Twenty-five years ago, Language in the British Isles, edited by Peter Trudgill (henceforth LBI1), became an essential reference text for anyone wanting information about varieties of English in Britain, or the languages spoken in Britain other than English, whether indigenous ones or newer arrivals. LBI1 represented an attempt to rectify the surprising ignorance, as Trudgill saw it, of the great range of dialects and languages spoken in Britain and Ireland at the time. It was unsurpassed for depth of information and coverage and became a text for any university course on language varieties, its chapters noted for the accessibility of their content, such as, for example, the late Alan R. Thomas's chapter on Cornish, a detailed, clear synthesis of its linguistic and sociolinguistic history, and Nicol Spence's chapter on Channel Island French, a variety little discussed in print before. David Britain's essay collection bearing the same title (henceforth LBI2) will inevitably attract the attention of the many linguists who grew up with Trudgill's volume. Younger generations of linguists will see the volume in its own terms, and both groups, and indeed others, will value LBI2 for its thorough coverage of the very complex linguistic picture that Britain and Ireland present today. Even so, LBI1 is no obsolete textbook currently.

LBI2 has much to live up to, given the success of its 1984 namesake. Britain claims it provides ‘a snapshot both of the languages and dialects spoken and signed here, and of some of the implications for education of that linguistic diversity’ (1). Like LBI1, the collation of LBI2 represented a huge task. LBI1 had 33 chapters and 28 contributors, while LBI2, which is somewhat shorter, has 25 chapters and 31 contributors. Indeed, two linguists have contributed to both volumes: Kenneth MacKinnon, writing on Gaelic, and James Milroy, writing on the history of English. The contributors to LBI2 had much to reflect upon in terms of recent research. We know much more now about the nature and causes of linguistic change than we did in 1984. The intervening years themselves were a period of rapid social change, and the linguistic composition of Britain and Ireland's population has been altered significantly. For example, the largest ethnic group in Cambridgeshire is now reportedly the traveller/Gypsy community (3) (although official statistics are lacking); Lithuanians, Nigerians and Latvians are now significant ethnic minorities in the Irish Republic, according to the 2006 census; and Polish speakers represent a very sizeable group in both countries. Attitudes to Received Pronunciation (RP) and Standard English have also changed. Welsh is holding its own after decades of slow decline in speaker numbers, as evidenced by its heightened visibility on the streets throughout Wales; and the Scottish government is actively supporting Gaelic through legislation, while Manx and Cornish revival movements have generated new interest among the young. Some varieties of English, barely researched or hardly apparent in 1984, are now quite widespread. Increasing globalisation has had an impact on levels of bilingualism and multilingualism in Britain and Ireland too, and has, as Ben Rampton, Roxy Harris & Constant Leung state in their chapter (‘Education and speakers of languages other than English’), ‘profoundly affected the contours of multilingualism in ways that we are still struggling to comprehend’ (434). The appearance of LBI2 is thus not only timely, but overdue and almost inevitable. Its contents have to reflect a changed world in which English and Britain and Ireland's minority languages now operate and survive.

LBI2 essentially follows the structure of LBI1. Part I, ‘English’, considers English, spoken as either a first or a second language; part II is devoted to ‘The Celtic languages’; part III is concerned with ‘The other languages of the British Isles’, e.g. Romani, but also includes discussions of multilingualism, Caribbean creoles and Black English, Indic languages, Chinese and European immigrant languages; and part IV is recast as ‘Applied sociolinguistic issues’, with one chapter focusing on language policy, and two chapters looking at educational issues in relation to the experience of people who speak either non-standard varieties of English or languages other than English.

Closer comparison of the two LBI volumes shows that some of the 1984 chapter topics have been conflated. While LBI1 has a chapter on Scottish accents and dialects, and a separate one on Highlands and Islands English, LBI2 has just one chapter on ‘Scottish English and Scots’ (by Paul A. Johnston, Jr.); and while LBI1 has a chapter entitled ‘The RP accent’, and another on ‘English accents in England’, there is a subtle shift in emphasis in LBI2, with just one chapter on ‘Phonological variation in England’. The shifted research focus from rural to urban dialectology over the last thirty years is also apparent in LBI2, which no longer contains separate chapters on ‘Rural dialects in English’ and on urban speech (which constituted a relatively new field in 1984). Instead, urban dialectology now forms much of the focus of the discussion of chapters 2 (Paul Kerswill's ‘Standard and non-standard English’), 3 (Paul Foulkes & Gerard Docherty's ‘Phonological variation in English’) and 4 (David Britain's ‘Grammatical variation in English’). As in LBI1, Irish English is the focus of two excellent chapters, with ‘Northern Irish English’ being covered by Kevin McCafferty and ‘Southern Irish English’ by Raymond Hickey. Again, as in LBI1, one chapter each is devoted to ‘English in Wales’ (by Robert Penhallurick) and ‘English on the Isle of Man’ (by Andrew Hamer). Unlike LBI1, LBI2 contains a chapter on English in the Channel Islands, as well as French, but has no specific chapters on Manx and Cornish, a gap filled by excellent chapters in Ó Néill (Reference Ó Néill2005). Where LBI1 has chapters on both ‘Romani and AngloRomani’, LBI2 has only ‘Angloromani’ (by Peter Bakker & Donald Kenrick), despite the existence of thousands of speakers of ‘inflected’ Romani varieties in the UK now, where a useful addition to the bibliography provided here might be Grant (Reference Grant and Matras1998). LBI2 has 11 figures and 22 tables that give information ranging from topics such as the decline in Welsh speakers (250, table 14.4) to suggested sources of the key features of southern Irish (148, table 7.1.) and an indication of the functions of polyglossia in the Chinese communities in Britain (318, table 18.1), all of which provide much material for thought.

