Squaring the circles: issues in modeling English worldwide

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by  Bruthiaux P.

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF APPLIED LINGUISTICSS, QVUoAlR. I1N3G, TNHoE. C2I,R 2C0L0E3S 115599
Squaring the circles:
issues in modeling English worldwide
PAUL BRUTHIAUX
Texas A&M University
The model originally promoted by Braj Kachru and representing
English worldwide as Inner, Outer, and Expanding circles has helped
valorize denigrated varieties by drawing attention to commonalities
across old and new varieties and by altering perceptions of their com-
municative potential and relative prestige. However, the model suf-
fers from being based in a political/historical view of English worldwide
and thus fails to capture transplantations of the language in locations
not formally recorded by colonial history. Because it promotesspecific
varieties, the model also ignores variation within locales, especially
where the gap between those who know English and those who do not
is vast. Overall, the model encourages broad-brush descriptions of
manifestations of English across all three circles that do not stand up
to sociolinguistic analysis. In response, it is suggested that the model
can continue to serve as a shorthand for English worldwide but that it
must adapt by (1) moving away from a focus on nation-states in favor
of a sociolinguistic focus on English-speaking communities wherever
they are found and (2) recognizing that fundamental differences across
contexts for English worldwide cannot be glossed over in support of
specific varieties if we are to arrive at descriptively adequate sociolin-
guistics and socially relevant language policies.
Introduction
For the best part of the last two decades, commentators on English worldwide
have taken as their theoretical premise the model consisting of three concentric
circles originally proposed by Braj Kachru (1984, 1985, 1989). In this model,the
“Inner Circle” comprises locations where English is the language of asubstantial,
often monolingual majority (e.g. USA, UK, Ireland, Australia, etc.). A major
characteristic of varieties spoken in these locations is that they are largely
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160 PAUL BRUTHIAUX
endonormative, that is, they find within themselves the norms of correctnessand
appropriateness to be propagated through language education and language
planning. By contrast, the “Outer Circle” represents locations that typically
came under British or American colonial administration before acceding to
independence and where English continues to be used for interethnic communica-
tion and as a dominant language by those at the top of the socioeconomicladder.
These English-speaking – or at least English-knowing – communities range insize
and geopolitical importance from India to Nauru through Nigeria, Kenya, the
Philippines, Singapore, Fiji, and many more. Post-colonial “New Englishes”tend
to generate ambivalence among commentators. While some stress the role played
by these varieties in perpetuating socioeconomic divisions between those who
have English and those who do not (e.g. Canagarajah 1999; Ramanathan 1999),
others emphasize the way in which they encapsulate aspirations to modernity
through participation in worldwide trade, access to technology, and the tying
together of new and typically multilingual nations (e.g. Kanyoro 1991). Despite
increasing linguistic self-reliance and a gradual shift from exonormative to
endonormative attitudes (Banjo 2000), these Englishes continue to be affected
by conflict between linguistic norms and linguistic behavior, with widespread
perceptions among users that Anglo-American norms are somehow superior
and that their own variants are therefore deficient. The “Expanding Circle”,
meanwhile, represents societies where English is not passed on to infantsnatural-
istically across generations but is taught in schools to an increasing number of
learners and is used – by some, at least – in activities involving members of
other linguistic local communities and in international trade or tourism. Given
that English – it can be safely assumed – is now taught to someone somewhere in
every nation on earth, the Expanding Circle presumably comprises everynation
not included in the Inner or Outer circles. Randomly selected names include
Brazil, Italy, Thailand, Morocco, and many more. In these locations, English
tends to be exonormative in that speakers, educators, and policy-makers have
traditionally looked to American or British models for linguistic norms.
Judging by the number of scholarly sources in which reference is made to
the “Three Circles” of English, the model has clearly had a major impact.
Introduced at a time when the duopoly of American and British English was
unquestioned and metropolitan attitudes to postcolonial variants often ranged
from amused condescension to racist stereotyping (for reviews, see de Beaugrande
1999; Canagarajah 1999; Bhatt 2002), the model broke new ground in raising
awareness of the very existence of dynamic varieties of English with growing
populations of speakers and increasingly vibrant media, literatures, andpopular
cultures. Startling though it may have seemed to many at the time, the very act
of pluralizing “English” and encouraging serious debate regarding the nature
and role of “New Englishes” denoted both imagination and courage. Indeed,
the enterprise was far from innocent. In Kachru’s own words (reported in
Prendergast 1998: 229), this terminological choice constituted nothing short of
“an insurgent linguistic weapon”. Though potentially a double-edged sword,
the characterization of the enterprise as “liberation linguistics” (Kachru 1991),
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SQUARING THE CIRCLES 161
a label that evolved in response to Quirk’s 1990 concern with over-politicization)
was apt.
