It is both appropriate and significant that the sociolinguistic importance of data from popular culture be examined in a handbook of World Englishes. In the same way that World Englishes represent the interaction between local norms of divergence and global norms of convergence, the development of multiple popular cultures that are inevitably related to one another, yet, at the same time, distinct from one another, is a feature frequently attributed to popular cultures. In Edward Said’s (1993) description of the whole of American identity and culture as ‘a complex but not reductively unified one’ , he continues to not that ‘partly because of empire , all cultures are involved in one another ; none is single and pure , all hybrid, heterogenous [sic] , extraordinarily differentiated, and unmonolithic’ (1993 : xxv.). In much the way that World Englishes theorists celebrate the plurality of English varieties , Storey argues for the plurality – what we might think of as ‘world cultures’- as the goal of globalization of culture, ‘ to build a world culture that is not a monoculture , marked only by hierarchical distinction , but a world culture which values plurality, in which diversity and different exist in horizontal relation’ ( Storey 2003 : 120) . Relevant to the student of world Englishes, therefore , is the spread of popular culture by many of the same mechanisms that have produced globalization within linguistic varieties.