Reviewed by Gabriela Brozbă, Romanian-American University

This slim book collects six articles which constituted the substance of a workshop of the same name organized by Lisa Lim at the First International Conference for the Linguistics of English. The book gathers analyses on four Asian varieties of English: Singapore English (SgE), Indian English (IndE), Hong Kong English (HKE), and Thai English (ThaiE), in which some similarities and dissimilarities are delineated from a clearly typological perspective, based on judicious and well-argued assessments of quantitative and qualitative data.

In the opening chapter, Lisa Lim and Nikolas Gisborne explain the need for a typological approach in assessing the state and features of the New Englishes by looking at the structural features of the substrate languages and the ecologies from which they emerged. Additionally, the editors of the book bring forward some of the reasons why Asian Englishes should be treated as a challenging topic for research.

In his chapter, Umberto Ansaldo underlines the importance of an evolutionary approach to language change rather than treating it as a departure from the norm or as a result of system-internal processes, especially when one deals with contact language formation. Such delimitations become clear when the focus shifts to grammatical features of SgE (e.g. zero copula, predicative adjectives, and topic prominence), whose selection is based on their numerical and typological frequency in the dominant substrate languages (e.g. Sinitic and Malay).

The third article, contributed by Nikolas Gisborne, covers a central aspect of HKE morphosyntax, namely finiteness, in relation to the absence of copula and the blurred lexical boundaries between verbs and adjectives. The claim for non-finiteness in HKE is not absolute. HKE is at the third stage of its developmental cycle (nativization), according to Edgar Schneider’s dynamic model, and there is some degree of variability.

Addressing diversity, Devyani Sharma looks into the behavior of three of the so-called ‘angloversals’ in IndE and SgE. A closer analysis of past-tense omission, over-extension of the progressive, and copula omission reveals that in most cases one deals only with surface similarities, because there are systemic differences in imperfectivity-marking (substrate-sensitive) and copula omission (grammatically conditioned by the substrate languages as well).

In the instrumental study by Priyankoo Sarmah, Divya Verma Gogoi, and Caroline Wiltshire, the authors highlight the distinctiveness of ThaiE. Segmental and suprasegmental phonological aspects are compared with those of the substrate language (Thai), British English (BrE), and two other Asian Englishes (e.g. HKE and SgE). At the prosodic level, the rhythm of ThaiE closely resembles BrE when compared to that of SgE (as a transfer of the peculiar rhythmic characteristics of Thai), whereas in terms of vowel systems the Asian varieties at issue are more alike, as a reflex of the typological commonalities in their substrates.

In the final article, Lisa Lim approaches a topic that has seldom been touched upon in research on Asian Englishes: the inappropriateness of treating Asian varieties of English from a stress/intonation traditional viewpoint, and a shift to their interpretation as tone languages, given the structural features of the substrate languages. This claim is supported by evidence from SgE, where both the internal ecology (dominance of tone substrate languages) and the external ecology (high proportion of first-language users of such languages) favor such an interpretation.