policies adopted by core countries to bring about the worldwide hegemony of English, for the benefit of core country institutions and individuals ".
What Phillipson (1992) is arguing, then, is that English is interlinked with the continuing neocolonial patterns of global inequality. He explains:
We live in a world characterised by inequality - of gender, nationality, race, class, income, and language. To trace and understand the linkages between English linguistic imperialism and inequality in the political and economic spheres will require us to look at the rhetoric and legitimation of ELT (for instance, at protestations that it is a 'neutral', 'non-political' activity) and relate what ELT claims to be doing to its structural functions. (1992, pp46-7)
According to Phillipson, therefore, English plays an important role in the structure of global inequality. The notion of imperialism in 'linguistic imperialism' thus refers not only to the imperialism of English (the ways in which English has spread around the world) but also to imperialism more generally (the ways in which some parts of the world are dominated politically, economically, and culturally, by other parts of the world). It is not a coincidence, therefore, that English is the language of the great imperial power of the 19 th century (Great Britain) and also of the great imperial (or neocolonial) power of the 20 th century (and probably the 21 st ) (USA).
Phillipson convincingly shows how, for example, "A vast amount of the aid effort has ... gone into teacher education and curriculum development in and through English, and other languages ​​have been neglected. A Western-inspired monolingual approach was adopted that ognored the multilingual reality and cultural specificity of learners in diverse 'Third World' contexts "(1994, p. 19). As he goes on to argue, "In the current global economy, English is dominant in many domains, which creates a huge instrumental demand for English. There has therefore already been a penetration of the language into most cultures and education systems "(1994, pp. 20-21). But the challenge here is to show not only that the global spread of English can be seen as a form of imperialism which is particularly threatening to other languages ​​and cultures, nor only that this spread of English correlates with other forms of political and economic domination and thus reflects global inequality, but rather that there is also a causative relationship between the promotion of English and forms of global inequality, that English helps produce and maintain inequitable global power relationships. While it is indeed crucial to understand the political context of the spread of English, we need to be cautious of assuming that the effects of the spread of English are easily understood, that language is simply spread rather than learned, adopted, adapted and appropriated.
While this homogeny position views English as a reflex of global capitalism and commercialization, the alternative heterogeny position, as epitomised by the notion of world Englishes, views the global spread of English in terms of increasing differentiation. The interest from this perspective is on the 'implications of pluricentricity ..., the new and emerging norms of performance, and the bilingual's creativity as a manifestation of the contextual and formal hybridity of Englishes '(Kachru, 1997: 66). And yet, while Kachru's world Englishes framework opens up questions of hybridity and appropriation, at the same time it all too often loses sight of the broader political context. As Canagarajah (1999a, p180) points out, Kachru "does not go far enough, since he is not fully alert to the ideological implications of periphery Englishes. In his attempt to systematize the periphery variants, he has to standardize the language himself, leaving out many eccentric, hybrid forms of local Englishes as too unsystematic. In this, the Kachruvian paradigm follows the logic of the prescriptive and elitist tendencies of the center linguists. "
Amongst a number of problems here (Pennycook 2002) are the political naivety, descriptive (in) adequacy of the three circles, the focus on varieties of English along national lines, and the exclusionary divisions that discount 'other Englishes'. Of immediate concern, then, is the rather strange insistence within this paradigm on the social, cultural, and political neutralty of English (see for example, Kachru 1985, 1986). As Parakrama (1995, p.22) points out, these repeated claims, are strangely repetitive, bizarre and inaccurate, hiding as they do a range of social and political relations: "These pleas for the neutrality of English in the post-colonial contexts are as ubiquitous and as insistent as they are unsubstantiated and unexplained. "Dua (1994, p 7) also...
