This book integrates a historical and linguistic exploration of world English, documenting the emergence of the language as a contested site of linguistic encounters. It revises the understanding of English spread during the colonial period, emphasizing the agency of non-mother-tongue English speakers. The book contends that English owes its existence as a world language in large part to the struggle against imperialism but not to imperialism alone. To explain English varieties, the book introduces a new linguistic model of second language acquisition by speech communities: macroacquisition. Ten chapters focus on the following: (1) "Images of World English: Writing English as an International Language"; (2) "The Representation of the Social in a Social Science: Methodology in Linguistics"; (3) "Ideological and Economic Crosscurrents of Empire"; (4) "The Contested Terrain of Colonial Language Policy"; (5) "Access Denied: Containing the Spread of English"; (6) "The Becoming of a World Language"; (7) "Macroacquisition: Bilingual Speech Communities and Language Change"; (8) "The Macroacquisition of English: New Representations in the Language"; (9) "(The) World (of) English: Englishes in Convergence"; and (10) "Decentering English Applied Linguistics." (Contains approximately 400 references.) (SM)