This article challenges the categorisation of English into national forms, arguing that this obscures differences in usage within a nation and ignores genres and registers that exist around the world. Further, I suggest that in addition to examining the spread of English around the world, scholars should study the ubiquity of various discourses that span multiple languages. Based on research carried out in Tunisia, and using the examples from academia, and the Internet, I argue that what is linguistically important about these examples is not the language used, but the global discourses and language ideologies of which they are a part. Whatever language Tunisians use in these discourses, Arabic, French, or English, they use them in similar ways, so that there is standardisation despite linguistic diversity. Frequently, power resides in the mastery of the discourse, rather than mastery of a language.