FOR SOME time, a growing chorus of voices has been expressing concern over the way in which English is promoted by English-speaking countries, primarily the UK, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand (cf. Phillipson 1992, Pennycook 1994 & 1998, Canagarajah 1999, Skutnabb-Kangas 2000). Identified by Kachru (1985) as the ‘inner circle’ countries, these make vast profits from linguistic sales to ‘outer circle’ countries such as Singapore and India – despite the fact that the latter have largely developed their own Englishes – and even more so to the ‘expanding circle’ of countries which require access to the default international lingua franca.