1. I have said something similar elsewhere. I say ‘perhaps’ because much depends upon what we mean by ‘use’ and on how we use English under what conditions. The Sana'a or Addis Ababa taxidriver who is occasionally obliged to speak, in whatever way, a word or two in English, isn't he a user of the language, or is he? English is normally used on the outside under some kind of compulsion on a few occasions. We may also note here what Mary Louise Pratt has to say on the subject. ‘To monolingual anglophones,’ she says, ‘it may look like everyone in the world is learning English, but the more accurate statement … is that the world is becoming increasingly multilingual.’ What people learn ‘as an international lingua franca’ is ‘a kind of instrumental English’. (See ‘Comparative Literature and Global Citizenship’ in Bernheimer, Charles, ed., Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, The Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore and London, 1995, 62.Google Scholar) I may also note here that in Yemen, for example, I met lots of people who knew several languages, Arabic, English, Persian, German and Russian.

2. See Quirk, Randolph, ‘The English Language in a Global Context’ in Quirk, Randolph, and Widdowson, H. G. (eds), English in the World: Teaching and Learning the Language and Literature, Cambridge University Press for the British Council: 1985, 1–2.Google Scholar

3. The possibility of change is recognized when Kachru, for example, says, ‘What is an ESL region at one time may become an EFL region at another time or vice versa’ (Braj B. Kachru, ‘Standards, codification and sociolinguistic realism: the English language in the outer circle’ in Quirk and Widdowson, op cit, 14) or when Moag notes that India, Malayasia, Philippines, Sri Lanka and Tanzania are ‘in transition from ESL to EFL status’ (Moag, Rodney, ‘English as a Foreign, Second, Native, and Basal Language: A New Taxonomy of English-Using Societies’ in Pride, John, (ed), New Englishes, Newbury House Publishers, Inc: Rowley, Massachusetts, 1982, 14).Google Scholar

4. The ‘tentatively’ labelled categories were discussed at some length in a lecture delivered at an International Conference (see Kachru in Quirk and Widdowson, op cit, 12-15). For a succinct account of Kachru's model, see McArthur, Tom, ‘Models of English’, English Today, 32, Vol. 8, No. 4, 10 1992, 12–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar