In recent decades, identity has served a critical role in the study of World Englishes (WEs). At the core of this interest lies the idea that changing forms of identity construction may have played a crucial part among the groups involved in the development of New Englishes. However, not everyone agrees on the role identity may have played in the development of WEs. This chapter locates this research strand in recent theoretically based ideas about identity. It provides an overview of the different perspectives of identity within sociolinguistics and relates this to the study of WEs. It then outlines Third-Wave Variationist Sociolinguistics and some of its central issues pertaining to WEs, identity, and indexicality. Representative studies are considered that provide empirical evidence of identity performance and indexicality in a variety of local and global contexts. These concern, in particular, (1) the social meanings of features of English at the micro level of interaction, in which identity work is most transparent, and (2) the perception of linguistic features.
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