What Is English, Anyway?

What Is English, Anyway?

There are roughly 1.5 billion English speakers in the world — and only about 370–390 million of them grew up speaking it (Ethnologue, 2025 estimate, cited in Rosetta Stone, 2025). That means fewer than one in four English speakers today is a native speaker. One widely cited estimate goes further: if you listened to every English conversation happening on Earth right now, only about 4% would involve exclusively native speakers (Lemon Grad, 2026, drawing on Ethnologue’s 25th edition).

So here’s a question worth sitting with: What is English, anyway?

The assumption we don’t usually question

Most of us — especially those of us who grew up in Canada, the US, or the UK — carry around an unexamined assumption: there’s a “real” English, a correct one, and everyone else is approximating it with varying degrees of success. Ours is the standard. Theirs is the version still in progress. Theirs has an accent. Ours does not — or if it does, it is a charming and quaint regional variation.

It’s a comfortable assumption if you happen to be a native speaker. On inspection, this perspective reveals a rather uncomfortable colonial bias.

Linguist Braj Kachru gave this idea a name and a structure in his influential 1985 essay, “Standards, Codification and Sociolinguistic Realism: The English Language in the Outer Circle” (Kachru, 1985). He described English as spreading through three “concentric circles”: an Inner Circle (the UK, US, Canada, Australia) where English is the primary language; an Outer Circle (India, Nigeria, Singapore, and others) where English was institutionalized through colonization; and an Expanding Circle, where English is learned as a foreign language with no historical claim to it at all.

Kachru’s model has been hugely influential — but Kachru himself, along with later scholars, pointed out its risk: treating the Inner Circle as the source of “correct” English, with everyone else measured against it. Writing in World Englishes in 2026, sociolinguist Andrew Moody and colleagues named this directly as one of several “fallacies” in how the Circles model gets applied — specifically, a “prestige fallacy” that privileges Inner Circle varieties as the standard others are judged against (Moody et al., 2026).

Linguist Henry Widdowson made the point directly in his 1994 TESOL Quarterly article, “The Ownership of English”: the very fact that English is an international language means that no nation can have custody over it — and to grant such custody would be to arrest its development (Widdowson, 1994, p. 385).

Where new Englishes came from

So kick the “one correct English” assumption to the curb. What’s left?

Kachru’s own model actually goes on to complicate the story he’s often credited with popularizing. His Outer Circle describes countries where English arrived through colonization, became institutionalized in government and education — and then didn’t stop there. It kept evolving, locally, into its own standardized systems: Indian English, Nigerian English, Singaporean English.

These aren’t broken dialects limping toward a British finish line. Kachru’s central argument was that English belongs as much to its “non-native” users worldwide as it does to the countries that colonized them (Kachru, 1985) — a claim other scholars in this field have continued to build on, arguing that Outer Circle Englishes deserve to be understood on their own linguistic terms, not as deviations from an Inner Circle standard.

This is where a lot of well-meaning conversations about linguistic diversity stop: new Englishes sprouted up wherever the British Empire went, and now there are many legitimate Englishes instead of one. Good — diversity, corrected.

But that story has a quiet problem of its own.

The Englishes with no colonial story at all

Here’s what that framing still gets wrong: it assumes every English in the world traces its lineage back to a colonizer. Increasingly, that’s just not true.

Linguist Jennifer Jenkins, former Chair Professor of Global Englishes at the University of Southampton, has spent decades studying what she calls English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) — the English used daily between, say, a German engineer and a Japanese executive, neither of whom is speaking to a native English speaker at all, and neither of whom is deferring to native-speaker norms to do it. Jenkins’s research starts from an observation now widely cited in the field: non-native speakers using English for international communication now outnumber native speakers doing the same (Jenkins, n.d.-a, drawing on Crystal, 1997, and Graddol, 1997).

This English isn’t measured against Kachru’s Inner Circle at all, because it was never derived from it. It’s not “improving toward” British or American English, and it’s not an Outer Circle variety either. It’s built by the people actually using it, in real time, optimized for exactly one goal: mutual intelligibility between speakers who don’t share a first language. Jenkins’s research on the “Lingua Franca Core” specifically studied which pronunciation features actually matter for non-native speakers to understand each other — and found that plenty of features taught as “correct” in traditional English Language Teaching (ELT) simply don’t affect intelligibility at all (Jenkins, 2000).

There’s a further twist: some research in this field has found that native English speakers can actually be at a disadvantage in ELF conversations — less practiced than multilingual speakers at adjusting their language on the fly for a listener who doesn’t share their assumptions (Jenkins, n.d.-b).

That’s the real punchline. There was never one English being diluted as it traveled the world. There are, and always were, many Englishes — some with colonial roots, some without any colonial story at all — and no honest linguistic reason to rank any of them beneath the others.

Why this matters at Red Flannel Workshops

We don’t teach “correct” English. There’s no such thing, and if there were, it wouldn’t be ours to hand out.

What we teach is a register — the specific, situational English used in North American workplaces: the idioms, the unspoken rules, the way meaning sometimes hides in tone and timing rather than vocabulary. That’s not the “real” English any more than Nigerian English or ELF boardroom-English is. It’s just the one that happens to be useful if you’re trying to navigate a Canadian or American office.

Knowing that going in changes the whole exercise. You’re not fixing something broken in how you speak. You’re adding one more register to a repertoire you already have.

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Sources:

Ethnologue. (n.d.). Ethnologue: Languages of the world. https://www.ethnologue.com/

Jenkins, J. (2000). The phonology of English as an international language. Oxford University Press.

Jenkins, J. (n.d.-a). English as a lingua franca: Attitude and identity. ResearchGate. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259687630

Jenkins, J. (n.d.-b). Research profile. University of Southampton, via ResearchGate. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jennifer-Jenkins-8

Kachru, B. B. (1985). Standards, codification and sociolinguistic realism: The English language in the outer circle. In R. Quirk & H. G. Widdowson (Eds.), English in the world: Teaching and learning the language and literatures (pp. 11–30). Cambridge University Press.

Lemon Grad. (2026). English language statistics. https://lemongrad.com/english-language-statistics/

Moody, A., et al. (2026). Applied linguistics, sociolinguistics and world Englishes. World Englishes. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/weng.70017

Rosetta Stone. (2025). A detailed look at how many people speak English globally. https://blog.rosettastone.com/how-many-people-speak-english/

Widdowson, H. G. (1994). The ownership of English. TESOL Quarterly, 28(2), 377–389. https://doi.org/10.2307/3587438