Requests in Indian and Sri Lankan English

Abstract

AbstractDespite notable exceptions, research on requests in world Englishes has so far largely involved role plays, questionnaires and discourse completion tasks. Moreover, research on requests in South Asian varieties of English is rather scarce. Therefore, the present study employs a multifactorial approach towards requests in Indian and Sri Lankan English as compared to their historical input variety British English by investigating the spoken components of the International Corpus of English, hence involving authentic, non‐intuition‐based empirical data. Based on a conditional inference tree and a random forest extended via the integration of interaction predictors, the present article concludes that quantitative differences in the realisation patterns of requests in British, Indian and Sri Lankan English can be observed.