The papers in this volume were originally presented at the 1st International Conference for the Linguistics of English (ISLE1), with the theme “Setting the Agenda”, in Freiburg in October 2008, in the workshop “The Typology of Asian Englishes”, organized by Lisa Lim, and we thank the conference organizers, Bernd Kortmann and Christian Mair, for their most positive support. The collection of papers was then published in 2009 as a special issue of English World- Wide 30:2. We wish especially to express our gratitude to the editor of English World-Wide, Edgar Schneider, not only for being so amenable to a thematic issue – the first special issue in EWW – but also, and more crucially, for appreciating the significance of the innovativeness of the topic and embracing our work on it; we thank him for his enthusiasm, support and trust throughout the project, and are glad to have had EWW as an ideal platform for this collection. We are very pleased that our special issuehas now been selected for inclusionin the series “Benjamins Current Topics”, and we extendour thanks to Ankede Looper for her support in both this and the original publication. We alsothank Umberto Ansaldo for his comments on the papers as well as his advice on other aspects of this project.