ABSTRACT
English has a unique role in the world – that is indisputable. What is less clear is how to label that role as it currently stands. There is also considerable debate about what might happen in the future. This chapter ponders over some of the issues. The intelligibility criterion has traditionally provided little support for an English ‘language family’. But we have learned from sociolinguistics that this criterion is by no means an adequate explanation for the language nomenclature of the world. The emergence of hybrid trends and varieties raises all kinds of theoretical and pedagogical questions, several of which began to be addressed during the 1990s. They blur the longstanding distinctions between ‘first’, ‘second’ and ‘foreign’ language. According to Salman Rushdie, the debate about the appropriateness of English in post-British India has meaning only for the older generation; the children of independent India use English as an Indian language, as one of the tools they have to hand.
