The diachronic study of Philippine English (PhilE) has recently become possible through the compilation of a PhilE corpus (Phil-Brown) at De La Salle University. The period of time defined by Phil-Brown (whose sampling period was the late 1950s to the early 1960s) and ICE-Phil, the Philippines component of the International Corpus of English (comprising texts sampled in the early 1990s), covers most of the period of time over which there has been general recognition of the existence of PhilE as a World English. Based on a selection of texts from these two corpora, we examined recent changes in the use of a set of modals ( may, might, must, ought to, shall, and should) and quasi-modals ( be able to, be going to, be supposed to, have to, need to, and want to), investigating their frequency differences, genre variation, and semantic differentiation, and comparing the findings with those for British and American English of the same period. It was found that, in general, PhilE does not closely follow either British English or American English, with distinctive patterns identified both at the macro level of the overall rates of change for the modals and quasi-modals considered as two sets, and at the micro level of frequency changes of the individual items, thereby providing support for locating PhilE in the phase of “endonormative stabilization” of Schneider’s evolutionary scale. Nevertheless, there are certain areas where PhilE appears to have been striving to “catch up” with American English over the thirty-year period, suggesting that it may not yet be ready to completely renounce its exonormative allegiance to its postcolonial “parent.”

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American English has been observed to be leading the way in the revival of the (mandative) subjunctive, leaving behind British English and its postcolonial “children”. Drawing on data from two sets of corpora, sampled in the 1960s and the 1990s, this paper examines the extent to which Philippine English, a distinctively American-rooted variety, has been following American patterns in its use of the subjunctive (both the mandative and the hypothetical were-subjunctive). Some of the findings reflect the historical exonormative dependence of Philippine English on its American “parent” (notably, its continuing preference for the subjunctive over should-periphrasis, and its dispreference for the indicative, in mandative constructions), while others reflect its evolutionary progression towards endonormative stability (for example its disregard for American maintenance of the traditional formality connotations of the mandative subjunctive, and for the American preference for subjunctive were over indicative was in subordinate counterfactual clauses).