Abstract

China English or Chinese English? In the literature on World Englishes to date, both terms are used, with the former being far more widely adopted. Such a terminological variation is not conducive to the healthy development of scholarly inquiries into critical sociolinguistic issues concerning the use of English in the country with the largest number of non-native learners and users in the world. After a small-scale survey of the structural patterns of name labels in reference to ENL, ESL and EFL countries or territories, it was found that the pattern ‘[country name] English’ as in ‘Singapore English’ and ‘China English’ is uncommon among EFL societies (e.g., *Indonesia English, *Japan English not found). By contrast, most ESL societies are indexed by a name label ‘xxx English’, where ‘xxx’ is more likely an adjectival form of the place (e.g., Indian English, Nigerian English). Some four decades have elapsed since ‘China English’ was first coined and used. The numbers of learners and users of English in China have mushroomed from hundreds of thousands to hundreds of millions. Although English has no official language status in China, the ways it is learned and used by the masses today suggest that it is much more sophisticated than a performance variety. Compared with China English, which makes reference to the nation in abstraction of its people, Chinese English indexes its use by the Chinese people, but also their ownership of that de facto global lingua franca.