Classifying World Englishes from a Lexical Perspective: A Corpus-Based Approach.

The spread of English has led to the emergence of new English varieties worldwide. Existing quantitative approaches made use of several linguistic criteria, particularly morphological and syntactical features, in investigating variations across English varieties. Taking an alternative lexical perspective to the classification of World Englishes, this paper adopts a corpus-based approach in investigating the lexical frequency across 20 regional English varieties. Specifically, the lexical items in focus include culture-bound terms and words that have undergone semantic shift. The English varieties are categorized following a series of filtering rules and normalization techniques, and a hierarchical cluster of the varieties is subsequently formalized. Our findings generally corroborate with Kachru’s Three Circle of English model, with subtle differences to the Inner Circle-Outer Circle groupings. The taxonomy of the English varieties additionally reveals geographical and cultural correlations.