The present review aims to deal chiefly with matters not given full consideration in Windsor Lewis (Reference Windsor Lewis2004) except to mention certain uncorrected mistakes. Coming a remarkable sixteen years after the first (Upton, Kretzschmar & Konopka Reference Upton, Kretzschmar and Konopka2001), this new edition provides 2000 new entries, increasing the book's number of pages from xx + 1208 to xxvii + 1561. It again employs four columns per page but now on much larger pages, with more generous surrounding spaces. The volume's size is increased from approximately 22 cm × 14 cm × 6 cm to 25 cm × 18 cm × 6 cm, making it undeniably bulky. Users will need both hands to pick it up. But it is now even more comfortable to read though the weak legibility of the bar of its symbol ᵻ may still cause difficulty for some readers. Its understandably hardback-only printed form is plainly aimed at libraries. None but extraordinarily affluent individual students will be able to afford the hefty price of £180. It should be widely welcome in its e-book form at less than one-sixth of that.

The unusual use of ‘for’ rather than ‘of’ in the book's title may presumably be understood as indicating that the pronunciations given are offered not primarily as facts, in the way normally expected of such books, but as recommendations to the reader. This appears to be confirmed in their Preface at page vi, where the editors say that they ‘offer our models’ for the pronunciation of British and American English. At page viii, they refer, again rather idiosyncratically, to having ‘designed model accents’. Their somewhat dubious advice with regard to selection and representation of pronunciations has been followed by editors of certain Oxford English dictionaries including the OED in recent years. At page xiv, they say: ‘An obvious model for British pronunciation is that which is usually termed Received Pronunciation [RP]’. There seems to be very little difference between what is generally understood by that dated term and what they prescribe. The most striking difference in this second edition is the editors’ abandonment of what, in their first edition at its page xii, was admitted to be, by contrast with RP, ‘the one specifically “northern” BR [i.e. British] feature which has regularly been incorporated into the transcription system’. This referred to words such as brass, bath, dance and sample recorded with markedly Northern (meaning North of England) /a/ as well as the (General British) /ɑ/, which they had listed in first position in such entries. Rather than expunging all these Northern variants it would surely have been better to have retained them as noteworthy information on what Cruttenden (Reference Cruttenden2014: 81) terms Regional General British? Wells (Reference Wells2008: xix) describes them as ‘widespread in England among educated speakers’ and extensively includes them identified by ‘§’ glossed as ‘BrE non-RP’. Thus, they are not dismissed as mere ‘local dialect’ but recognised as a major variety of British English pronunciation. This variety is to be heard widely among current newsreaders, presenters and correspondents, etc. from the BBC and other British broadcasting organisations.

The new Preface provides information that was lacking in the first edition, the title of which represented Konopka at that time as a co-author. We now learn that his contribution was that ‘[h]e was instrumental in the initial computerization . . . decades ago’ and ‘contributed materially to the development of the American pronunciation model in relation to the British . . . through his experience as a learner of English’ (p. vi). Repeating their admiration for the achievements of Jones (see Roach, Setter & Esling Reference Roach, Setter and Esling2011) and Gimson (see Gimson Reference Gimson1989), they still make practically no mention of the excellent lexicographical work of their successors who have contributed importantly to what is now known as the Jones Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary. The authors insist, again rather idiosyncraticly: ‘we have in this volume declared particular models of British and American pronunciation, and we do assert their essential value for native speakers and for learners alike’ (p. vi).

They include many items like liveableness and caressingly which presumably are rather unlikely to be needed. Every item, however brief, is accorded a minimum space of three lines. Transcriptions of various longer words wrap around the narrow columns to occupy multiple lines. For example, another surely superfluous word, deinstitutionalization, takes up fourteen lines and is repeated in an adjacent column with its alternate spelling different only by exchanging its s for a z. There is no mention in this new edition of the five editorial staff or the eighteen ‘foreign language consultants’ credited in the previous one. The authors say again (p. xxiv) that there are ‘a limited number of foreign headwords’ given in ‘native forms’ but ‘only where these differ significantly from the anglicized pronunciations’. The foreign transcriptions when supplied are mostly quite satisfactory though the basis for inclusion is often not obvious. Except for Turkish, they are solely of European languages and their post-colonial offshoots. No mention is made of why they exclude African, Asian or other languages. Many words one would have thought should have received original-language transcriptions do not do so and vice versa. We find them at bon vivant but not at bon voyage, at accelerando but not at rallentando, at Paris but not at Lisbon, at Oslo but not at Copenhagen and so on.

They display basic entries highlighted by a headword in bold type with its pronunciations given beneath, as they instance at page ix:

Blameless

BR bleɪmlᵻs

AM bleɪmlᵻs

This kind of entry fails to warn the reader that, for example, the vowel recommended for the -less suffix is now very much a minority usage, a matter of no little concern to users such as learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). More regrettably still, they supply nothing but /-ɪz/ for the British plural suffix -ies (as in cities) when these days the alternative /-iz/ not merely exists as a variant but has arguably become the predominant General British usage.

Few changes have been made in this second edition to the dictionary's introductory matter. The editors still list only five British diphthongs even though the text includes two others at e.g. fear and cure. At page xiii, they have not removed the unfathomable entry ‘l (=[ʎ])’. This, as it reads, is pure nonsense, asserting that the alveolar lateral /l/ of English ‘equals’ a palatal lateral consonant. They have again failed to include an explanation for the bilabial fricative [ɸ] used e.g. at their entries phew and pshaw. At page xxvi, they repeat their attempt to employ a single closing inverted comma [’] as a symbol for an inaudibly released plosive consonant for which IPA (1999) officially has only its ‘corner’ symbol. The Danish word Aarhus, in LPD (Wells Reference Wells2008) [ˈɔːhuːʔs], which they again offer as their only example, contains a glottal articulation hardly comparable to the oral plosives to which the corner symbol is usually applied. At any rate, its applicability in this dictionary is surely questionable. Unfortunately, there is, as yet, no accompanying audio facility whether as CD or website. Now that Longman seem to have long been silent about the future of their LPD and that Cambridge, as reported by Jane Setter (http://aworldofenglishes.blogspot.co.uk, 18 April 2017), have said ‘the way forward . . . is electronic editions only’, this volume could well soon become the only recently-revised printed book of its kind even if it is not so fully up to date as one might have expected. For example, it lacks entries for Aung San (Suu Kyi), Beyoncé, Barroso, Berlusconi, Baudouin, Corbyn, Erdogan, Farage, Federer, Kardashian, Kim Jong un, Jolie, Kolkata, Merkel, Mumbai, Mourinho, Nadal, Nakasone, Putin, Rowling, Schengen, Taliban and Tusk.

The authors may perhaps be said to have included some items of dubious value, but this weighty new enlargement certainly deserves to be welcomed for its offering of a very large number of items that users should be glad to find in their libraries in such a comfortably legible form.