Over time, the model has enabled a generation of analysts to explore
changing sociolinguistic circumstances and to capture evolving relationships
across varieties (for a historical survey of this process, see Leitner 1992) as well
as between language and power. The model has played a significant role in
valorizing non-metropolitan varieties of English and in encouraging perceptions
of these varieties as the default code for increasing numbers of speakers, the
object of serious scholarly investigation, and the uncontroversial vehicle for
best-selling literature (Thumboo 2001; Talib 2002). One direct outcome of this
perceptual shift has been the increasing number of recommendations that the
teaching of English be made to reflect local identities and incorporate local as
well as worldwide norms (among recent examples, see Pakir 1999; Eguiguren
2000; Kubota 2001; Bhatt 2001). Typical of this shift is the claim by Arua and
Magocha (2000) that the variety of English now taking root among Botswana
children meets all the criteria for a communicatively adequate code, is not
perceived as inferior to other varieties, is comprehensible internationally, and
is of a quality such that there is no reason why it should not be used for
educational purposes.
Yet, despite its evident merits and the contributions it has undoubtedly
made to our appreciation of the modern sociolinguistic context of English world-
wide, the Three Circles model is not without limitations. In this article, I review
some of the major reasons why the model may no longer be appropriate for this
evolving context. I argue that because it is descriptively and analytically incon-
sistent as well as over-representative of a political agenda, the model has little
explanatory power and makes only a minor contribution to making sense of the
current configuration of English worldwide. In essence, the model suffers from
the legacy of past successes. While the promotion of denigrated varieties was a
just and timely objective, this concentration has left us with a primarily nation-
based model which draws on specific historical events and which correlates
poorly with current sociolinguistic data. Because it tries to account for varieties
(in the Inner Circle), a multiplicity of speaker types (mainly in the Outer
Circle), and geographical locations (in the Expanding Circle) all at once, this
superficially appealing and convenient model conceals more than it reveals and
runs the risk of being interpreted as license to dispense with analytical rigor.
On balance, I suggest, the Three Circles model is a 20th century construct that
has outlived its usefulness, and I will briefly sketch out at the end of this article
a 21st century alternative that focuses instead on the specific sociolinguistic
characteristics of English-speaking communities wherever they are found.
Limitations of the model: the Inner Circle
Curiously, perhaps, given the self-declared intention by promoters of the model
to be subversive, the model reinforces perceptions of Inner Circle varieties of
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162 PAUL BRUTHIAUX
English as largely monolithic and standardized because it offers no account of
dialectal variation within each of the varieties that it lists. This is especially
true of African-American English, as the recent Ebonics controversy amply
illustrates. As Lippi-Green (1997) and Collins (1999) show, the debate may have
raged over whether or not Black English was to be regarded as a dialect or a
language. However, the two sides were in agreement throughout in their view
that Standard English and Black English do not simply constitute minorvariants
of one variety. Though generally less controversial, the same debate has marked
perceptions of what might constitute British English given that the variety con-
tinues to be characterized by substantial dialectal divergence. As Millar puts it
in Afendras et al. (1995: 299), “British English is not so much a cover term as
a masking term: it hides major phonetic and phonologicalvariation and renders
invisible very many speakers and several national identities”.
By glossing over this variation, the model inadvertently contributes to
perpetuating the notion that despite the variety traditionally referred to as
Received Pronunciation (RP) being spoken by a tiny minority of British users,
this single, supposedly homogenous and norm-giving variety should remain the
preferred model for speakers who – for historical or personal reasons – tend to
relate to British linguistic norms. In large measure this is due to the fact that
discussions of standards – within the Three Circles model as elsewhere – rarely
take into account the fundamental difference between spoken norms, spontan-
eously shared by communities of speakers and hence not easily amenable to
deliberate standardization, and written norms, which are relatively open to
manipulation by institutional forces, especially through schooling. By ignoring
the fact that written norms differ relatively little whereas spoken norms differ
widely across Englishes old or new, the model misses an opportunity toencourage
rigorous analysis of commonalities and differences across varieties of English.
