English in Third World countries characteristically possesses an ambivalent, even ambiguous character, relating uneasily with feelings of nationalism and of tolerance towards grassroots multilingualism on the one hand, and with the not-so-blind desire of common people to acquire the White people's language on the other. Many different kinds of communicative needs have to be satisfied, often in the same country, speech community, or family. Any comprehensive attempt to estimate the consequences for language learning would have to go far beyond the prevailingly psycholinguistic emphases of interlanguage theorists. It would also have to give greater recognition to the transfer of communicative competences associated with native languages. These may be well motivated and sociolinguistically variable. The role of literature in non-native Englishes may be focal in this regard. Above all, it is time to place the study of language learning and motivations on a proper bicultural and bilingual footing so as to recognize the interplay of several types of motivation with several types of linguistic repertoire. (Author/AMH)