Varieties of World Englishes KINGSLEY BOLTON

The concepts of language variety and variation lie at the heart of the world Englishes enterprise, not least because many researchers in this field have identified their interests as the study of "varieties of English," "localized varieties of English," "non-native varieties of English," "second-language varieties of English," and "new varieties of English." The issue of linguistic variety is also central to both traditional dialectology and contemporary linguistics, where it is often subsumed into the study of language variation and change. The notion of world Englishes, in its turn, may be seen as having both a wider and narrower application. The wider application of the concept subsumes very many different approaches to the study of English worldwide (including varieties-based studies) ranging from the Celtic Englishes of Britain, through diverse varieties in the USA, Australia, New Zealand, and Africa to English in Europe and Asia, and also involves the study of· discourse and genre in those contexts where English is regarded as a second or foreign language. The narrower application of the term, however, refers to schools of thought closely associated with the Kachruvian approach, many of which are discussed in the other chapters to this volume. Elsewhere (see Chapter 15), I note that research on world Englishes in the wider sense includes at least a dozen distinct approaches, including those of English studies, corpus linguistics, the sociology of language, features-based and dialectological studies, pidgin and creole research, Kachruvian linguistics, lexicographical approaches, popularizer accounts, critical linguistics, and futurological approaches. In this context, the use of the term "Englishes" consciously emphasizes the autonomy and plurality of English languages worldwide, whereas the phrase "varieties of English" suggests the heteronomy of such varieties to the common core of "English." The "double-voicedness" of such nomenclature (English vs. Englishes) resonates with the much-cited Bahktinian distinction between "centrifugal" and "centripetal" forces in language change. Leaving such tensions aside to begin with, I start by discussing the notion of "variety" within the context of world Englishes, and then attempt to unravel discussions of the wider theoretical context in the later sections of the chapter.