In this chapter we discuss the results of the experimental component to the study, which is designed to examine the degree to which the probabilistic contrasts uncovered in the corpus analysis are also discernible in language users’ introspective preferences. These experiments were designed to corroborate and interrogate the scope of the patterns observed in our corpus models.

This chapter includes a succinct review of World Englishes and dialect typology literature, with a focus on the main theoretical paradigms within this sphere (e.g. the Three Circles model and the Dynamic Model). We then introduce the nine regional varieties of English under study in the book: British English, Canadian English, Irish English, New Zealand English, Hong Kong English, Indian English, Jamaican English, Philippine English, and Singapore English. The discussion includes a brief summary of relevant aspects of these varieties’ sociohistories as well as their linguistic profiles.

Research on gender differences in language use previously focused mainly on affluent, especially Western societies. The present chapter extends this research to acrolectal Indian English, a postcolonial variety of English, investigating how the use of intensifiers (e.g. very, really) is affected not only by the speakers’ gender, but also their age, the gender of the other speakers in the conversation and the formality of the context. Results show some parallels with Western varieties of English, in particular a tendency for women to use more intensifiers than men in informal contexts. However, Indian women modify their usage of intensifiers with respect to the formality of the context more than British women and men, while Indian men do so less than British women and men. In mixed-sex conversations, Indian women also converge with Indian men in their intensifier usage, while neither British women nor men do so. The more flexible use of intensifiers by Indian women may be a response to societal expectations regarding their linguistic behaviour, in order to avoid censure by society. British women likewise continue to be affected by such constraints, but much less so, while the linguistic behaviour of Indian and British men is subject to less criticism.

This paper is concerned with one of the features typically associated with genderlectal differentiation in language, namely tag questions. It investigates the repertoire of tag questions in Indian English, comprising both canonical and non-canonical tags such as invariant isn’t it and the indigenous forms no/na. Both a quantitative and a qualitative approach are chosen. Firstly, we apply a multifactorial analysis to the data derived from the private dialogues in the International Corpus of English for India (ICE-India) in order to determine the interplay of (sociolinguistic) context factors for the occurrence of specific tag question types. Secondly, we consider patterns of social interaction and their linguistic correlates in all-female, all-male, and mixed-group conversations, thus trying to establish locally meaningful uses of tags. We also offer some general considerations on the feasibility of integrating more recent sociolinguistic approaches towards the category of gender in corpus-linguistic research.

Linguistic colloquialisation and democratisation are said to be responsible for some of the recent changes in inner-circle varieties of English. Thus, colloquialisation is said to be the process that explains changes such as an increase in the use of the future marker be going to, an increase in the frequency of not negation to the detriment of no negation, and an increase in the use of contractions, among others. Democratisation is claimed to be at the root of an increasing use of non-sexist language, including the use of neutral professional terms (e.g. fire-fighter instead of fireman), the use of gender-neutral or inclusive third-person singular pronouns (singular they, or coordinate he or she, rather than generic he), a decline in the use of deontic modal must and a parallel increase of the semi-modals have to and need to. This paper explores these six markers in two Asian Englishes spoken in India and Hong Kong from a genderlectal perspective using ICE-India and ICE-Hong Kong. The results show that (i) colloquialisation and democratisation are global tendencies; (ii) that Hong Kong English is closer to Inner-Circle varieties of English than Indian English regarding these two phenomena; and (iii) that Indian women are clear leaders of the six changes related to colloquialisation and democratisation.

Chapter 5 discovers an unlikely source of caste and class politics in Aravind Adiga’s Anglophone novel of individual ambition The White Tiger ‘2008’. I propose that the novel recodes, through a series of parodies and formal allusions – rural lower-caste militants, who regularly appear at the margins of the plot and whose contrapuntal significance the majority of commentators have overlooked. The chapter re-illuminates the complex maze of subterranean flows that undercuts the novel’s surface narrative of a new India. I hold that traditions of the protest novel, epistolary narrative, modernist, and indigenous satirical genres are at work in the novel: these gesture to suppressed narratives of peripheral internationalism. My reading of the novel elaborates on the evolving significance of internationalism in twenty-first-century India, where the rural and the subaltern have been all but banished from cultural discourse.

From the earliest decades of British colonisation of India to Indian independence in 1947, dictionaries of English in India focused exclusively on the English spoken by the British who were resident in India, and not on English as it was spoken by Indians. Not until the late twentieth century did dictionaries begin to document true Indian English. Yet despite the continuing role of English as an official language, as the language of choice in higher education, and as a lingua franca between speakers of different mother tongues, the lexicography of Indian English remains underdeveloped, and no current comprehensive dictionary of this variety exists, nor has any standard been established for Indian English.

From a bird’s-eye perspective, the English language in South Asia has developed from a contested colonial legacy into an asset within the linguistic ecology of the region, both intra-nationally and pan-regionally. With more and more speakers and contexts of use in a population of well over a billion, English has become a firmly entrenched South Asian language with distinctive characteristics, effectively the third-largest variety of English worldwide. This chapter outlines the sociohistorical background to the development of English in South Asia from the beginning of British colonialism in the area to the present day. The main focus is on English in India as the largest state to emerge out of the former British Raj and arguably the historical input variety to other South Asian Englishes. In presenting distinctive features of Indian English vis-à-vis other South Asian Englishes, the notion of Indian English as the regional epicenter is also taken into account.