ABSTRACT
Today English is a first, second, or foreign language for hundreds of millions of speakers. This chapter traces the spread of English around the world from its historical origins to its present-day status as a global language. It also introduces the two most important theoretical models for conceptualizing this multitude of Englishes, namely the Three Circles Model by the late Braj Kachru and the Dynamic Model of the evolution of Postcolonial Englishes by Edgar Schneider. The chapter closes with a brief introduction to the different levels of language that can be studied with corpus-linguistic tools.
