COMMENT On ‘Researching and critiquing World Englishes’ by A. Mahboob and J. Liang Isabel Pefianco Martin* Department of English, Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines (Received 2 August 2014) Mahboob and Liang argue that studies on World Englishes, specifically those that aim to identify features of ‘new’ varieties, have failed in indexing these languages as dis- tinct varieties of English. Drawing from research on China English, the authors discuss six issues that challenge the usefulness of such studies, namely: (1) the studies do not demonstrate the uniqueness of the features; (2) the features identified reflect register variation, rather than variety distinction; (3) the norms used for describing oral texts are inappropriate; (4) the sociolinguistic contexts in which the features are used are not made available; (5) the studies lack information about the extent of use or stability of the features; and (6) the studies involved data sources that are highly problematic. The issues raised by Mahboob and Liang do not apply to research studies in the expanding circle countries alone, but to outer circle contexts as well. In research on Philippine English, for example, studies that describe the features of the so-called Philippine English variety have fallen into the same trap of taking an essentialist approach, which is ‘to identify each object-language, to describe it as accurately as possible and give it a suitable and unique name’ (Saraceni, 2010, p. 135). This name – Philippine English – presented in academic discourse as an objective reality, is promoted as the language that pushes forward the World Englishes agenda of challenging the superiority of an inner circle variety, which in the case of Philippine English is its parent, American English. Philippine English is the shield that protects its users from linguistic arrogance. Philippine English is the weapon used to defeat inner circle oppression. Because of this, Philippine English must be utilized as a pedagogical tool so that it would achieve its full potential as a new variety in Schneider ’ s(2007) differentiation phase. Sadly, no amount of linguistic description alone, no matter how rigorous or extensive this may be, would make Philippine English scholars and researchers fulfill these dreams. As recognition of the issues that challenge the concept of Philippine English as an identity-marking variety, linguists have referred to it as ‘educated’ Philippine English. This points to the reality that the data sources of the research studies are problematic, an observation that Mahboob and Liang also make in their analyses of Chinese English descriptions. While studies on China English make use of data from student interviews and newspaper texts, most descriptions of Philippine English features have developed from the International Corpus of English Philippines (ICE-PHI) corpora, which was *Email: mmartin@ateneo.edu © 2014 Taylor & Francis Asian Englishes, 2014 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13488678.2014.953766 Downloaded by [University of Sydney] at 18:22 08 October 2014