Reviewed by Sofia Rüdiger, University of Bayreuth

Christiane Meierkord’s book focuses on interactions between non-native speakers of English stemming from diverse, often multilingual, backgrounds. The aim, as outlined in the first chapter, is to develop a theoretical framework for the description of how varieties of English mix and blend in interaction and how the resultant varieties can be described on the levels of phonetics, phonology, morphosyntax, lexicon, and discourse. In addition, the book aims to connect theoretical considerations with descriptive accounts.

Following a short introduction, M explains how she loosely based her theoretical approach on Braj Kachru’s three circles model in order to differentiate between intranational interactions across Englishes (i.e. in the outer circle countries) and international interactions across Englishes (i.e. including participants from expanding circle countries).

Ch. 2 explicates the notion of English as a lingua franca, challenges several ‘myths’ regarding the concept, and provides a historical overview. Other lingua francas, such as Kiswahili, Malay, and Quechua are also introduced. Ch. 3 considers the nature of language contact and its processes and products: code-alternation, nonce-borrowing, and the mixing and leveling of varieties. The following chapter introduces M’s interactions-across-Englishes (IaE) model. Essentially, all participants of an interaction bring their individual features to the ‘feature pool’ from which they can then, with certain constraints, select.

Ch. 5 looks at IaEs between participants from outer circle countries located in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific (e.g. Cameroon, Nigeria, Kenya, India, Singapore, Malaysia, and Fiji). M then proceeds to focus on the situation in South Africa, detailing the countries multilingual history and ecology before introducing her own data. M’s project consists of twenty-seven interviews with participants from diverse social backgrounds, focusing on interactions between black and colored speakers. Excerpts from the interviews are used to exemplify phonological, grammatical, and lexical choices made during these IaEs.

Ch. 7 looks at trends and developments regarding the use of English in expanding circle countries and how these countries use English for international IaEs. The highly diversified situation of interaction between participants from the outer circle and participants from the expanding circle in English (termed global IaEs) is highlighted in Ch. 8.

M introduces another of her projects in which she collected data from an international hall of residence open to students from expanding and outer circle nations. Even though outer circle English speakers bring features from their local English variety to the feature pool, whereas expanding circle English speakers bring structures associated with learners’ communication strategies, all speakers seem to accommodate to each other. M analyzes these data at the levels of vocabulary, grammar, and discourse. The concluding chapter summarizes the IaE-framework, places it in relation to previous research, and offers an outlook on the future of IaEs, especially in terms of the Internet.

This book introduces an interesting new approach to interactions across varieties of English. Especially valuable is the inclusion of the chapter on interactions between outer circle and expanding circle English speakers, since this subject matter has often been neglected by previous studies. Students might especially profit from the chapter on English as a lingua franca, which provides a very good overview of the topic.