From Dictionary to Classroom: Philippine English in the Oxford English Dictionary and Language Education in the Philippines

The present article offers an overview of the Oxford English Dictionary’s (OED) continuing efforts to improve its coverage of words originating from world varieties of English, such as those spoken in Anglophone communities in postcolonial Southeast Asia. In these new centers of English, millions of second-language speakers use a variety of linguistic mechanisms to adapt the English word store to their unique cultural and social milieu, and the OED is documenting this distinctive vocabulary by including a wider range of lexical innovations from Southeast Asian varieties of English that more accurately reflect the way that the language is being used in the region. The article places particular emphasis on the Philippine English lexicon and the implications of its inclusion in the OED to English language teaching in the Philippines, and concludes with some recommendations on how to effectively engage with the OED’s Philippine content in the local classroom.