ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a comparative investigation of the use of collocation (frequent combinations of two words within a short distance of one another) (Barnbrook, Krishnamurthy, & Mason, 2013) across a large number of World English varieties. The major goals were to determine the groupings of English-speaking countries based on shared use of collocations and to verify the extent to which these groupings conformed to geographical location and/or to the bipartite classification of English in terms of inner and outer varieties. Overall, the results show the strengths and weaknesses of both the concentric circle model and regional taxonomies of WE in variationist studies.
