English World-Wide A Journal of Varieties of English

About English World-Wide A Journal of Varieties of English

English World-Wide: A Journal of Varieties of English — Overview

English World-Wide: A Journal of Varieties of English is a peer-reviewed linguistics journal published by John Benjamins Publishing Company in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Its print ISSN is 0172-8865 and its electronic ISSN is 1569-9730, matching the identifiers on its Journals World record. The publisher describes it as the leading and most comprehensive journal dealing with varieties of English — a claim grounded in its history: the journal was founded in 1980 and, under its founding editor Manfred Görlach, it helped build the modern study of World Englishes as a research field in its own right. It appears three times a year and publishes articles Online First ahead of issue assignment.

The journal's centre of gravity is the dialectology and sociolinguistics of English-speaking communities, both native-speaker and second-language communities. Around that centre it admits work in variationist, general and historical sociolinguistics, pidgin and creole linguistics, language planning and multilingualism — but only, the publisher stresses, where such work has a direct bearing on modern varieties of English. That single qualifying clause is the most important sentence in the journal's scope statement, and prospective authors should treat it as the editorial test their manuscript must pass.

The current editors named by John Benjamins are Marianne Hundt of the University of Zurich and Anne Schröder of the University of Bielefeld, supported by a senior consulting editor and editorial assistants. Regular research papers are expected to run to 8,000–10,000 words, regular reviews to 1,500–2,000 words, comparative reviews to 4,000–6,000 words, and short focus pieces to 500–1,000 words — length bands that tell authors a great deal about the kind of fully developed, evidence-rich article the journal exists to publish.

History and the Making of a Field

When the journal began in 1980, the systematic study of English beyond Britain and the United States was still taking shape. Varieties in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and the Pacific were often treated as deviations from a metropolitan standard rather than as structured systems with their own histories, norms and internal variation. Manfred Görlach, who founded and long edited the journal and the associated book series Varieties of English Around the World, was among the scholars who changed that framing. A dedicated journal gave researchers of individual varieties a shared venue, shared descriptive standards and a cumulative conversation — surveys of one region could be read against surveys of another, and theoretical claims about how new Englishes develop could be tested against documented cases from several continents.

That founding mission explains the journal's enduring structure. It has remained a journal of record for variety description and comparison while absorbing the field's methodological turns: the rise of sociolinguistic interview studies, the growth of corpus linguistics and the International Corpus of English project with its parallel corpora from English-speaking countries, and more recently work on English in digital communication, mobility and transnational media. The festschrift volumes Englishes Around the World, honouring Görlach, illustrate the breadth the journal cultivated — general and comparative studies alongside work on the British Isles and North America, covering lexis, phonology, morphology, syntax, pragmatics and orthography as well as sociohistorical questions about how dialects evolve and are transmitted.

Four decades on, the field the journal helped create is sometimes called World Englishes, global Englishes or the sociology of language for English — terminology debates the journal itself has hosted. Its continued publication by John Benjamins, a specialist linguistics publisher, and its editing from European universities with strong English-linguistics programmes, keep it at the centre of that conversation rather than at its margins.

Scope in Detail

Varieties of English, native and second language

The core subject is English as it is actually used in communities around the world: regional dialects and sociolects, national and postcolonial varieties, and the Englishes of second-language speakers where English has institutional or everyday roles. Studies may describe a variety's features at any linguistic level — sound system, grammar, vocabulary, discourse and pragmatics — or examine variation within a variety across class, age, gender, ethnicity and style. Identity is a recurring theme: how speakers use features of a variety to signal who they are, and how those signals change as communities change.

Sociolinguistics, variation and change

Work framed in sociolinguistic and variationist terms is squarely in scope: how social factors structure linguistic variation, how changes spread through communities, and how historical sociolinguistics reconstructs earlier stages of modern varieties from written records. General problems of variationist, general and historical sociolinguistics qualify when they bear directly on modern varieties of English — a methodological paper tested on English data, for example, rather than a general theory paper with an English example added at the end.

Pidgins, creoles and contact

Pidgin and creole linguistics belongs to the journal's stated territory where it connects to English varieties — as it often does, since many English-based pidgins and creoles coexist with, and influence, standard and vernacular Englishes in the same communities. Contact phenomena more broadly — borrowing, code-switching, multilingual repertoires in which English is one component — fall under the journal's inclusion of multilingualism, again with the requirement of a direct bearing on varieties of English.

