Globalization is taking place in which more people than ever are learning English. This is because it has become the planet’s language for commerce, technology and also empowerment. According to a recent report from the British Council, two billion people will be studying English and three billion people will speak it in ten years. Linguistically speaking, it is a totally new world. At the moment, there are more nonnative speakers of English than there are native speakers; the ratio is 3:1. By the most common estimates, 400 million people speak English as a first language, another 300 million to 500 million as a fluent second language, and perhaps 750 million as a foreign language. For the first time, there is a language that is being spoken by more people as a second language than as a first. The largest Englishspeaking nation in the world, the United States, has only about 20 percent of the worlds English speakers. In Asia alone, an estimated 350 million people speak English, about the same as the combined Englishspeaking populations of Britain, the United States and Canada (Crystal, 1997). All these new Englishspeakers are not only using the language, they are also shaping it. The terms Japlish (mixture of Japanese and English) and Hinglish (mixture of Hindi and English) refer to new varieties of English that came into being all over the world. In SouthAfrica, many blacks have adopted their own version of English including many indigenous words. Naturally, all languages are work in progress but the globalization of English is a process the world has never seen before, a change whose effects we can only imagine. Experts talk about a future triEnglish world in which speakers of English will speak a local dialect at home, a national variety at work, school or university and some kind of international Standard English to talk to foreigners.
[...]... rise of major cross-linguistic and cross-cultural attributes, which together resulted in the changed profile of English as a pluricentric language This pluricentricity, he asserted, “is not merely demographic, it entails cultural, linguistic, and literary reincarnations of the English language” (Kachru, 1996, p 136-137) Bhatt (2001) echoed this notion, citing the development of “regional-contact varieties... Australia, and New Zealand) (b) The Outer Circle (L2) represents countries where English is institutionalized as an official language and learned as a second language (ESL) such as Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, India, and Kenya (c) The Expanding Circle (L3) includes countries such as Sweden, China, Korea, and Japan, where English is a Foreign Language (EFL) English users and anywhere from100 million... communication” (p 25) This legitimization of non-L1 speakers is in 22 direct opposition to Kachru’s (1992) model where it is assumed that L1 speakers are proficient and norm production is restricted by geographical location Modiano argues that English by definition as a globally functioning language can no longer be conceptualized as restricted to any particular place There is an emphasis on the democratic