ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we begin by giving a brief historical overview of the development of English language corpora, and trace the development of corpus-based studies of world Englishes. We then look at recent changes in the field of world Englishes, especially in relation to the status of English in second-language countries. Finally, we discuss some of the implications of these changes, and of recent technological change, for the future of corpus-based studies of world Englishes. Specifically, we emphasise the need for (ideally) automated annotation of corpora to an agreed standard, and the need to collect more spoken data from a wide variety of world Englishes.
