With arguably the largest number of speakers of any postcolonial variety of English and a history stretching over four centuries, Indian English has received more attention in the literature than many other varieties. This chapter will track its emergence and development from the end of the sixteenth century onwards, from early English-speaking travelers and the earliest English trading ventures via the gradual extension of British colonial power over the subcontinent and its linguistic consequences, to the diffusion of English to ever greater sections of society at the start of the twenty-first century. Regarding the structure of Indian English, this chapter will take advantage of the large body of corpus-based research which has probed into the actual frequency and distribution of a wide range of Indian English features, allowing for a more empirical approach towards Indian English, encompassing its phonology, morphosyntax, lexicon and (discourse) pragmatics.

Sri Lankan English is a postcolonial English in South Asia with its origins dating back to the end of the eighteenth century. Its evolution is reflected in a plethora of unique English-language structures and distinct quantitative preferences. Against the background of its historical development, this chapter provides an overview of the local features of Sri Lankan English in its sound system, lexis, syntax and semantics, but also points out that Sri Lankan English features traces of pragmatic nativisation. The documentation of the structural and pragmatic emancipation of Sri Lankan English from its historical input variety of British English is framed by sociolinguistic findings about speaker groups and domains associated with English as well as about attitudes towards different varieties of English. Together with a global account of Sri Lankan English from both formal and sociolinguistic perspectives, this chapter considers potential epicentral constellations among South Asian Englishes.

The current chapter provides a historical sociolinguistic overview of English in Zimbabwe. It challenges anachronistic descriptive taxonomies that in colonial times aligned ‘L1 English’ with the variety spoken by white English-speaking monolinguals and ‘L2 English’ with black multilinguals for whom English might be a second, third or even fourth spoken language and stereotypically, assumed to be marked by pronunciation and grammatical features from the background language(s). This chapter describes varieties of English in the Zimbabwe setting at the levels of morphosyntax, phonology, lexis and discourse in both spoken and written contexts, drawing both upon the research literature and the author’s own corpus of conversational and interview speech of Zimbabweans of a range of ages, ethnicities, educational, socio-economic and language backgrounds. The chapter presents English in Zimbabwe as a collection of varieties and repertoires, performed contingently depending upon such factors as ethnicity and race, time, audience, ideology, rural-urban divide, socio-economic conditions and education.