Chapter 1 - Introduction

Summary

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.