Despite being a comparatively young branch of English linguistics, World Englishes research has been one of the most flourishing subdisciplines since its beginnings in the early 1980s. As a result of the ongoing spread and ever-changing character of the English language and the different perspectives that have been employed in the description of the multiple forms English has taken ever since (e.g. macro-linguistic vs micro-linguistic), the discipline has seen an array of theoretical contributions and discussions, roughly from Kachru's (Reference Kachru, Quirk and Widdowson1985) Three Circles to Schneider's Dynamic Model (Reference Schneider2003, Reference Schneider2007) – to mention just the most prominent ones. In most recent times, the discipline is once more facing new theoretical and methodological challenges due to the unstoppable, unprecedented spread of the English language and rapidly changing linguistic realities that mainly result from globalization and its many different economic, political, technical and cultural guises.
In eleven contributions by thirteen renowned scholars (including the Introduction by Elena Seoane), the volume at hand addresses a wide variety of issues which have emerged from these developments and have both theoretical as well as methodological repercussions for the scholarly discipline of World Englishes research. It considers the general neglect of diachronic investigations of World Englishes, marginal and non-frequent linguistic characteristics of English worldwide, and Expanding Circle varieties of English, and explores newly emerging types and uses of English, as found, for example, in the new media.
The volume is introduced by a very informative, up-to-date overview chapter by Elena Seoane, entitled ‘World Englishes today’. This first chapter of the volume lives up to its name and offers a brief survey of milestone developments and publications in the discipline of World Englishes. It touches on the most recent developments and up-to-date issues that are currently being discussed in the field and which are subsequently treated in the individual contributions to the volume – before summarizing the following ten contributions of the volume and putting them into context.
The first chapter, ‘Beyond and between the “Three Circles”: World Englishes research in the age of globalization’, by Christian Mair, is an interesting theoretical contribution to the ongoing discussion of how to capture the most recent developments in English worldwide. On the basis of a web-forum-based empirical investigation of the African American device of augmentation as used in a Nigerian diasporic internet community, he traces such new linguistic realities, viz. ‘the new dynamics of contact and change’ (p. 25). He finds that four varieties play a role in this particular forum communication, viz. Standard American English, African American Vernacular English, Nigerian Standard English and Nigerian Pidgin, all of which are characterized by different degrees of overt and covert prestige and usage. On the basis of his findings and discussion, he validates the scientific significance of his World System of Englishes (see Mair Reference Mair2013).
Also with a strong theoretical focus, Marianne Hundt's chapter discusses the status of a low-frequency item, i.e. the combination of auxiliary be plus been as participle construction and variant of the present perfect: is it an ‘Error, feature, (incipient) change – or something else altogether?’ To answer this question, she looks into a variety of relevant issues, such as the structure's occurrence in New Englishes as well as in British and American English; she takes into consideration historical evidence, dialects and child language use – which is not done very often within the field of World Englishes research and thus deserves special appreciation. The results of her study suggest that even though it is ‘an unusual auxiliary combination’, be been ‘is too consistently attested’ and occurs in too many different types of English (i.e. contact varieties and dialects of British and American English, spoken, informal English (especially American English) and also in older forms of English) ‘to be written off as a mere performance error’ (p. 57). From a methodological perspective, she addresses the issue that linguistic characteristics of low frequency are often understudied even though they too can provide important insights into the development of Englishes worldwide.
In the next chapter, Ignacio Palacios Martínez investigates how frequently structures such as He don't like football, does he? can be identified in present-day British English, conducting ‘A corpus-based study of third person singular don't in the language of British teenagers’. Comparing different corpora of teenage and adult language, he finds that indeed third-person singular don't is on the rise in the language of young speakers, and clearly more frequent than in comparable adult language corpora, even though the standard form doesn't still prevails overall. A stratification of the results beyond the speakers’ age, i.e. according to different internal/grammatical factors and external/sociolinguistic factors, reveals that on the one hand subject animacy as well as the occurrence of another non-standard negative have an important influence on the realization of the third-person singular -s. On the other hand, the analysis shows that gender does not play a prominent role, whereas ethnicity (Anglo vs non-Anglo) makes an important difference since – against the author's expectations – it is the Anglo speakers who use the non-standard realization more often than standard doesn't.
