Standard Ideology in World Englishes : ACase Study of NESs’ and NNESs’ Language Attitudes Towards Indian English

Building upon Kachru’s three concentric circles model, this research aims to uncover how native-centric norms are conceptualized by NESs and NNESs. Placing a form of English in the Outer Circle (i.e., Indian English) at the focus of discussion, this study addresses how traditionally considered NESs and NNESs position themselves towards varieties of English to probe how deeply entrenched standard English ideology is in the English language teaching (ELT) field. The data were collected from two sets of interviews and one set of responses from questions, which specifically concerned Indian English. The study showed that both NESs and NNESs displayed unfavorable attitudes towards Indian English, and did not regard it as a legitimate variety of English. The findings further revealed that ideologically-laden preferences for American English persist in both NESs and NNESs and that their language attitudes reflect Kachru’s six fallacies of the users and uses of English. The participants’ monocentric approach to ELT teaching does not sync with scholarly attempts to equalize the variety of Englishes around the world. These findings call attention to the need to further combat linguistic chauvinism (i.e., privileging standard English over other variations) by creating more egalitarian ELT milieus foregrounding the pluralism of Englishes.