The term ‘South-East Asia” has considerable currency outside linguistics and has a broadly geographical reference, namely to countries which are at the south-east corner of the Asian mainland and to the many islands which are to be found in the area off this land-mass, bordered in the west by the Indian Ocean, in the south by Australia, in the east and north-east by the Pacific and in the north by the South China Sea. In essence, this encompasses the countries Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines. For the purposes of the present linguistic discussion, Hong Kong is taken as falling into the ambit of South-East Asia (Bolton 2000a), a practice which is sometimes reflected in linguistic treatments of English there (see Platt 1982), although it lies some distance north of the Philippines in the south of China. This allows one to treat the English language in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia (Nabahon 1983), the Philippines and Hong Kong together (but see McArthur 2002: 348–72 who treates Hong Kong English in a section on East Asia).

For the current chapter the title ‘South-East Asian Englishes’ has been chosen deliberately. The plural is necessary for several reasons. The areas where these Englishes exist are not geographically contiguous (contrast this with South Asian English). The English-using countries of South-East Asia have typologically different background languages and different colonial pasts, mostly British, but in the case of the Philippines, American.