Next, Stephanie Hackert looks into the development of ‘Standards of English in the Caribbean’ and their ‘History, attitudes, functions, features’. Beginning with an informative historical outline in which she sketches the development and background of English(es) in the Caribbean, she observes changing attitudes towards English and creoles to the benefit of the latter and argues that the division of ‘high’ vs ‘low’ functions – or ‘good’ vs ‘bad’, ‘formal’ vs ‘informal’, respectively – between English and creoles has been reduced over time, with the creoles clearly rising in prestige. They ‘have now become valued symbols of national independence and of a unique Caribbean cultural heritage’ (p. 105). She further describes the emergence of an endonormative standard gaining local prestige, as such being used in local domains.
By means of a well-thought-through, very sophisticated methodological approach, Valentin Werner deals with ‘Aspects of the present perfect in World Englishes’ and inquires into potential ‘overlap and divergence’ between the different varieties he investigates. His contribution employs a strong and informative methodological focus, illustrating several ways of dealing with and categorizing present perfect structures and their usage patterns within but also across these varieties. Werner's chapter is a data-driven, empirical study of five L1 (Australian, Canadian, British, Irish and New Zealand English) and six L2 varieties (Hong Kong, Indian, Jamaican, Nigerian, Philippines and Singapore English) based on the respective ICE corpora. He investigates the influence of several factors on the usage of the present perfect, i.e. presence and absence of temporal adverbials, sentence type, main verb and preceding time reference forms. His results from an aggregative analysis suggest that L1 and L2 varieties show no clear differences when it comes to the use of the present perfect. On the basis of these findings, Werner also employs a theoretical focus in his chapter; he discusses what his results suggest with respect to existing models of World Englishes, e.g. that the ENL-ESL(-EFL) distinction ‘is of restricted explanatory potential when it comes to the investigation of individual features’ (p. 131), and offers a modified version of Modiano's (Reference Modiano1999) Common Core model as alternative approach.
In ‘(Semi-)modals of necessity in Hong Kong and Indian Englishes’, Lucía Loureiro-Porto investigates syntactic and semantic aspects of the use of must, need (to), want to and have to in Indian, Hong Kong and British English, drawing on the respective private dialogue sections of ICE. Her findings are threefold: (1) her results show important semantic differences between the (semi-)modals in the varieties under investigation; (2) in terms of grammaticalization, she finds that the semi-modals are more strongly grammaticalized in BrE than in the L2 varieties, and more strongly grammaticalized in HKE than in IndE; (3) the results reveal that colloquialization and grammaticalization go hand in hand when it comes to the replacement of modals by semi-modals. Finally, she offers an interesting discussion of her findings as well as interpretations of the ranking of grammaticalization in the three varieties under investigation against the backdrop of (i) Schneider's Dynamic Model, and (ii) colloquialization.
Like Werner's study, the overall objective of the next contribution is to investigate to what extent developmental tendencies found in L1 varieties (on which most earlier research is again based here) are also to be detected for L2 varieties: Julia Davydova looks into ‘Indian English quotatives in a real-time perspective’, i.e. she traces the development of quotative marking strategies in this L2 variety and, indeed, her findings are similar to what has been reported for L1 varieties of English. She finds a larger inventory of forms in the more recent corpus (the Indian component of the Hamburg Corpus of Non-Native Varieties of English; dating from 2007 to 2011) than in the Indian component of ICE (dating from the early 1990s). Despite a clear decrease of say and an increase of other innovative variants such as (be) like (as a global variant) and okay (fine) (as a local innovative pattern), older forms also survive and the diversity of forms in the system as such consequently keeps growing. By means of a multivariate analysis, she shows how intra- and extralinguistic variables (grammatical person of subject, tense, quote type and gender, age, occupation, respectively) influence the quotative system and how the sets influencing its use have changed over time.
