With the increasing accessibility of online corpora and the advancement of corpus tools, the use of corpus tools and methods is becoming increasingly common in the field of World Englishes (WE). Large online English corpora such as the Global Web-based Corpus of English (GloWbE) handily provide useful tools and resources for ‘a wide range of studies on lexical, phraseological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic variation among dialects of English’ (Davies & Fuchs, Reference Davies and Fuchs2015) and are an important ‘toolbox’ of resources for WE study by researchers. However, for WE teachers and researchers, especially newcomers, two of the most important challenges are how to properly incorporate corpus tools and methods into WE instruction and how to accurately evaluate the status of various corpus tools and methods in research practice. Fortunately, this timely book, Corpus Linguistics and World Englishes: A Guide for Research, provides a comprehensive introduction to the field of corpus-based WE research and is immensely helpful for addressing the previously mentioned challenges. This book gives a detailed account of how to analyze WE using corpus-based linguistic methods. Along with case studies, hands-on exercises and open questions in Chapters 2–7, the authors, Claudia Lange and Sven Leuckert, demonstrate the use of freely available corpora, corpus interfaces and corpus analysis tools to conduct empirical WE studies. Applying case studies in the explanation of relevant concepts and methods, this book also provides an introduction to the theory and practice of WE analysis, illustrates the basics of corpus-linguistics methods and expounds on several key corpora for WE research, including the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), the International Corpus of English (ICE), and GloWbE. The aim of this book is to provide an accessible and practical guide to corpus-based WE research for graduate students, university instructors and researchers interested in WE. Some chapters may also provide insights for seasoned corpus linguists who are unfamiliar with WE and what they offer with regard to the variation of languages. The book is comprised of eight chapters. The first and last, Chapters 1 and 8, introduce and conclude the book, while Chapters 2 to 7 expound and illustrate the applications of corpora to WE study.

In the following text, I will briefly introduce and analyze these chapters and review the features and the weaknesses of the book as a whole.

Chapter 1 ‘Introduction’ initially introduces the fields of WE and corpus linguistics and then gradually merges the two fields together. Chapter 2 ‘World English’ proceeds with a historical perspective on the development of English from an island language to a global means of communication and gradually moves to the present by answering some key questions in the field of WE. For example: how did English spread globally and become a major global language? How can we categorize the different forms of English worldwide? And, eventually, how can we study variation in WE via corpus linguistics tools?

Chapter 3 ‘Corpus-linguistics approach’ focuses on corpus linguistics. The authors of the book first introduce some theoretical and practical basics of corpus-linguistic study: corpus, corpus-based approach, corpus-driven approach, n-grams, and steps in corpus analysis. This is followed by a brief explanation of some important terms and concepts in the field. Additionally, the authors in this chapter emphasize the importance of the research question and ask readers to consider the quality of any data source when they conduct corpus-based research. Eventually, the hands-on exercises provided in this chapter give readers the opportunity to apply what they have just read.

Bringing together what readers have learned in the previous two chapters, Chapter 4 ‘Corpora and World Englishes’ offers an overview of WE corpora available, methods of accessing them, the way how they are structured, the types of texts they contain, and additional information. This is of great importance to unseasoned students or researchers of corpus-based WE research, since one of the basic prerequisites for evaluating corpus findings is ‘knowing corpora used in research’. In addition, this chapter also gives readers ideas of how to create their own corpus for WE research.

After readers are familiarized with a series of corpora and the retrieval of data from them, Chapter 5 ‘Tracing variation and change in World Englishes’ moves to discuss language variation and change with special reference to WE. In this chapter, Lange and Leuckert initially introduce variation and language change and then explicate the relationship among variation, mistake, and innovation in language. The emphasis of the authors moves from variation in language to the reasons for variation in the context of postcolonial Englishes. Moreover, the chapter also discusses the role of language contact in shaping the Englishes spoken in a multilingual environment.

Chapter 6 ‘Interpreting variation and change in World Englishes’ offers five corpus-based case studies of WE, ranging from the lexicon, via the verb phrase, noun phrase and sentence structure to the pragmatics of utterances in context. The studies illustrate the manifold possibilities of researching WE via corpus methods and help readers to reflect on how the case studies can be used as a guide for their own research projects. The sample case studies are ‘more accessible to beginners’ (p. 165) so that they are useful for novices in starting corpus-based WE research. In sum, this chapter shows readers useful glimpse of the amazing scope of WE and the many ways that corpus linguistics can help them to explore it.

Moving beyond traditional approaches to WE, Chapter 7 ‘World Englishes, Learner Englishes, and English as a Lingua Franca’ turns to discussing Learner Englishes (LE), English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) and corpus design. In this chapter, the authors try to link LE, ELF, and ENL to WE. They first introduce background information about WE, LE and EFL and then discuss learner corpus design and some learner corpora. Furthermore, the chapter provides an in-depth look at a case study on phrasal verbs (PVs) featuring up (Gilquin, Reference Gilquin2015), which was carried out with corpus data of ‘New Englishes’, LE and ENL, which gives an incentive for a follow-up study. Finally, the chapter also considers corpora and case studies related to ELF.

The final chapter of the book, Chapter 8, offers an overview of the state of the art in the field of WE and the way ahead. It shows how corpus-based WE studies remain at the frontier of English linguistics, since new corpora, new analysis tools, new models, and more complex statistical methods are developed.

To sum up, by the aforementioned eight chapters the two authors want to emphasize: (1) variation in Englishes used all over the world is something valuable because ‘it is an expression and an artefact of individuality, of different cultures, and of history’ (p. 201); (2) corpora are the window into this, which makes variation visible and quantifiable; and (3) new corpora, new tools, new models and more statistical methods can help us further reveal the features of WE.

Corpus Linguistics and World Englishes: A Guide for Research, is commendable for four reasons. First, it provides a comprehensive and practical introduction to the field of corpus-based WE research. In addition, one of the features of the book is its key components: key terms; in-text exercises and questions; chapter exercises; and open exercises and discussion questions. These are immensely helpful for readers, especially for inexperienced students embarking on WE or corpus linguistics. Furthermore, the five replication tasks in Chapter 6 can be particularly useful for some novice readers to start their studies or projects by replicating the experts’ research steps. And finally, there are no obscure terms in the book. The key terms in WE are clearly explained and illustrated, so readers can much better understand this book. However, it needs to be noted that the book may not be so accessible for readers with little previous knowledge of WE, as it assumes substantial prior knowledge of WE, such as the history of WE, the conceptualization of WE, variation in WE, etc.. The book would have been improved by an appendix and an index to the corpus tools or statistical tools used in the book. This would be useful for readers using the book who lack knowledge of corpus linguistics. In conclusion, this book is readable and instructive, and is especially suitable for graduate students and researchers interested in studying or conducting corpus related WE research.