This is a collection of twenty-two specially selected articles from the 13th annual conference of the International Association of World Englishes (IAWE), which reflects the state of the art and development trends of research on English varieties in distinctive economic, political, cultural, ecological, sociolinguistic, and educational contexts. Importantly, this book has a strong focus on the spread, acculturation, functions, and evolution of English in diverse L2 contexts, moving away from a Eurocentric or Americentric perspective in the scope of topics presented.

The book has two parts, one on regional and the other on global perspectives on English varieties. Part 1 includes four sections, which examine linguistic, applied, pedagogical, ideological, and identity issues related to English as it is spoken in four regions: Africa, the Caribbean, Australasia, and Asia. A recurrent theme in Part 1 is the attempt to illustrate and substantiate the claim that the global spread of English is a complex and dynamic process. This process not only involves dynamic structural and functional changes in English but also changes in the identity and ownership associated with the language.

Part 2 comprises two sections. The first section promotes a globally comparative corpus approach to selected morphosyntactic and semantic features of the English language across a number of L1 and L2 varieties. The four corpus studies in this section show that L2 varieties of English exhibit region-specific linguistic features that are not shared by L1 varieties (e.g. the omission of the auxiliary), and that L1 varieties usually have a higher degree of morphosyntactic complexity than their L2 counterparts (for example, L1 varieties exhibit more word-formation types). The concluding section in Part 2 (which also serves as the book's conclusion) deals with interdisciplinary issues. Connecting and integrating ecology, lingua franca research, discourse-historical analysis, peace sociolinguistics, and literary studies with traditional World Englishes studies, the five contributions in this section offer new perspectives on, and approaches to, the diversity and sociopolitics of English.

This book presents a wide range of research orientations, approaches, and interests. The strengths of the book lie in the diversity and multiplicity of the subjects investigated and methods of analysis deployed, including acoustic analysis, corpus-linguistic studies, sociophonetics, discourse-historical analysis, surveys, and interviews, among others. It is an important and innovative addition to World Englishes studies and an appropriate resource for students, researchers, and professionals in the fields of World Englishes, English language teaching, second language acquisition, corpus linguistics, and sociolinguistics.