World Englishes explores the way in which the English language is developing and spoken around the world. Situated within the richly multilingual and multicultural postcolonial society of Hong Kong as well as in close proximity to other postcolonial societies in Asia, the Department of English is a leading research hub for the documentation and exploration of new varieties of English, including Asian Englishes such as Hong Kong English, China English, and Filipino English, among others. Our internationally renowned scholars conduct cutting-edge research across several areas of world Englishes.
Jette Hansen Edwards’ research has explored the native speaker construct in multilingual societies; the intelligibility of Asian Englishes; the phonological features of China English and Hong Kong English; and politics, attitudes, and youth identity in Hong Kong pre and post the Umbrella Movement. Her research on attitudes towards Hong Kong English have been cited in The Economist and she has written several invited articles on Hong Kong English and China English for the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs. She has also produced three digital projects on World Englishes: Telling Stories: Linguistic Diversity in Hong Kong, English Accents Worldwide and The History of the English Language. She is the author of The Sounds of English around the World: An Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology, published by Cambridge University Press (2022). Wilkinson Daniel Wong Gonzales' research focuses on the interactions of world English(es) with many social factors such as identity, age, ethnicity, and gender. He is particularly interested in examining Englishes from a contact linguistics and sociolinguistics perspective. Most of his work focuses on East Asian Englishes such as Philippine English and Singapore English, some of which have been published in World Englishes, Asian Englishes, and English Today. He manages the multilingual Lannang Corpus - a corpus contain Lánnang-uè, English, Hokkien, and Tagalog utterances as used by the metropolitan Manila Lannangs; he is also currently working on creating a set of 100-million word sociolinguistic corpora in East Asia based on verbal and online communication data. As of 2022, he has compiled the Twitter Corpus of Philippine Englishes (TCOPE) and is working on compiling the Twitter Corpus of Englishes in Hong Kong (TCOEHK). He is one of the collaborators of the Corpus of Singapore English Messaging (CoSEM) project. David Huddart has examined the relationship between world Englishes and postcolonial studies in his book Involuntary Associations: World Englishes and Postcolonial Studies (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014). Prem Phyak investigates the politics of English as a subject of teaching and medium of instruction. He takes a critical approach to analyse the sociocultural, political and economic power of English in across domains such as education and public spaces in multilingual contexts.