One of the characteristic features of South Africa, which the apartheid system used to legitimate its divide and rule ideology, is linguistic diversity. The country has a multiracial population of 59.39 million (at 2021) speaking at least some 25 languages divided into three major groups: African languages (e.g., Zulu, Xhosa, etc.), European languages (e.g., English, Afrikaans, Portuguese, etc.), and Asian languages (mostly Chinese languages, e.g., Cantonese and Hakka; and Indian languages, e.g., Hindi, Tamil, etc.). It is within this web of languages that English functions in South Africa. Contact between English and South Africa's other languages has resulted in a wide range of sociolinguistic phenomena that the book under review investigates, among them language variation and change, codeswitching, language shift, and multilingualism. Also, as the editor notes on the back cover, the book investigates ‘the challenges that South Africans face as a result of multilingualism and globalization in both education and social interaction.’

The book consists of 18 chapters preceded by front matters and followed by a timeline for South African History (pp. 394–399), a glossary (pp. 400–414), and a subject index (pp. 415–420). The chapters are divided evenly into three sections, each with 6 chapters.

Section 1 – A Framework for English in South Africa – offers a historical background to the social and linguistic life of English in South Africa, along with theoretical frameworks against which the language can be studied. This section consists of the following chapters: Chapter 1, English in South Africa: Contact and Change (Raymond Hickey, pp. 3–15), presents a review of the history, development, and literature on English in South Africa, along with a brief note on the changes that the language has undergone over time in the polity. Chapter 2, South Africa in the Linguistic Modeling of World Englishes (Edgar Schneider, pp. 16–29), reviews earlier literature on South African English (SAfE), highlights attempts at modeling the variety and its subvarieties in the light of World Englishes theories, and identifies some of the issues that need to be addressed to gain a better understanding of SAfE. Chapter 3, South African English, the Dynamic Model and the Challenge of Afrikaans Influence (Ian Bekker, pp. 30–51), critiques Schneider's Dynamic Model (DM) in light of the complexity of SAfE. Chapter 4, The Historical Development of South African English: Semantic Features (Ronel Wasserman, pp. 52–73), is a microlinguistic study into the development of some semantic features of SAfE over time and across registers. Chapter 5, Regionality in South African English (Deon du Plessis, Ian Bekker & Raymond Hickey, pp. 74–100), is also a microlinguistic study into SAfE, but with the focus on regional variation in the realization of various vowels. The last chapter in this section, by Haidee Kotze (pp. 101–126), explores how editing reflects and affects endornormativity and convergence in South Africa's written Englishes.

Section 2 – Sociolinguistics, Globalization, and Multilingualism – discusses issues in language contact, language variation, language policy and planning, and decoloniality. In Chapter 7 (pp. 129–150), Tessa Dowling, Kay McCormick, and Charlyn Dyers survey language contact and multilingual practices in Cape Town. They note that despite the dominance of standard English in public domains, non-standard English and other languages are widely used and valued in other contexts (e.g., hip-hop and rap clubs) in the city. In Chapter 8 (pp. 151–175), Alida Chevalier delivers a microlinguistic account of vowel shift in SAfE, with the focus on the reverse short front vowel (RVS). Heather Brookes, in Chapter 9 (pp. 176-195), examines the role of English in South African Tsotsitaals, language varieties associated mostly with the youth. The next Chapter (pp. 196–215), by Russell Kaschula, raises the question whether Africa can develop economically using former colonial languages (e.g., English, Portuguese, etc.); and what role, if any, Africa's indigenous languages should play in the region's socio-economic development. Kaschula introduces the notion of econo-language planning, defined as “a need to integrate language, identity, and economic realities into a coherent language planning process that takes cognizance of localization (indigenous language and culture) in the face of globalization” (p. 200). Integrating language planning and the economy is the focus of research in language economics, a field of studies that explores ways in which linguistic and economic variables influence one another in the success or failure of language policy, as discussed, in the African context, in Djite (Reference Djite2008) and Kamwangamalu (Reference Kamwangamalu2016). In their chapter (pp. 216–238), Kathleen Heugh and Christopher Stroud contextualize English within a decolonial perspective of multilingualism in sub-Saharan Africa, with the focus on South Africa. The authors challenge what the American anthropologist and geographer James Blaut (Reference Blaut1993) critically calls “the colonizer's model of the world”, also known as “Eurocentric diffusionism” (Blaut, Reference Blaut1993: 10), according to which, inter alia, knowledge is produced in the north and is then consumed in the south. As Blaut puts it, Eurocentric diffusionism is a western-based paradigm, once used to justify colonialism and the repression of indigenous peoples, according to which “all good things, including dominant languages, develop first in the West, and are then ‘diffused’ to the periphery, based on western models” (Blaut, Reference Blaut2000: 11). On the contrary, Heugh and Stroud demonstrate, convincingly, that contemporary debates over multilingualism in South Africa, for example, that now circulate in northern contexts are not new; they do, rather, follow on from African debates some decades ago (p. 231).

The last section in the book – Language Interfaces – focuses on the outcomes of contact between English and South Africa's other languages. Some such outcomes include codeswitching, language shift, and linguistic interference. Chapters 12, 13, 15, 16, 17 and 18 all are essentially microlinguistic studies into SAfEs. In Chapter 12 (pp. 241–264) and Chapter 15 (pp. 310–328), Bertus van Rooy and Silvester Simango examine codeswitching between English and Afrikaans and between isiXhosa and English, respectively. In Chapter 13 (pp. 265–287), Raymond Hickey highlights some characteristic features of South African Indian English (pp. 273–280) – a shift variety – and raises the question whether such features qualify shift varieties to be accorded the status of a typological class, that is, as ontologically separate from other varieties. Chapters 16, 17, and 18 are also microlinguistic studies into SAfEs. In Chapter 16 (pp. 329–349), Sabine Zerbian investigates “aspects of sentence intonation in BSAfE”. Chapter 17 (pp. 350–370), by Carien Wilsenach, studies the development of cognitive-linguistic skills in Sotho-English learners. In Chapter 18 (pp. 371–393), Ella Wehrmeyer discusses linguistic interference in interpreting from English to South African Sign Language, using a corpus of interpreted news broadcast. Chapter 14 (pp. 288–309) by Dorrit Posel and Jochen Zeller is the only chapter (in this section) that does not deal with microlinguistic features of SAfEs. Instead, its main goal is to determine whether there is evidence of language shift from Afrikaans to English in the so-called ‘colored’ communities and whether there are regional differences in language use among those communities.