A well-organised index is necessary in a quasi-encyclopaedic text like this and, though there is just one main index, it is more than satisfactory. LBI2 does not follow LBI1 in providing separate indices for topics and places. As in LBI1, the popular terms for many of the well-established non-standard varieties of English such as Brummie, Cockney and Geordie are absent from the index of LBI2, and if readers look up, say, ‘Scouse’, they will be disappointed unless they then look up ‘Liverpool’, where some thirteen references are listed.

LBI2, of course, provides a great opportunity for indicating recent research into varieties and changes in thinking, so that, for example, James Milroy's chapter is more than just a review of ‘The history of English’; it is also a reconsideration of traditional views about the motivations for some of the great linguistic changes in English. It is a pity, then, that we are not provided with similar chapters on, say, new research on the history of Welsh or Irish. Coming back to English, the development of social and regional dialectology and urban language studies, along with new methods of acquiring accurate and reliable linguistic data, has changed our understanding of what actually constitutes ‘English on the ground’. Paul Kerswill's chapter (chapter 2) draws our attention to recent social change and its impact on English usage. Non-RP accents should be seen in the context of an increasingly accepted meritocratic ideology in Britain. Loss of traditional local speech patterns is partly explained by increasing mobility leading to regional Englishes like Estuary English (51). Yet levelling is not happening everywhere. One consequence of our increasing understanding of phonological variation in English is its direct relevance for work in automated speech recognition systems and speech synthesis, language therapy work and forensic analysis of recorded speech. In their contribution (chapter 3), Paul Foulkes & Gerard Docherty note that work on the evaluation of accents has important relevance for people involved in call-centre work (74). Grammatical changes underway are also numerous. There are indications of some very recent changes, such as David Britain's report (chapter 4) on the erosion of the allomorphy of definite and indefinite articles, a rapidly diffusing innovation among white and Bangladeshi young adults in London's East End, e.g. a apple, the apple, where the vowel of the is reduced to schwa (104).

In chapter 5, Paul A. Johnston, Jr. provides a very thorough and informative review of the linguistic situation in Scotland. The future of Scots remains uncertain: either traditional vocabulary will be entirely lost and replaced by new slang coinages, or it will fossilise and reduce to a hard core of commonly used terms, forming the basis for a newer, more vital, but less distinctive regional norm (121). What influence devolution has had on Scots remains to be seen, but the association between Scottish national identity and Scots remains strong. A Norwegian-style Bokmål/Nynorsk dispute seems to be replicating itself in the conflict between Lallans and Central Belt Scots (108), while the mixing of Scots and Scottish Standard English near the highland line (e.g. in Inverness) along social class divisions is an interesting development (109).

In a short review such as this, it is impossible to indicate all the linguistic highlights of this informative and fact-heavy tome. There are, however, some notable sections: Bencie Woll & Rachel Sutton-Spence's chapter on ‘Sign languages’, a topic omitted in LBI1, is excellent, and, in particular, the discussion of Irish sign language (346–347) is a revelation. The chapters on ‘Language policy and planning’ (by Dennis Ager) and ‘Non-standard English and education’ (by Ann Williams) deserve to be read by all prospective teachers. LBI2 contains other fascinating observations: for example, Andrew Hamer notes that boys affricate /k/ more than girls in Manx English, and that adult males show more Liverpudlian dialect features than females in the English on the Isle of Man (175); and David Britain observes that explicit pronouns in imperatives, as in, for example, shut you up, still survive in Cambridgeshire speech (93).

Readers will welcome the inclusion of online resource listings for further reference, such as in Mark Gibson's contribution on ‘Multilingualism’ (273) – in fact one wonders why a separate web site index was not provided for the whole text.

A volume such as LBI2 cannot cover everything. Apart from the gaps in coverage identified above, the reader might have expected to see rather more about recent grammatical change in Welsh, and more on rates of lexical borrowing from English into Welsh. There is little discussion of lexical change or lexical diffusion in Welsh, or indeed in regional English. Lexical and semantic change in English is generally little remarked upon. We could also do with a chapter on how Indic languages in Britain are diverging from their South Asian parent languages, which they clearly are, or a chapter on the sociolinguistic rivalries that exist in many northern towns and cities like Blackburn, where these languages jostle for position among each other and borrow from each other. There are also curious anomalies: LBI2 has a chapter on English on the Isle of Man, but no chapter specifically on English in the north of England, or indeed any part of it. If there are substantial gaps in the discussion of contemporary English, one such might be in the area of non-segmental phonology. References to intonational differences in English across Britain and Ireland are very scattered across the volume. There are only two and a half pages given over to intonation in general, which are mainly devoted to the spread of high rising tone (71–73). Similarly, just over ten lines on Northern Irish English intonation (127) seems a bit short. The lack of sustained discussion of regional intonation patterns is disappointing in this otherwise very solid and data-heavy text.

Inevitably in a text this size, there are several minor errors or inadequacies, for example, the use of /y/ for /j/ in the transcription of Welsh blewiach ‘fine hair, down’ (190), and the bare title given to table 16.1 (288), ‘Vowels’, where what is presented is a comparative table showing the nature of vowel differences between Jamaican Creole and British English varieties. However, these errors do not detract from the great value of the volume to researchers.