When considering the structure of New Englishes which have evolved in multilingual, mostly post-colonial contexts of Asia (thus, Asian Englishes), the significant factors to be considered are: 1) the variety/ies of the English lexifier that entered the local context; 2) the nature of transmission of English to the local population; and 3) the local, i.e. substrate, languages of the community in which the New English emerges. This third factor is the focus of the five papers in this volume: they investigate the structure of Asian varieties of English by exploring the relationship between the...

This volume brings together contributions that explore the increasingly important roles that English plays in Asia, including its contribution to economic growth, national imaginaries and creative writing. These are issues that are political in a broad sense, but the diversity of Asian contexts also means that the social, political and cultural ramifications of the spread of English into Asia will have to be understood in relation to the challenges facing specific societies. The chapters in the book collectively illustrate this diversity by focusing on countries from South Asia, Southeast...