This chapter includes a succinct review of World Englishes and dialect typology literature, with a focus on the main theoretical paradigms within this sphere (e.g. the Three Circles model and the Dynamic Model). We then introduce the nine regional varieties of English under study in the book: British English, Canadian English, Irish English, New Zealand English, Hong Kong English, Indian English, Jamaican English, Philippine English, and Singapore English. The discussion includes a brief summary of relevant aspects of these varieties’ sociohistories as well as their linguistic profiles.

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.

This chapter discusses global challenges in English language teaching and teacher education and the local responses in the Philippines. It outlines the issues posed by globalization from two perspectives: (1) globalization as an "economic imperative" and (2) "critical resistance" against globalization as marginalizing local economic initiatives. It discusses the government’s responses to these issues, motivated by the need for the Philippines to be globally competitive, especially as part of a community of nations in the ASEAN. This chapter also discusses critical issues arising from the local responses to the challenges of globalization, which impact on English language teaching and teacher education in the Philippines: the competing proposals for the medium of instruction, the mixed attitudes toward English, the changing standards of English, and the expanding role of the English language teacher. Finally, it outlines important insights have been gained from these discussions that may inform policy making and professional practice.

The chapter discusses the notions of norms and standards in conceptualizing the evolutionary status of World Englishes. While “standard language” is the product of its functional and formal development in Haugen’s (1972) model, in Schneider’s (2007) model it is the status attained by a regional variety that has become endonormative. From the sociolinguistic perspective, the standard may be seen by its users either inclusively, as a uniting medium for the speech community, or exclusively, as an elevated reference style of English associated with correctness and an ideology of the standard. The norms of a variety can be induced from corpus data, showing how it has differentiated itself from the source variety. Two case studies illustrate the interplay between standards and norms. In both, there is grammatical evidence of the norms shifting away from their exonormative standards yet discomfort expressed in some quarters about the popular regional forms (Singlish, Taglish). Corpus evidence suggests that metalinguistic awareness of tension between Singlish and “good English” is stronger in Singapore than the equivalents in the Philippines, correlating with their evolutionary status.