Language planning, attitudes and policy

Language planning and policy questions are included on the same terms: standardisation debates, the status of local varieties in education and media, attitudes and prejudices toward varieties and their speakers, and the hierarchies those attitudes create. Research on attitudes matters to this journal because perception shapes use — which varieties gain institutional support, which are stigmatised, and how speakers respond.

What sits outside the scope

The publisher is explicit that issues relating to applied linguistics and language teaching are not within the journal's scope — while adding, fairly, that the journal provides important background information for everyone involved in teaching English worldwide. A classroom-intervention study belongs in a language-teaching journal; a study of the variety that learners actually encounter, or of the norms teaching should reckon with, may belong here. Corpus and methodological innovation is welcomed in service of the core questions, not as an end in itself.

Article Types, Lengths and Submission

John Benjamins directs authors to submit through the journal's online submission and manuscript-tracking system, after consulting its short guide for authors, and to prepare manuscripts in line with the journal's stylesheet. The stated length bands deserve emphasis because they differ from many linguistics journals: regular papers of 8,000–10,000 words allow the full presentation of data — transcribed examples, quantitative tables, corpus evidence — that variety studies require. Shorter genres are clearly separated: regular reviews at 1,500–2,000 words, comparative reviews at 4,000–6,000 words for essays engaging several works together, and focus articles at 500–1,000 words for brief interventions.

Articles are published Online First, so accepted work becomes citable with its DOI before it is gathered into one of the year's three issues. For authors, the practical guidance follows from the scope: state early which variety or varieties the paper concerns, what data the claims rest on (fieldwork, corpus, archival record), and how the findings speak beyond the single case — to comparison, to theory, or to the history of English worldwide. Papers that describe without analysing, or that generalise from a handful of examples without a defensible dataset, face an uphill task in review at any serious journal in this field, and this one is no exception.

Peer review follows the publisher's standard scholarly process for its linguistics list. Specific turnaround times and any acceptance-rate figure are not publicly disclosed by the publisher in the sources consulted for this profile, and authors should be wary of third-party sites that publish precise-looking figures without a stated source.

Indexing, Metrics and Standing

The journal is a long-established Scopus-indexed title in language and linguistics, and its Journals World record lists an h-index of 71 — a substantial figure reflecting more than forty years of heavily used descriptive and theoretical work. Secondary metric summaries compiled from Scopus and citation databases have reported SCImago Journal Rank values in recent years in the region of 0.3 to 0.6, varying by release year, and category placements around the second quartile in linguistics and language in some years. Because these values move annually and third-party summaries disagree with each other, they should be quoted only with their source and year; the authoritative current figures are those in Scopus and SCImago for the release in question.

Standing in this field is not, in truth, carried by metrics alone. English World-Wide is the journal that departments stock, that handbooks cite for variety profiles, and whose back issues document the formation of World Englishes research. A scholar working on, for example, English in West Africa, in South Asia, in the Caribbean or in the Pacific will encounter its articles as standard references regardless of any single year's rank. That archival centrality — more than 1,200 works indexed on its Journals World record, with citation totals to match — is the realistic measure of its position.

Readers should also distinguish the journal from its near neighbour in title: World Englishes, published by Wiley, is a different journal with a broader socio-political remit, and the two are frequently confused in citations and library searches. Checking the ISSN — 0172-8865 print, 1569-9730 online — resolves any ambiguity, as does the publisher: John Benjamins for English World-Wide.

Access and Publication Model

The journal operates on the traditional subscription model through the John Benjamins platform, with institutional library access the normal route and Online First publication for accepted articles. Print subscription information is maintained on the publisher's catalogue pages. Whether a particular article is openly accessible depends on the arrangements for that article; a general article processing charge for the journal is not publicly disclosed in the publisher sources consulted, so authors needing an open-access route should ask the publisher directly at submission rather than assuming a standard fee. Accepted-manuscript sharing follows the publisher's prevailing policy, which authors should confirm for their own institution's repository requirements.

Who Should Read and Publish Here

Readers include researchers and graduate students in English linguistics, sociolinguistics, dialectology, creole studies and the history of English, together with scholars in adjacent areas — education, media and cultural studies — who need authoritative accounts of how English varies worldwide. Teachers of English, while outside the journal's research scope, form part of its background readership for good reason: any serious account of which norms to teach must start from how English is actually used.

