Reviewed by Kanavillil Rajagopalan, State University at Campinas, Brazil

This volume contains a selection of papers from the thirteenth International Association of World Englishes conference, held in Regensburg, Germany, in October 2007. The papers are presented in two parts, ‘Focus on’ and ‘The global perspective’. Part 1 is further divided into four sections: ‘Africa’ (two papers), ‘The Caribbean’ (three papers), ‘Australia and New Zealand’ (two papers), and ‘Asia’ (six papers). Part 2 is divided into two sections, ‘Comparative studies’ and ‘New approaches’.

The papers collected in Part 1 concentrate on peculiarities of specific varieties of English such as the so-called ‘GOOSE vowel’ in South African English, rhoticity in educated Jamaican English, and certain discourse particles in Indian English, as in ‘Where’s the party, yaar!’ Some of the papers report on surveys and bird’s eye views of emerging or already consolidated varieties of English such as Ghanaian English, the role of standard English in Trinidadian secondary schools, Australian English as ‘a regional epicenter’, and the intelligibility of Japanese accents.

Alongside these mostly descriptive studies, some papers address theoretically more challenging issues, such as Lisa Lim’s ‘Not just an “Outer Circle”, “Asian” English: Singapore English and the significance of ecology’ (179–206), which foregrounds the need to take the whole of linguistic ecology into account to capture its inherent dynamicity.

The papers in Part 2 are all meatier theoretically. Of the four papers in the first section, one uses empirical, mostly morphosyntactic, evidence from some World Englishes (WE) to challenge the modern linguistic sacred cow of the ‘equi-complexity axiom’. Another looks at the progressive passive against the backdrop of the tension between the global feature and local norms; and the other two address the issues of the common core of different WEs and differences in word-formation among them.

Finally, the section on new approaches addresses a host of issues like the indigenization of English in North America, English as a lingua franca, the theoretical ‘hot potato’ of the English native speaker, WEs in the context of ‘Peace Sociolinguistics’, and the sensitive topic of WEs and the literary canon.

Ever since Braj Kachru promoted the study of WEs, scholars from all over the world have contributed to its development in diverse ways. Over the years it has also become clear that these and kindred linguistic phenomena, relatively neglected in the past, can nevertheless afford us important insights into the workings of the very object of our research, language. The papers that comprise this volume will greatly contribute to that end.