World Englishes and grammatical variation

Abstract

AbstractLess than three decades after the launch of the International Corpus of English project, corpus‐based research on world Englishes has enjoyed continued success. A wide variety of corpora and databases are now available to researchers, which allow for the exploration of very large datasets of varieties of English all over the globe, including historical data, as found in diachronic corpora that have recently been released for varieties other than British or American English (for example, Australian, Ghanaian, Indian, Philippine, or Singapore Englishes). Research in the field has also been enriched by the emergence of new models of analysis of world Englishes (beyond the Three Circles and the dynamic model), which take into account the social dynamics of the 21st century, such as mobility, globalization and Americanization. The papers in this special issue set out to make a contribution to our understanding of general patterns of language change, and reveal how major theoretical explanations of language variation and change are better understood through the broad lens of corpus‐based research on world Englishes.