ABSTRACT
There has been increasing interest in the different types of variation that can be found in different Englishes as spoken and written around the world. Early work on world Englishes tended to focus on pronunciation features and local dialect items, but this variation can be seen in syntactic structures too. A non-parametric test suitable for comparison of two groups is called the Mann-Whitney U test; this ranks all the scores in the analysis and then examines whether one group in general ranks higher than the other. A Mann-Whitney U test was run on the above data and showed that UK film reviews ranked as using the present perfect tense more than Indian film reviews, with mean ranks of 33 and 47 respectively. The Mann-Whitney U test showed that this ranking demonstrated a significant difference between the two groups of reviews.
