24th Conference of the International Association for World Englishes

IAWE is committed to the study of the forms and functions of varieties of Englishes in diverse cultural and sociolinguistic contexts. The association focuses on global issues relating to three major aspects of world Englishes: language, literature, and pedagogy.

The 24th Annual IAWE conference was held at the University of Limerick, Ireland from June 20th – 22nd 2019. The theme of the conference was World Englishes: Peripheries and Centres. This theme has particular relevance for the conference location: Ireland is part of the putative ‘centre’ in terms of being within the Inner Circle of English, yet within that context, the English spoken in many parts of Ireland, including Limerick as a geographically peripheral site, can also be seen and understood as peripheral. Peripherality and centrality are, of course, temporally and spatially defined, as well as constantly shifting.

Contributions to the conference (see the Book of Abstracts here) explored the tensions and dynamics of centrality and peripherality in relation to, for example: changing centres and peripheries in terms of world Englishes; the changing global political economy of world Englishes; shifting centres of norms in world Englishes; new roles for peripheral world Englishes through technology, globalisation and commodification; and the evolution of peripheral normativities which are locally determined as challenges to central norms.