The following chapter, by Lena Zipp and Adina Staicov, ‘English in San Francisco Chinatown: indexing identity with speech rhythm?’, again has a strong methodological focus. The two authors report on the methodological challenges that arise in a study that aims at identifying and quantifying ethnic identity and linking it to durational features from free speech, but they also show convincing avenues for how that can be achieved. By means of a combined qualitative and quantitative study, they ‘assess the flexible use of rhythm as part of speakers’ ethnolinguistic repertoires’ (p. 223) drawing on a range of data (sociolinguistic interviews and questionnaire data) from four younger second-generation Chinese Americans in Chinatown, San Francisco. They detect intra-speaker variation of durational prosodic parameters, clearly – though not consistently – connected to a change in interlocutor, who was either part of the local community or an outsider (the second author of the study). What is particularly interesting is their interpretation of the finding that the two participants with middle-range ethnic identification indices are the ones who show the greatest flexibility in speech rhythm. What the two authors convincingly suggest as an interpretation is ‘that variation in rhythm could be used to negotiate the middle ground of modern Asian-American identity construction’ (p. 224).
In ‘On the globalization of English: observations of subjective progressives in present-day Englishes’, Mikko Laitinen and Magnus Levin touch on a very important yet long neglected issue of World Englishes research, viz. a theoretical embedding of Expanding Circle varieties (following the Kachruvian terminology). The aim of their chapter is twofold: on the one hand, they contribute to a recent theoretical development in World Englishes research – back then in its early stages, in the meantime a lot more advanced – i.e. the questioning of the ENL-ESL-EFL distinction and the theoretical and methodological integration of learner English into the World Englishes paradigm. On the other hand, they investigate the influence grammatical changes in American English have on non-native global Englishes (here specifically in the Expanding Circle). To that end, the authors look into ‘a specific use of the progressive: the subjective sense with an intervening adverbial’ (p. 229), the so-called always-type of progressive, from a diachronic perspective. They qualitatively and quantitatively compare native English usage of this feature as represented in the TIME Magazine Corpus and the Longman Spoken American Corpus with data drawn from various Expanding Circle corpora. Like Werner's findings, their results on the use of the subjective progressive reinforce the idea that there is no clear-cut distinction between ENL, ESL and EFL, as both American English and the Expanding Circle Englishes show similarities in the use of this feature.
The last chapter of the volume touches on another so far neglected research issue, viz. the representation and presentation of ‘World Englishes on YouTube’. Here, Edgar W. Schneider discusses the question whether the video-sharing website YouTube is a ‘Treasure trove or nightmare?’ for linguists and therefore addresses one facet of yet another recently upcoming linguistic research trend, viz. the investigation of language use and presentation in the new media. He offers a wealth of examples and sets up a basic typology including a subcategorization into metalinguistic or natural clips. Schneider also employs a methodological focus, asking the question: ‘How can useful video clips be systematically searched for and identified on YouTube?’ (p. 275). Despite some severe limitations in access and search options for linguistic researchers, which he identifies as ‘the “nightmare” aspect of trying to use YouTube for linguistic purposes’ (p. 276), he also highlights the ‘“treasure trove” perspective’ (p. 277), in particular the array of linguistic performance and the wealth of data available. He thus concludes with a generally positive evaluation of YouTube as a platform for linguistic analyses. As the last contribution, Schneider's chapter nicely rounds off the ‘New theoretical and methodological considerations’ envisaged in the edited volume.
Overall, the volume does exactly what its title promises: it provides fresh and interesting insights into World Englishes, offering new theoretical and methodological considerations. It is a very multifaceted volume, which combines established theoretical and methodological approaches of World Englishes research with up-to-date, often previously neglected dimensions. The volume includes diachronic elements, investigating different types and usages of English and putting them into a historical perspective. It includes analyses of low-frequency items and discussions of their relevance and potential for World Englishes research, and it takes Expanding Circle Englishes on board as well as English as represented and presented in the new media. Several chapters discuss theoretical implications and methodological challenges arising from these new research findings and current trends, and offer innovative methodological options facing these challenges. The volume thus addresses the full range of currently relevant topics in World Englishes studies and is – to my knowledge – the first one of its kind. It is an excellent, highly sophisticated and up-to-date contribution to ongoing debates in the World Englishes research paradigm.
