Fuchs, Robert. To appear. Colonial lag or feature retention in postcolonial varieties of English. The negative scalar conjunction “and that too” in South Asian Englishes and beyond. In Rautionaho, Paula, Hanna Parviainen, Mark Kaunisto & Arja Nurmi, eds. Social and Regional Variation in World Englishes: Local and Global Perspectives. London: Routledge. Colonial Lag or Feature Retention in Postcolonial Varieties of English: The Negative Scalar Conjunction ‘and that too’ in South Asian Englishes and beyond 1 Abstract The term ‘colonial lag’ has been used to refer to the loss of a language feature in an ancestor variety, while the same feature is maintained in a (post-)colonial variety derived from it. Recent research has been very critical of this concept, suggesting that it plays a role only at very specific points in the development of postcolonial varieties, if at all. The present study’s goal is to show that colonial lag (or, to use a more neutral term, ‘feature retention’) can play an important role in the development of specific linguistic features of postcolonial varieties of English. Furthermore, the analysis reveals that colonial lag/feature retention is mediated by substrate influence, the sociolinguistic history of the use of English in a specific country or context, and influence between postcolonial varieties. The results, derived from several corpora, show that the negative scalar conjunction and that too is a case of colonial lag/feature retention in Indian English, and has been retained to variable degrees in other South Asian varieties, from where it might have spread to South-East Asian varieties. Keywords: Colonial lag, feature retention, postcolonial varieties of English, New Englishes, Indian English, South Asian Englishes, Southeast Asian Englishes 1. Introduction Research on postcolonial varieties of English has often focussed on constructions that are new or innovative, in the sense that they emerged after the new variety was founded. A frequently invoked explanation for such features is contact with indigenous languages, often called substrate influence. For example, in Indian English (IndE) the use of the definite article with generic nouns (e.g. “Hindi was compulsory for us [...] in the school”, Sand 2004, 290), non-inversion of subject and auxiliary in questions (e.g. “Where you are going?”, Sailaja 2009, 58), and the use of itself, only, and also as presentational focus particles/focus markers (Lange 2007, 2012, Fuchs 2012) has been variously explained with the absence or presence of parallel structures in Indian languages. Substrate influence can often be identified as one of the main historical sources of differences between postcolonial varieties of English on the one and British English on the other hand (Sharma 2012). It is a major source of variation across varieties of English, on a par with general learning mechanisms (see e.g. 1 I would like to thank the editors, the reviewers and the audience at IAWE 2014 for their comments on an earlier version of this chapter. Special thanks go to James Lambert for suggesting the term ‘feature retention’.