This paper looks at the emergence of Asian English varieties in terms of the evolution of new grammatical features. It is proposed that, in order to reach a thorough understanding of how the unique combination of grammatical features that define specific Asian Englishes come about, one must approach these features from a typological and evolutionary perspective which allows to contrast them not only with Standard English varieties but also with the Asian languages with which these come into contact. As restructured vernaculars, Asian English varieties are de facto contact languages, and, as such, evolve as a consequence of selection of features from a multilingual pool. In this pool, features of Asian varieties play a significant role in determining the output grammar and must therefore be appreciated in their own right. In order to illustrate these points, this paper introduces an evolutionary view of contact language formation, and presents a set of features typical of Singlish, which are all instances of replication of Asian, not English, features.