This paper focuses on the ‘intrusive as’-construction in complex-transitive verb complementation which was so far only attested for Indian English. Our data show that ‘intrusive as’ is a common feature in South Asian Englishes generally, albeit to different degrees. Comparing the South Asian data with data from Learner Englishes allows to test several hypotheses concerning the origin of ‘intrusive as’; the most robust correlation within the data points to redundancy as a motivating factor for both ESL and EFL contexts.