In short, by oversimplifying in this manner, the model offers an incomplete and
potentially misleading representation of one of its major components.
A second limitation of the model is that it fails to account for varieties that
meet conventional Inner Circle criteria except for the fact that they are spoken
by a minority, often alongside evolving varieties taking root among neighboring
communities in the country. Typical of this context is South Africa, a nation
where English fulfills a nationwide range of functions including that of lingua
franca, dominant medium of education, and symbol of political change and
modernization. In a multicultural and multilingual country of such complexity,
at least three major varieties of English operate with distinct social andfunctional
distributions. One of these, which could be described as “White South African
English”, is a recent transplant, in many ways comparable to Australian orNew
Zealand English in their respective settings. Another, widely identified as “Black
South African English”, represents an emerging variety not yet securely estab-
lished but possibly evolving toward a competing standard of increasing prestige
and power (van der Walt and van Rooy 2002). A third, labeled by Mesthrie
(1996) “South African Indian English”, has its origins in the efforts of amigrant
population speaking a range of North and South Indian languages tocommunicate
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SQUARING THE CIRCLES 163
with English and Zulu speakers without having significant competence in either
language, at least initially. The result is a variety that is distinct from bothWhite
and Black South African Englishes as well as from mainland Indian varieties
because it was influenced by a specific set of social conditions, namelyprolonged
interactions with native and non-native speakers and teachers of English (often
other Indians) in South Africa. Overall, as de Kadt (2000) argues, South Africa
fits neither the “Inner” nor the “Outer” components of the model.
One response to this conundrum has been to focus on the relatively stable
White variety of South African English and to list it alongside less problematic
Inner Circle varieties, an approach followed by Graddol (1997: 10). The other
is simply to omit all reference to South African English in relation to Inner
Circle varieties, as does Yano (2001). Clearly, listing White and Black South
African Englishes as part of the Inner and Outer circles respectively would be
politically divisive. Yet, even if we accept the characterization of Black South
African English as rapidly evolving and therefore not amenable to classifica-
tion, there is a case for identifying a White South African variety of English on
the same basis as, say, an Australian or even an American variety in that these
are spoken natively by most descendants of European immigrants and the
descendants of other, more recent immigrants who adopted those speech norms.
On this basis, especially once comparable populations in neighboring countries
such as Zimbabwe or Namibia are taken into account, the total number of
speakers of what might be labeled “White Southern African English” isprobably
greater (approximately 4–5 million) than the entire English-speaking populations
of Ireland or New Zealand. On demographic grounds alone, this makes leaving
this population and the variety of English it sustains out of the Inner Circle
untenable. On theoretical grounds, there is a case for questioning the validity of
a model that stresses the common nature of varieties of English descended from
a colonial power that exported its language and saw it gain additional speakers
in at least five locations (Ireland, USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand)
while leaving out an obvious candidate on the grounds of political sensibilities
or simply poor fit with other varieties within the nation-state in question. In
effect, the very reliance of the model on nation-states as its principal conceptual
base is called into question.
Limitations of the model: the Outer Circle
THE OUTER CIRCLE AND (NON-)NATIVENESS
While it is legitimate for a model of English worldwide to encourage a sense
of increasing ownership of English among its many users, it must also address
the complexities arising from multilingual settings in which an increasing number
of these users operate. These complexities include the nature and scope of
(non-)nativeness, whether and how these can be determined, and whether they
matter. In practice, the Three Circles model appears to have muddied thewaters
by idealizing the very distinction between native and non-native speakers that it
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164 PAUL BRUTHIAUX
set out to counteract. At a relatively trivial level, this is apparent in some of the
odder attempts at grouping countries on the basis of the native or non-native
competence of their populations. Graddol (1997), for example, lists two nations
with largely bi-ethnic populations born of the earlier practice of importing
Indian laborers: Fiji, and Trinidad and Tobago. Yet, while Trinidad andTobago
is listed alongside India and others as having both native and non-native
populations of English speakers, Fiji is not, despite the fact that its Indian
population (still numbering close to 50% of the total) displays a similar con-
tinuum from English-dominant bilinguals to those with little or no knowledge of
English, and every shade in between (Siegel 1992).
