It is a well-established fact that during the past four centuries, the English language
has spread around the world, and that as a result, it is used for a wide range of
purposes by many millions of people for whom it is not a mother tongue in the
traditional sense of the term. This means that there are more English users nowadays
in the Outer Circle (i.e. in the countries colonised by the British in the ‘second
diaspora’, see B. Kachru 1992) than there are English users in the Inner Circle (i.e. in
Britain and the mother tongue English countries colonised by the British in the ‘first
diaspora’). English in the individual countries of the Outer Circle, meanwhile, has
become Englishes: nativised varieties of English each with its own flavour and
characteristics appropriate to its speakers’ local social and professional uses and to
local institutionalised functions. Thus, we can talk of Indian English, Malaysian
English, Singapore English, Nigerian English, and so on.