ИСТИНА

The presentation discusses the status of non-native varieties of English related to the Expanding and Outer Circles, as classified by Braj B. Kachru (1985) in his Three Circle Theory. It is not infrequent that these world Englishes, which do not function as national languages, are recognized with effort as varieties per se, especially by their users. The author of the presentation argues that every variety, native or non-native, differs from other varieties, first and foremost, in their linguacultural basis, as it serves to reflect the culture and mentality of its users. The variety is normally characterized by distinctive linguistic features that are nativized due to phonetic, lexical, syntactical, or morphological transfer of L1 though in speech of different people these features can appear differently, sometimes resulting in strong accent, sometimes very weak. Whereas a variety is a sociolinguistic phenomenon, the cumulative total of the community speech, an average user (if we may speak of an average speaker) is not expected to manifest all the distinctive features of their variety. A variety is not to be confused with an individual speech or interlanguage, which is an object of psycholinguistics. Recognizing a variety becomes a problem when it is taken for a deficient form of the language, typical of language learners, or vice versa, is associated only with a language model, which is an ideal for teaching and learning the language. Nevertheless, a realistic approach to the English language testifies to non-British people speaking their own varieties. The process of educational codification and description of such varieties has started. The most challenging are sociological and psycholinguistic types of codification (Kachru 1983). Studying institutional or performance varieties (Kachru 1983) reveals the dynamics of linguistic norms and the language development. Knowing distinctive features of other varieties will make intervarietal communication, including intervarietal translation/interpretation, easier as we can anticipate the difficulties in intelligibility, comprehensibility, and interpretability (Smith 1992), and this will facilitate intercultural communication. Knowing typical features of one’s own variety is important for improving one’s command of the language. At the same time, recognizing one’s own variety among other world Englishes provides for one’s psychological comfort in intercultural communication due to the principle of inclusiveness and equality of varieties. Awareness of linguacultural identity through English as a secondary means of expressing ethnic culture reveals the dialectics of the local and global that contradict and complement each other in the contemporary world.