The introduction provides a brief overview of the topic, outlining the status of English as a global language and pointing at the lack of research when it comes to patterns of conversational interaction in Englishes of the Outer and Expanding Circle. Language and culture are closely interrelated, yet existing research on English interactions has so far focused on only one small part of the English language complex – that of Inner Circle varieties such as British or American English. The chapter ends with an overview of the research questions that will be addressed in this study as well as a detailed outline of the book.

This chapter is concerned with the question why conversational interaction has been described as orderly and supportive in some contexts but is perceived as chaotic or interruptive in others. After scrutinising the data for signs of ‘interruptiveness’ it can be shown that this concept is often confused with a preference for more direct turn-taking strategies. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the apparent dichotomy of cooperation and competition and suggests regarding turn-taking as an instance of coopetition instead.

The last chapter sums up the main findings of the study and gives an outlook on potential further research at the interface of CA and World Englishes.

This chapter provides a quantitative analysis the strategy clusters Southeast Asian and Caribbean interactants use for claiming or holding a turn at talk. It can be shown that speaker groups essentially use the same strategy combinations, although some differences also become apparent. The second part of the chapter zooms in on the frequency of selected phonetic and syntactic resources and compares their usage across the two speaker groups. Again, both similarities and differences between the speaker groups become apparent; for example, with respect to the usage of tempo downsteps or direct requests. These findings support the notion of a locally inflected conversational infrastructure, which is influenced by both cultural context and variety-specific preferences.

This chapter provides an in-depth analysis of the resources Southeast Asian and Caribbean speakers of English use to claim or hold a turn at talk. Four larger strategy groups are described and compared: latches and overlaps, phonetic resources, lexical resources, and syntactic strategies. The chapter describes how these are realised by the individual speaker groups and compares this to previous research on Inner Circle Englishes. It can be shown that speaker groups essentially have access to the same set of resources but exhibit different preferences with respect to which strategies they prefer for organising turn-taking in conversational interaction.

This chapter provides a detailed analysis of the different types and scenarios of speaker change in Southeast Asian and Caribbean conversations. The three general types of turn allocation – next speaker selection, self-selection, and current speaker continuation – and their concrete realisations in the data are examined both qualitatively and quantitatively. It can be shown that turn-taking in Southeast Asian and Caribbean English interactions is rule-governed and exhibits patterns similar to those that have been found in Inner Circle English conversations. Nevertheless, some differences between the speaker groups are found; for example, when it comes to how likely conversationalists are to yield the floor to a current speaker.

This chapter describes the theoretical foundations of the study. The study is located at the interface of two scientific areas that had not had much contact before: Conversation Analysis and World Englishes. In the first two sections of the chapter, central theoretical and methodological tenets in both fields are introduced. The last section addresses epistemological differences between the traditions and provides a rationale for why and how Conversation Analysis and World Englishes can still be reconciled in a fruitful way.

This chapter describes the process of choosing and preparing the data investigated in the present study. It starts with a definition of the notion of ‘culture’ and then introduces the data that form the basis for the analysis. The interactions analysed were extracted from two larger corpora, the Asian Corpus of English (ACE) and two components of the International Corpus of English (ICE) – ICE-Jamaica and ICE-Trinidad and Tobago. The chapter then describes how a collection of unscripted natural conversations was compiled for the project and briefly comments on the transcription process involved. It illustrates how qualitative analysis can be successfully combined with subsequent quantification and shows why this is essential in comparative conversation analytic research. The last part of the chapter provides a detailed description of the codification procedure and the formal coding system developed for the project, before summarising the steps involved in the quantitative part of the analysis.