At the root of this lack of typological systematicity is a sense of ambiguity
encouraged by the model. Clearly, there is a crucial sociolinguistic difference
between what languages users know and what they do with what they know. Put
another way, the language needs of adults do not necessarily require that they
possess native or native-like competence across the entire system. However, this
purely instrumental perspective bypasses the psycholinguistic underpinnings
of multilingual competence. In practice, it should be uncontroversial to note
that locations of the Outer type are characterized by a vast spread between
those who know and use English in preference to any other language in their
repertoire and those who know or use no English whatsoever. Unlike most
speakers in Inner Circle locations, many Outer Circle residents cannot be said
to share a reasonably stable linguistic system broadly recognizable as English
with the rest of the population because they do not communicate with each
other extensively in that language and thus do not expose their children
primarily to input based on that shared system.
This fundamental distinction and its consequences for the nature and scopeof
Outer varieties of English cannot be glossed over without encouragingmisleading
perceptions of each sociolinguistic setting, often based on oxymoronicreferences
to “non-native varieties” (Singh, in Prendergast 1998), as well as unrealistic
expectations of the social and educational potential of English in Outer Circle
locations. Just as South African Indian English evolved in response to interac-
tions between Indian migrants and speakers of local languages as well as native
and non-native teachers of English (Mesthrie 1996), mainland Indian English
features substantial code-mixing between English and at least one locallanguage
even in supposedly English-medium education, with lower socioeconomic groups
institutionally barred from access to English-medium schooling (Ramanathan
1999). At the syntactic level, it also exhibits substantial and systematic internal
variation between standard and vernacular usage (Bhatt 2000).
A further difficulty is that by grouping together nation-states on the basis
of their shared colonial history at the expense of detailed sociolinguistic
analysis, the model fails to discriminate between strongly multiethnic entities
and strongly monolingual ones. For example, in strongly multilingual Nigeria,
Mauritius, or Singapore, English is widely used in a variety of official and
unofficial roles not only for education, administration and – for a few, at least
– international communication but also for internal communication across
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SQUARING THE CIRCLES 165
ethnic groups. By contrast, despite having come under British administrative
control at approximately the same time, relatively monolingual Bangladesh or
Hong Kong have little need for English as a tool for internal communication
and tend to limit it to administrative and educational functions. As a result, the
model makes few useful predictions regarding proficiency levels and commun-
icative practices in each location, a deficiency that affects language educators
and language policy-makers working in these communities.
THE OUTER CIRCLE AND POSTCOLONIALISM
A second limitation of the Outer Circle concept is that it places at its core
nation-states born of the vagaries of (de)colonization and poorly reflects local
sociolinguistic arrangements. Borrowing from Crystal (1997), for example,
Graddol (1997: 11) lists a total of 63 countries with non-native populations of
English speakers, a set of nations and territories of hugely different size and
geopolitical importance, ranging from 1-billion strong regional superpower
India to microscopic Nauru. Among the tinier nations, the Seychelles are listed
but the Maldives are not, perhaps reflecting the fact that the former was a
crown colony and the latter a mere protectorate.
While this type of omission may seem relatively trivial and could easily be
remedied, a greater flaw in the Outer Circle concept is that it encourages a
correlation between new varieties of English and locations where (mostly)British
colonial power left behind readily identifiable creations in the form of inde-
pendent nation-states. This results in the model missing countries that became
part of a colonial empire only in disguise. One example among many is Egypt,
where British occupation began in 1882 and was reinforced at the close ofWorld
War I when the country officially became a British protectorate, a situation
that lasted until 1952, longer in fact than the more transparent American
colonization of the Philippines. As Schaub (2000) shows, the British presence
in Egypt has had a major impact on educational practices to the point where
something like “Egyptian English” is common currency among professional and
service-oriented groups working in engineering, business, medicine, and the
tourist industry. One major difference is that, because the country is consider-
ably less multilingual than, say, India, English in Egypt does not normally
function as an interethnic lingua franca. However, its use among a professional
class that could in theory make do with Arabic makes the omission of a country
of such demographic and cultural importance from representations of the Outer
Circle model such as Crystal (1997) and Graddol (1997) somewhat puzzling.
