This paper studies the genitive alternation in British English and Sri Lankan English on the basis of more than 4,000 annotated cases of of- and s-genitives from the British and Sri Lankan components of the International Corpus of English. Specifically, we explore the effects of a variety of language-internal and language-external effects, focusing in particular on how these factors affect genitive choices both on their own, but also in interaction with each other and, a first in this kind of variety research, with the gender of the speakers. Our results corroborate previous findings regarding the language-internal factors, but we also obtain a variety of statistical effects representing interactions of those with variety and gender: for instance, animacy effects are stronger in Sri Lankan English, but animacy and length/weight effects are moderated by speaker gender; we discuss these and other findings with regard to processing, language contact and gender (in-)equality. Methodologically, we are developing two innovations for variationist research, namely a principled way to identify and then also visualise the effect of interactions in random forests.

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.