Editors and world Englishes

Abstract

The impact of editorial intervention on the language of published written texts has been the topic of a handful of recent empirical investigations within the world Englishes paradigm. These studies have demonstrated that the linguistic changes that editors make to texts written in world Englishes contexts are not as conservative or consistent as previously assumed, with some scholars suggesting that the sociolinguistic profiles of such editors might account for the varying behaviours noted in the corpus-based investigations. In this article, I build on recent arguments for a more considered view of the impact of editorial intervention on the language of published written texts in world Englishes contexts by examining editors’ sociolinguistic profiles and the overt norms they draw on in the course of their work to explore how they orient their normative behaviour and how this may be related to the evolutionary development of their respective varieties.