Similarly, nations such as Jordan, Iraq, or (then) Palestine, over which
Britain had a brief mandate as they emerged from the disintegration of the
Turkish empire after World War I, or those countries created on the edge of
the Arabian peninsula in part to serve as administrative frameworks for oil
production such as Kuwait or Abu Dhabi, came under British influence too late
to be colored red on maps of the empire. Yet, despite not being listed as Outer
Circle locations in sources such as Crystal (1997) or Graddol (1997), many of
these nations are seeing English evolving into a language of widercommunication
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166 PAUL BRUTHIAUX
connecting a dominant local ethnic community to a vast multinational
immigrant labor force, in addition to playing an increasing role in education
at all levels.
Another group of significantly English-speaking communities overlooked by
the model includes portions of countries whose regional componentsexperienced
diverging colonial influences but are now unitary nation-states. Cameroon, for
example, is acknowledged by Graddol (1997) as having in excess of 6 million
non-native speakers of English, mostly originating in the formerly German-
controlled western portion of the country that came under British control at the
end of World War I and was later joined to the larger French-controlled area to
form post-independence Cameroon. Yet, no such recognition is accorded to
Somaliland, the north-facing portion of Somalia that was a British protectorate
from 1884 to 1960 – once again significantly longer than the more familiar
American colonization of the Philippines – at which point it was joined to a
greater Somalia. This ignores the fact that Somaliland has attempted since 1991
to have its de facto break with the formerly Italian-controlled southern portion
of the country recognized internationally (with little success so far) and lists
English along with Somali and Arabic as one of its three official languages.
Another major country rarely discussed in relation to English worldwide
and the Three Circles model is Ethiopia, a strongly multiethnic country never
subjected to substantial interference by a dominant, English-speaking colonial
power and yet where English has long played a role as a prestige language, as
witnessed by Amharic-English code-switching patterns (Leyew 1998). Because it
appears to offer a neutral tool for internal interethnic communication as well as
– rightly or wrongly – a promise of modernization, English is currently being
promoted throughout the country as an alternative to Amharic not only in a
nationwide official role but also as the medium of education, a prospect of
obvious interest to many non-Amharic-speaking Ethiopians (Ambatchew 1995;
Bloor 1996; Hameso 1997; Boothe and Walker 1997). In this sense, despite
substantially different patterns of European colonization, the current sociolin-
guistic interplay of Amharic, other local languages, and English in Ethiopia
recalls India, with its 50-year-old tussle between English and Hindi, the latter
promoted by a dominant group as a national language of wider communication
yet resisted by many non-Hindi speakers. In brief, a systematic focus on the
largely accidental outcome of political history obscures major sociolinguistic
similarities across former colonies and non-colonies alike and severely weakens
the descriptive and explanatory scope of the model.
Another case of English-speaking populations being treated differently by
the model on primarily historical rather than sociolinguistic grounds relates to
Central America. From Belize to Panama, the six Central American countries
with access to a Caribbean coastline all have substantial populations of English-
speaking descendents of relatively recent immigrants, mostly from Jamaica,
originally contracted to work on plantations as well as on related projects such
as railroad construction, and in Panama on the construction of the canal. Prior
to these relatively recent developments, however, links among British traders in
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SQUARING THE CIRCLES 167
Central American outposts and the key commercial hub of Jamaica were strong
enough for repeated calls to be made for British colonial status to be granted to
the entire Caribbean coast of Central America (Naylor 1989). Indeed, so strong
was the link between these populations and de facto British colonial power that
it was not until the 1948 revolution that the Jamaican residents of theCaribbean
coast of Costa Rica were granted Costa Rican citizenship and thus freed from
the need to turn to British consular authorities for protection andrepresentation
(Harpelle 2001). Yet, only Belize (then British Honduras) succeeded in securing
official British recognition as a crown colony, in part because relatively favorable
geography made the threat of direct control being imposed from neighboring
Guatemala more likely than in countries (especially along the Mosquito Coast of
Honduras and Nicaragua) where British trading presence was confined toisolated
estuary settlements largely inaccessible from the seat of Spanish-speaking power
in remote highlands. Today, despite the inroads made by Spanish into these
English-speaking communities in part as a result of the spread of primary
education, a degree of cultural affinity continues to link the coastal people of
these six nations across regional borders as well as with neighboring English-
speaking Caribbean islands (Harpelle 2001). Yet little of this intricate sociolin-
guistic pattern is captured by a model that maps varieties narrowly onto national
boundaries. Once again, only a focus on accidents of political history, not
sociolinguistic observation, explains why of all speakers of English in Central
America, only those in Belize are mentioned in most discussions of regional
varieties of the language and accorded Outer Circle status.
