Editorial

Asian Englishes was founded in 1998 in harmony with the pluralistic views of English put forward by Kachru (World Englishes [WE]) and Smith (English as an International Language [EIL]). But as mentioned in my first editorial as Editor in Chief (vol. 16, no. 1), founding editor Honna was prescient to use the subtitle ‘An International Journal of the Sociolinguistics of English in Asia/Pacific’. Indeed, sociolinguistics is always relevant whereas, as Widdowson has stated, models can become reified or outgrow their convenience, and hence their ability to capture the sociolinguistic reality.

It has been almost two decades now that different scholars have drawn attention to weaknesses in the WE paradigm, specifically its focus on the post-colonial Outer Circle, and ‘bounded’, national varieties of English. In 2007, Schneider extended the relevance of WE with his dynamic model, which is not static like Kachru’s three circles. It shows the subtly complex differences between varieties in the same circle, and the process of how they get that way – but is nevertheless still focused on national varieties. As early as 2003, in a classic article on ‘Squaring the Circles’, Bruthiaux challenged the nation-based notion of WE, stating that we should focus less on historico-political questions of where users come from, and more on what they do (or do not do) with the language. In 2011, Seargeant and Tagg argued that we are in a ‘post varieties’ era: calling attention to the mushrooming use of English on the Social Networking Sites, and how this creates a seemingly chaotic network of constantly reshuffling contexts and communities. More recently, Buschfeld and Kautzsch have proposed an extension of Schneider’s model to non-postcolonial settings, which draws on external and internal forces (the EIF model) to account for the ‘transnational attraction’ exhibited by Expanding Circle English users. It should also be noted that scholars working on English as a lingua franca have been at work since 2000 or earlier on developing a paradigm more in tune with the real-time ‘languaging’ seen in global English-related linguistic practices.

Asian Englishes welcomes submissions that look at the multifarious contexts of English in Asia today, but at the same time we encourage authors to consider the paradigms which inform their work, and to also attempt the kind of meta-theoretical modelling which is essential to create constructs that help frame our research, and make it understandable to a wider audience.