As South Asian Englishes have been studied regarding their structural levels but only few studies have focused on their pragmatics, this study investigates thanking strategies in the spoken parts of the British, Indian, and Sri Lankan components of the International Corpus of English. The paper answers the questions: Do VARI-ETY, speaker AGE and GENDER, context FORMALITY, POSITION within the speaker turn, and the presence of a BENEFACTOR, INTENSIFIER, and REASON influence the choice between thank and thanks; and what implications do these findings have for the notion of pragmatic nativisation? In a multifactorial analysis, a conditional inference tree identifies AGE, BENEFACTOR, INTENSIFIER, and VARIETY as significant predictors while a random forest highlights the importance of variable interactions with VARIETY.

As studies on socio-pragmatics in South Asian Englishes and – more generally – postcolonial Englishes are still rare, the present study analyses how age, formality of context, gender, topic of the conversation and type-token ratio of a given speaker influence intensifiers and downtoners in spoken Indian, Sri Lankan and British English as represented in the International Corpus of English. Central research interests cover (a) differences in the frequencies of intensifiers/downtoners regarding these factors and across the varieties studied and (b) variety-specific intensifiers/downtoners in these regional varieties. Two random forest analyses highlight that, while topic and type-token ratio are more important predictors than age and gender, all variables are – to different degrees – sensitive to variety. Possible explanations for a higher incidence of intensifiers/downtoners in British English than in Indian and Sri Lankan English include intensification strategies transferred from indigenous languages or high degrees of uncertainty avoidance in the South Asian speech communities.

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