Reviewed by Kanavillil Rajagopalan, State University at Campinas (UNICAMP)

This book contains a collection of papers looking at ‘the contours of scholarship about the English language’ which, according to the editors, were ‘redrawn dramatically’ (1) after World War II. It comprises sixteen chapters, divided into four parts. The final chapter in each part is a response to the three others. As the blurb on the back cover announces, ‘[e]ach part is structured neither miscellaneously nor as a debate, but rather as an unfolding disciplinary conversation’. The editors declare in their introduction to the book their indebtedness to the late Richard Weld Bailey, whose monumental contribution to English studies (fifty-one entries in the bibliographical references) has inspired most of the contributors and whose name figures prominently in many of the chapters.

Part 1, titled ‘American dialects’, is concerned with work on dialects of American English (e.g. Michigander dialect, African American English). The response article highlights the author’s perspective on the issue as someone who was brought up in a low-prestige language community and also highlights the relevance of Bailey’s seminal work to our current discussions.

Part 2 is concerned with the history of the English language. The three chapters look at the concept of ‘talking proper’, developed in nineteenth-century England, the etymology of the word wife, and the growing presence of English in Asia, with focus on Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan. Each of these chapters gesture toward the future of the language, as the response piece rightly points out.

English lexicography is the theme of Part 3. The chapters address issues such as the enormous word-creating potential of American English manifested through different techniques of word formation, how quotation paragraph work in historical dictionaries, and why there has been little research on Irish English, in particular on compiling a dictionary of this variety based on historical principles. The response article to the three papers in this part draws attention to modern digital technology in the creation of dictionaries and how it can lead to lexicography as a collaborative enterprise.

Part 4 is titled ‘English language studies and education’ and consists of three chapters addressing the issues of how much progress has been made in research on African American English and the way it is dealt with in educational circles, what kind of changes have occurred in the last fifty years in language use and language scholarship, and ‘returning language to writing studies’ (298) as the final chapter declares in its very title.

In addition to the general introduction, each part also has its own separate introduction to the themes discussed in the chapters, which helps to put in perspective the rationale for why the chapters were selected. The book includes a sixty-three-page bibliography, brief notes on the contributors, and an index of key terms.