As for nearby Panama, its absence from classifications such as Crystal (1997)
or Graddol (1997) is doubly puzzling in that, in addition to being home to many
English-speaking descendents of former plantation and canal laborers, this
American-inspired creation and the construction and administration of thecanal
that justified it led to the growth of a bilingual administrative cadre of Spanish
speakers with its own localized variety of English as part of its communicative
repertoire. This should have predicted that the country would be accounted for
in much the same manner as Puerto Rico, the American Virgin Islands, or
American Samoa, all of which receive recognition in Crystal’s and Graddol’s
taxonomies. In brief, because it bases its coverage on political history (and
inconsistently, at that) as opposed to sociolinguistics, the concept of an
OuterCircle of new varieties of English is severely deficient in the explanatory
andpredictive power needed to account for the complex ecology of English
worldwide.
Limitations of the model: the Expanding Circle
The conceptual inconsistency that weakens the concepts of Inner and Outer
Circles of English worldwide is also apparent in discussions of the Expanding
Circle because it is not always clear whether the concept is meant to cover
countries, country-based varieties, speakers, or non- (or barely-) speaking
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168 PAUL BRUTHIAUX
learners. One consequence of this lack of clarity is that “me-too” calls are
heard periodically for additional varieties to be admitted to the ever-expanding
family of new Englishes. One such recent call comes from Shim (1999), who
argues that a long tradition of largely standardized English language teaching
and testing in Korea has resulted in an increasingly endonormative localstandard
shared by all members of the teaching profession. On closer examination, such
periodic sightings of emerging varieties appear to have more in common with
corn circles than with sociolinguistic ones.
The question of what constitutes a variety of a language is a thorny one. The
key issue is whether there exists in a particular location a core of speakers who
not only know some English (e.g. Shim’s Korean teachers) but also use it to a
reasonable level of proficiency for a substantial part of their daily activities,
whether for internal communication in a multiethnic society, for international
communication with other native or non-native speakers of the language, or for
academic purposes in a location where English plays a significant role as a
medium of instruction despite not having a substantial presence locally. This is
fundamental because for a variety to emerge, local practices must surely gain
norm value through recurring, spontaneous use across a range ofcommunicative
functions as well as in emblematic domains such as the media, artistic creation,
and popular culture. In other words, idiolects will converge as speakers accom-
modate to each other and gradually evolve a set of norms that most implicitly
recognize as a common bond. However, in countries where English is taught
widely but not used internally, the conditions for the emergence of such norms
are simply not in place. As a result, the kind of English spoken locally among a
narrow professional circle – here, teachers – no more constitutes the basis for a
variety of English than do restricted profession-based codes such as Airspeak,
the worldwide medium of air traffic control. One example of a restricted speech
form of this type is “Thai English”, which Smalley (1994) characterizes as
difficult for foreigners to understand and inadequate for communicative needs
beyond classroom practices. Although the increase in transnational communica-
tion across Europe has led to a well-documented claim for variety status to be
accorded to English used as a lingua franca (or “ELF”) by second language
speakers among themselves (Jenkins 2000; Seidlhofer 2001), the domain of such
language use remains restricted to specialized transactions (businessnegotiations,
industrial cooperation, tourism, etc.) by a relatively small number of speakers,
and broader variety-creating conditions remain largely absent.
Admittedly, allowance could be made for nations such as the Netherlands or
the Scandinavian countries where English is widely used in higher education. In
addition, the relatively small populations of these countries and theirsubstantial
involvement in international trade mean that at any given time a relatively high
number of people will be involved in transnational communication in English,
and this may provide part of the necessary social platform for norms todevelop.
In this sense, there may be a marginal case for speaking of “Dutch English” or
“Norwegian English”, though even this scenario is denied by Preisler with
respect to Denmark (in Afendras et al. 1995). If this is the case as regards a
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003