For authors, the fit test is threefold. First, is a modern variety (or a set of varieties) of English genuinely the object of study? Second, does the paper rest on substantial, described data appropriate to its claims? Third, does it connect the case to the wider field — comparison, variation theory, contact linguistics or language planning? A yes to all three, presented within the 8,000–10,000-word band and the journal's stylesheet, is the profile of a competitive submission. Review essays comparing several recent books on a variety or theme, and short focus interventions on live debates, offer additional routes in for scholars at different career stages.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the journal's ISSNs?

Print ISSN 0172-8865 and electronic ISSN 1569-9730, as recorded by the publisher and on the Journals World record.

Who publishes English World-Wide, and how often?

John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam. Three issues per year, with articles released Online First.

Who are the editors?

The publisher lists Marianne Hundt (University of Zurich) and Anne Schröder (University of Bielefeld) as editors. The journal was founded and long edited by Manfred Görlach.

How long should a submission be?

Regular papers 8,000–10,000 words; regular reviews 1,500–2,000 words; comparative reviews 4,000–6,000 words; focus articles 500–1,000 words, per the publisher's author guidance.

Does the journal cover language teaching?

Applied linguistics and language teaching are outside its stated scope, though its research provides background widely used by teachers. Teaching-focused manuscripts should be directed to a teaching journal instead.

Is it the same as World Englishes?

No. World Englishes is a separate Wiley journal. Verify by ISSN and publisher.

What is its citation standing?

A long-established Scopus-indexed linguistics title; the Journals World record lists an h-index of 71. Year-specific rank and quartile values should be taken from the current Scopus or SCImago release, as published summaries differ by year.

Conclusion

English World-Wide has done, for more than four decades, the defining work of its field: documenting, comparing and theorising the varieties of English used by native and second-language communities across the globe. Published by John Benjamins, edited from Zurich and Bielefeld, appearing three times a year with substantial 8,000–10,000-word research articles, it remains the natural first venue — and first reference point — for dialectological and sociolinguistic research that bears directly on modern varieties of English. Scholars with well-evidenced work on a variety, a contact setting or a question of variation and planning will find its scope statement a fair description of what its pages contain, and its archive an essential map of how English worldwide came to be understood.

Reading and Using the Journal: A Researcher's Guide

For researchers, the practical value of English World-Wide lies in how its articles can be combined. A single-variety study — of English in a particular city, country or community — becomes more powerful when read beside studies of other varieties using comparable methods, and the journal's archive is organised by four decades of exactly that accumulation. When preparing a study, scholars commonly begin with the journal's most recent articles on their variety, work backwards through earlier descriptions to establish what has changed, and then look sideways to varieties with similar histories: settler varieties beside other settler varieties, postcolonial second-language varieties beside comparable cases, creole-influenced varieties beside their contact partners. That comparative reading is the field's method in miniature, and the journal is its principal shelf.

Corpus researchers have a particular reason to know the journal. The International Corpus of English project, which built parallel corpora of spoken and written English from countries where English is a first or official second language, grew up alongside the journal's community, and corpus-based studies of varieties — their grammar, discourse markers, and emerging norms — have appeared in its pages throughout the corpus era. A researcher designing a new corpus study should expect reviewers here to ask standard but demanding questions: how the data were sampled, how speakers or texts were classified, whether the variety's internal diversity is represented, and whether comparisons rest on truly comparable material. Studies that answer those questions in their methods sections, rather than leaving them to inference, travel best through review.

Historical work requires equal care. Modern historical sociolinguistics, one of the journal's stated interests, reconstructs earlier speech and writing from letters, trial records, newspapers and other documents. Such sources are uneven — they over-represent the literate, the official and the preserved — and strong articles in this journal say so plainly, explaining what their documents can and cannot show. The same candour is expected of contemporary fieldwork: recording conditions, consent, transcription conventions and the researcher's own position in the community are part of the evidence, not administrative decoration.

Students should also learn to use the journal's shorter genres. The review section, with regular reviews of 1,500 to 2,000 words and comparative reviews several times that length, functions as a running critical bibliography of World Englishes scholarship: following it is an efficient way to learn which books define current debates, and comparative reviews in particular model how to place several works in a single argument — a skill every doctoral writer needs. The short focus articles, finally, show the field arguing with itself in public: brief, pointed interventions on terminology, method or interpretation that often signal where research articles will be heading in the following years. Read together — research articles, reviews and focus pieces — an issue of this journal gives a newcomer a reliable map of a mature field, and gives the specialist the comparative evidence on which the study of English worldwide continues to build.