World Englishes as an ideological movement in applied linguistics

Abstract Early world Englishes publications did not explicitly use an ideological frame of reference, even though much of their argument was essentially ideological. Neither did those walking in the footsteps of world Englishes pioneers; some opted for a discursive approach instead, while others used the framework of language attitudes. Indeed, world Englishes, albeit becoming a joint interdisciplinary academic endeavour in which various fields have made significant contributions, has not fully accommodated the language ideology framework yet. Continuing the ideological tradition for studying world Englishes, which Bhatt (2017) pioneered, this article provides a systematic analysis of world Englishes as a language ideological movement within applied linguistics. This article takes an ontological approach to provide a definition of language ideology. It uses the working definition as a starting point to focus on world Englishes being a movement against language ideologies about exclusive ownership of English, as well as its structure, use and spread.