DEFINING WORLD ENGLISHES AND ITS DIMENSIONS

It is obvious that today we live in a multilingual society. Wherever you go you meet
diverse groups of people who speak in distinctively different tongues. At the same time
what is more noticeable is that when we interact with people from different countries, we
hear English with a range of fluency which often deviates from the so-called standard
English in terms of pronunciation, lexis, expression and grammar.
Term World Englishes is now used to describe the nativised and distinct varieties of
English spoken in non-native countries and Kachru (1986) explains that the dispersion of
English can be categorized into a three concentric circle model; the Inner Circle, the Outer
Circle and the Expanding Circle. The Inner Circle Englishes in the model refer to the parent
countries of English or the colonizing nations such as Britain that spread the language to
different regions of the world, for whom English is the first language in almost all
functions. The Outer Circle is inhabited by the colonized territories in which English is a
second or non-native language and used in different functional domains, such as
government, education, law and so on. In the Expanding Circle English is considered as a
foreign language and is used in highly restricted domains such as for international
communication