The expanding circle under a magnifying glass: World Englishes in the European context

Abstract

The concept of ‘World Englishes/WEs’, which can be traced back to the Kachruvian Three-Circle Theory, has arisen out of the claim on ‘shared ownership’ of English throughout the world and the need to adopt an alternative approach to the role of native speakers. There has been exhaustive research into the characteristics of Outer (OC), and Expanding Circle (EC) varieties, but outside Europe. Since the context in which English is learnt/used in Europe is quite specific, our main aim was to determine the distribution and frequency of different ‘European Englishes/EEs’ in scholarly papers published in World Englishes in the last decade. We employed multilayered content analysis, focusing on the key words (e.g. EC, European n-variety etc), and then analysing the singled-out papers more thoroughly by the set criteria. The results indicate that the number of EC papers exploring contexts outside Europe almost doubles ‘EEs’ papers. The great majority of ‘EEs’ papers fall under the descriptive perspective, followed by hybridisationist, with no papers adopting the critical perspective. The most frequently employed approach is sociolinguistic. The results pertaining to n-varieties are inconclusive. To conclude, further research is needed to provide more valuable insights into the study of ‘EEs’.