In recent decades, the cultural and linguistic legacies of the colonial era have been superseded by the globalization of English through the international mass media, particularly via satellite television and the Internet. In many societies that were previously the colonies of Anglophone powers, ‘new Englishes’ have appeared, visible most dramatically in the ‘new literatures’ of India, Singapore, the Philippines etc. However, many of these new Englishes are much older in provenance than many linguists have previously recognized. The process of British and American imperial expansion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries took the English language to many parts of the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia, China and Japan. Indeed, it is typically in these initial stages of political, historical and cultural contact that we can identify the dynamics of ‘languages in contact’, and the origins of ‘World Englishes’, in a range of settings, including South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia.

This Major Work from Routledge, a new title in the History and Development of World Englishes series, is a unique reference collection. It brings together a range of sources, reprinted in facsimile, charting the spread of English throughout Asia and the development of ‘Asian Englishes’ from the eighteenth century through to the 1960s.