapore English, to a contact
variety, Colloquial Singapore English (SCE), also known as Singlish, which is
acquired both as a first language and as a second language. Borrowing terminology
from creole studies, some writers use the terms acrolect, mesolect and basilect to refer
to the most educated, the middling and the most informal varieties respectively.
Individuals with higher levels of education usually control the full lectal range