This book contributes to the field of pragmatic variation in WorldEnglishes by analysing the pragmatic markers 'kind of' and 'sort of'.After a general review of their history and current use, the bookoffers a contrastive study of their frequency, semantics and pragmatic values in four varieties of English, as represented in the GloWbEcorpus. These are, on the one hand, the two most influential innercircle varieties of English, those spoken in the United States andGreat Britain, and, on the other, two outer circle varieties spoken in former colonies of these two countries, namely the Philippines andSingapore respectively. The results strengthen the understanding ofthe effects of global processes such as Americanization andglocalization on pragmatic variation and illustrate phenomena oflinguistic convergence and divergence across space.