Much research on world Englishes (WE) since the 1980s has yet to impact significantly upon recent applied linguistics work in the areas of instruction, curriculum, testing and policy. Much of the received wisdom has been informed by the paradigm established by the earlier study of International English (IE) and its attendant foci in teaching English to speakers of other languages. However, with the emergence of WE as an increasingly recognizable and legitimate discipline in its own right, scholars in Southeast Asia are now paying attention to the research implications of a shift in paradigm and are investigating features associated with new Englishes, analysing mutual intelligibility and communication in English among Association of Southeast Asian Nations users, and establishing genre-based analyses. This paper has a dual focus: the first is to survey current approaches to research on Southeast Asian Englishes, and to discuss the relevance of a world Englishes approach to scholarship in this area. The second part of this paper introduces the papers in this special issue which offer topics relating to Southeast Asia and beyond.