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.

Setting the agenda for the volume, this introduction amalgamates the so far relatively isolated strands of research into genderlectal variation and World Englishes, relying on state-of-the-art empirical approaches. As they apply to the vast majority of speakers of English around the world, the notions of English as a second language and English as a foreign language are introduced and – in this light – recent attempts at bridging this paradigm gap between these two speaker groups as well as the models employed in these attempts are briefly discussed. For the study of gender and language, the central pillars of its most prominent theoretical waves – the dominance, the difference and the social construct framework – are presented and the corresponding methodological approaches critically appraised. Against this background, it is concluded that responsible explorations of genderlectal variation in World Englishes need to be based on transparent empirical foundations – both in terms of datasets and statistical modelling. For this reason, the tenets of corpus linguistics are explored and the benefits of multifactorial statistical techniques as consistently applied in this volume are illustrated. After previews of the individual chapters in the volume, the introduction ends with summarising remarks including the moderator function of gender in World Englishes.

The plethora of studies dealing with the quotative systems of English-as-native-language (ENL) varieties shows that the choice for be like is influenced by several linguistic and social factors. As for gender, most studies indicate that women are the prime users of be like. However, it is still unclear whether the same applies to English varieties that have emerged in countries with gender profiles differing from those found in ENL countries. This paper presents a case study of the quotative system of Ghanaian English based on a preliminary version of ICE-Ghana. The findings reveal that be like entered a quotative system that has been reshaped by language contact. Nonetheless, the new quotative still occupies a similar linguistic niche as that found in ENL varieties. Concerning social factors, the findings point towards a decreasing probability of be like with increasing age, but do not show a female lead. An intriguing interaction term between age and gender suggests that women in the sample are less likely to use be like the older they become compared to men. I argue that these patterns of genderlectal variation may be rooted in gender inequalities in international migration that were even stronger in the past.

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.

Women have often been profiled as prototypical users of hedges, i.e. linguistic devices such as I believe lowering the pragmatic force of a statement to potentially save interlocutors’ faces. Still, empirical investigations of gender-preferential hedging as employed by learners – specifically in postcolonial territories – are not available. This study establishes corpus-linguistically a) whether men or women use more hedges in native-speaker and postcolonial learner contexts, b) what factors determine hedge choice and c) on a theoretical level, the relation between learners and the evolutionary progress of their postcolonial habitat. A total of 1,530 hedges are extracted from texts by British native speakers and by learners (maximally level B1 in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages) from Hong Kong, the Philippines and Singapore. Males use more hedges in Britain and Singapore, while female learners employ more hedges in Hong Kong and the Philippines, but the concrete hedge chosen is determined by region – with Singapore being notably different from other territories – mode and gender. More generally, the findings suggest that speaker status differences, i.e. whether speakers are second-language or foreign-language users, may be less important in explaining linguistic choices than the evolutionary status of their sociolinguistic habitat.

The present study explores the effect of speakers’ gender in the well-known dative alternation (e.g. Mary gives John an apple vs. Mary gives an apple to John) and weighs the impact of this language-external factor against language-internal factors such as length of the constituents or semantics of the verb. Following up on previous research that explored the dative alternation across nine varieties of English, the focus of the present work will be on Jamaican English, a variety where male and female speakers seem to use the two variants differently. 615 variable dative tokens of acrolectal Jamaican English speech were annotated for eleven language-internal and three language-external factors and subjected to conditional random forest and mixed-effects logistic regression analyses. The results of these analyses indicate that the predictor gender plays only a marginal role vis-à-vis other language-external and -internal constraints. At the same time, if only the two most important language-internal predictors are considered, gender turns out to significantly affect dative choice with male speakers preferring the prepositional variant more than female speakers. These results not only highlight the potential of syntactic alternations to serve as sociolinguistic variables but also point to possibly different social dynamics between male and female speakers in Jamaica.

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.