I am an Indian, very brown, born in
Malabar, I speak three languages, write in
Two dream in one. Don’t write in English, they said,
English is not your mother-tongue. Why not leave
Me alone, critics, friends, visiting cousins,
Everyone of you? Why not let me speak in
Any language I like? The language I speak
Becomes mine, its distortions, its queernesses,
All mine, mine alone. It is half English, half
Indian, funny perhaps, but it is honest,
It is as human as I am human, don’t
You see? It voices my joys, my longings, my
Hopes, and it is useful to me . . .

(Kamala Das, 1997: 10)

Kamala Das captures the paradox of English in the world today. To some, English anywhere outside the mother tongue context is an alien language, perhaps even an imposed language. From this standpoint, English has a fixed identity, both political and linguistic. It represents something peculiarly English, or perhaps Anglo-American, but at all events certainly Western. English has become a world language because – and to the extent that – Anglo-American, Western culture has become hegemonic in the world. To others English, although not their mother tongue, is nevertheless their language, an expression of their own unique identity. It is theirs because they have made it so – through their lived experiences in the language that have gained expression in the way they use English. In this view, English has become a world language to the extent that it has been stripped of any simplistic association with Anglo American and Western culture. World English has emerged because its users have changed the language as they have spread it. Of the many English writers from Africa and Asia who have addressed this topic, perhaps none has expressed the point so eloquently as Chinua Achebe:

What I . . . see is a new voice coming out of Africa, speaking of African experience in a world-wide language. . . . The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use. . . . The African writer should aim to use English in a way that brings out his message best without altering the language to the extent that its value as a medium of international exchange will be lost. . . . He should aim at fashioning out an English which

is at once universal and able to carry his peculiar experience . . . I feel that the English language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience. But it will have to be a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit its new African surroundings. (1994: 433–4)

According to the text, the paradox of English in the world today is: