Of the social factors that are known to influence linguistic behaviour, gender is considered to be among the clearest and most consistent (Labov, Reference Labov1990). A substantial body of cognitive linguistic, sociolinguistic and variationist research demonstrates that there are differences in the linguistic behaviour of men and women, and that men and women play different roles in processes of language variation and change. Currently, language and gender is a particularly vibrant area of research and theory development within the larger study of language and society (Ehrlich, Meyerhoff & Holmes, Reference Ehrlich, Meyerhoff and Holmes2014). The question of whether and how women and men differ in their language is a topic of keen interest to scholars and scholarly interest in this topic has resulted in a steady stream of publications on gender-based variation in language. As the latest addition to the series Studies in English Language, this collection of essays aims to explore the degree of variation based on gender in native-, second- and foreign-language varieties, by using examples from World Englishes in Africa, America, Asia, Britain and the Caribbean.

This volume opens with a general introduction by the editor, which briefly introduces research on genderlectal variation in the English-speaking world. The following chapters in this book are arranged to reflect the continuation and expansion of research into gender and World Englishes in that Chapters 2–5 study traditionally genderlectal objects of investigation in World Englishes and Chapters 6–9 examine structures with rich histories of research in World Englishes to include a specific focus on gender. Chapter 2 presents a case study on variation and change in the quotative system of Ghanaian English (GhanE). After describing local and global variants in the quotative repertoire of GhanE, the chapter zooms in on the profile of the new global quotative be like and its gender association. It investigates whether female speakers are also the prime users of be like in this variety of English, even though gender relations in this country differ from those found in North America, where English is spoken as a native language (ENL).

In Chapter 3, by investigating the use of intensifiers in spoken Indian English (IndE) in comparison to British English, Robert Fuchs aims to determine how far their frequency of use is influenced by the gender and age of the speakers, the composition of groups and the formality of the context. The analysis demonstrates that the interaction of multiple factors, including gender, age and formality, needs to be taken into account in order to arrive at a full analysis. Fuchs' study has taken a first step towards broadening our view of gender-based variation in English. Chapter 4 aims at a finer level of granularity in considering the repertoire of tag questions in IndE, highlighting the role of gender in social interactions. The data derived from the International Corpus of English for India private dialogues are revisited with a multifactorial analysis to determine the interplay of sociolinguistic context factors for the occurrence of specific tag question types. Results show although Indian women notably use more tag questions overall, speaker gender has a weak effect on the type of tag question chosen as indicated by various association measures.

In Chapter 5, Tobias Bernaisch investigates 16 hedging devices in data from the International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English for Hong Kong, the Philippines and Singapore, alongside British English native-speaker reference data. The regional background and the gender of the speakers as well as whether spoken or written texts are produced could be profiled as robust factors influencing the choice of a hedge in a given communicative setting. It is argued that the variety-specific structures and preferences of a postcolonial English permeate all three Kachruvian Circles in miniature, suggesting postcolonial English has reached endonormative stabilisation. Chapter 6 seeks to add to the research of syntactic alternations across varieties by investigating genitive choice in Sri Lankan English. Results show that the language-external factors gender and variety moderate the effects of language-internal constraints on genitive choice. The authors arrive at the conclusion that Sri Lankan females use s-genitives more often than Sri Lankan men, and that genderlectal differences are more pronounced in Sri Lankan than in British English.

In Chapter 7, Melanie Röthlisberger analyses the effect of gender in the choice of dative variant in acrolectal Jamaican English. 615 variable dative tokens have been sampled from the spoken component of ICE-Jamaica and analysed with regard to the effect of eleven language-internal and three language-external predictors. The results of the conditional random forests show that language-internal constraints outweigh language-external factors in dative choice. The subsequent mixed-effects regression further illustrate that the speaker's gender influences variation between the double-object and prepositional dative significantly. Chapter 8 considers colloquialisation and democratisation in Hong Kong English (HKE) and in IndE, two varieties that have been found to differ notably regarding the presence of colloquialisms and register variation. Consonant with previous work, colloquialisation and democratisation can be considered global tendencies, in that evidence for them is found in two Outer-Circle varieties with different histories and traditions, namely HKE and IndE. In addition, the results obtained prove that these are general processes that operate systematically regardless of the specific language-internal factors that may condition the variation.

In the final Chapter, Melanie A. Law and Haidee Kotze focus on the role of gender variation in processes of ongoing change in World Englishes, casting this through the lens of editorial practices in one variety of English, namely South African English. With a focus on the genitive alternation, they extract relevant instances and annotate them for language-internal factors and language-external factors. The findings demonstrate that gender plays almost no visible role in conditioning the genitive alternation in writing or in editing. This might suggest that gender-differentiated linguistic behaviour is less evident at the level of grammar than it is in lexis and pronunciation.

By using an empirical platform for unbiased evaluations and discussions of gender in World Englishes, this volume enhances existing models of World Englishes by rooting them more explicitly in individual speakers and their sociobiographic characteristics. As the first large-scale and methodologically comparatively uniform attempt at empirically capturing the degrees of genderlectal variation worldwide, this volume holds merits in several aspects.

First and foremost, the strength of the collection lies in its methodological advance. To empirically explore whether genderlectal similarities and/or differences can be attested with regard to certain structural features, analysing how people in different parts of the world speak and write in real-life contexts appears a favourable option (p. 5). Corpus-linguistic methodology has been adopted to obtain a sociolinguistically and empirically valid picture of gender in World Englishes. Corpora of World Englishes featured in this volume – principally the ICE – contain authentic language data in the sense that the speech and writing of the corpus informants occurred naturally and were not prompted/biased by the corpus compilers. The analysis of such authentic text material offers unmediated insights into how English is actually used by female and male speakers of the regional varieties under scrutiny. Besides, each corpus featured in this volume is freely accessible for academic purposes, which means that other researchers can check the statistics of the phenomena studied and – probably more importantly – the arguments constructed on their basis. This intersubjective verifiability adds a high degree of analytic and argumentative transparency as well as data-induced neutrality, which is particularly welcome in a sensitive and hotly debated area like genderlectal research (p. 6).

Secondly, the scope of inquiry in gender and world Englishes research has been extended. This book constitutes an attempt at bridging the paradigm gap between English as a foreign language (EFL) and ESL research in the form of studies that jointly analyse ESL and EFL varieties. In recent years, an integrated approach to variation in English worldwide has been adopted by more studies, and influential models originally devised for ESL varieties have also been adapted to EFL contexts. This volume is a step forward towards extending research into EFL versus ESL, since it no longer assumes that each speaker in a postcolonial territory is automatically a competent second- or first- language user and that everybody speaking English in a non-postcolonial country should automatically be categorised as a learner of English (p. 3). For example, Bernaisch in Chapter 5 offers an analysis of hedges contrasting their use by learners from Hong Kong, Singapore and the Philippines with their use by competent second-language users from the same regions.

That said, Gender in World Englishes is a stimulating contribution with adventurous explorations of the degrees of genderlectal variation worldwide. This seminal book offers a starting point for researcher in the research domain of language and gender to clarify new research agendas and challenges that can drive the fields forward.