INTRODUCTION

Classification, be it of objects, behaviors, characteristics, or processes (or anything else that is remotely classifiable), is part of our human drive to understand the world and to generate knowledge. Just as the Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge referenced above classifies animals, linguists organize and label phonemes and morphemes, distinguish between sentence types, and categorize speech acts. Variationist linguists, particularly scholars of World Englishes, identify and classify different types of Englishes. World Englishes modeling started in the 1970s with a straightforward triad paradigm model distinguishing between A-speakers (ENL), B-speakers (ESL), and C-speakers (EFL) (Strang 1970: 17–18) and has since then become so productive that it is possible to classify models of World Englishes into different types themselves. Thus, there are models based on the notion of a central member, not coincidentally the biggest grouping of models (e.g. Kachru 1985; McArthur 1987; Gorlach 1990; Mair 2013), developmental models (Schneider 2003, 2007), communicative models (Meierkord 2012), or contact-based models (Onysko 2016).

With the EIF Model by Buschfeld and Kautzsch (2017), a new method of classifying Englishes has entered the scene. This model combines the advantages of the developmental models with the contactbased and communicative ones, as contextual factors (i.e. the forces) play an essential role in the make-up of the model. This has been a long overdue advancement in the field and the edited volume at hand presents a wealth of applications to different contexts. The one introduced in this chapter is South Korea (variably referenced as Korea/South Korea in the following text), which in the past was often overlooked or classified without too much in-depth consideration (but see Rudiger 2019 for a first comprehensive account).