While Kachru's Three Circles model of World Englishes (Kachru 1985, 1986; Kachru and Nelson 1996) has been highly influential in highlighting the changing distribution and functions of English, it has also been criticized for its inability to account for the heterogeneity and dynamics of English-using communities, and for perpetuating the very…

It is unfortunate that Wee's commendable effort (2005) to explore the theoretical underpinning of Linguistic Human Rights (LHRs) so as to explore different variants of English in Singapore empirically is marred by a substantial number of misrepresentations of what is stated in our work. We will exemplify this briefly, and otherwise refer the…

Skutnabb-Kangas, Kontra, and Phillipson's response to Wee (2005) only serves to highlight a whole new set of problems with the LHRs paradigm while failing to make any inroads towards resolving the earlier ones. For example, they adopt a "legal perspective" in relation to Singlish that is at odds with the way they would presumably wish to…

Although studies involving linguistic human rights (LHRs) have focused at length on cases of inter-language discrimination, much less attention has been given to intra-language discrimination (Blommaert 2001a; Skutnabb-Kangas et al. 2001). This paper highlights a number of theoretical issues that the LHRs framework needs to deal with once…