Festschrifts tend to have a grab-bag quality, with too many of the articles only loosely related to the honoree's work if at all. That is very much the case with these two volumes, festschrifts for Edgar Schneider and Augustin Simo Bobda respectively. Together, the volumes yield some useful insights on West African Englishes, particularly, but the quality of all of the articles taken together is quite uneven.

In the Schneider volume, among the chapters most directly relevant to his work are those addressing his Dynamic Model (Schneider Reference Schneider2007), situating World Englishes on a five-stage schema according to degree of incorporation into a society's linguistic identity. Two chapters apply the Dynamic Model to, respectively, Cameroonian English (Aloysius Ngefac) and Nigerian English (Kinsley Oluchi Ugwuanyi). Ngefac designates Cameroonian English as having over the past 20 years reached Stage Four, at which a variety's divergences from the colonial ancestor are processed as legitimate rather than substandard. Ngefac notes that a marker of of the transition is that the local variety is now commonly referred to not as ‘English in Cameroon’ but as ‘Cameroon English’. Ugwuanyi designates Nigerian English as at Stage Five – ‘own’ language rather than alien language.

Overall, though, it is perplexing that the editors chose many of these chapters, out of a much larger body of submissions, as responses to Schneider's output, both in terms of subject matter and, unfortunately, innovativeness. Too many chapters largely chronicle the obvious. On the Caribbean island of Sint Maarten, Dutch is the language of official business while English is the language of wider interaction. Are we to be surprised that when surveyed, residents tend to designate Dutch as official and English as ‘popular’? (Sarah Buschfeld and Wiebke Ahlers). Singapore Colloquial English (‘Singlish’) has incorporated a new discourse particle from Malay, upon which it is difficult to glean the urgency in the finding that native speakers of Chinese and Indian languages are unclear as to its etymology while Malay speakers are not (Mie Hiramoto, Wilkinson Gonzales, Jakob Leimgruber, Lim Jun Lie and Jessica Choo). Clifton Armstrong argues that in creoles, the superstrate language contributes most of the lexicon while the substrate contributes much of the grammar because lexicon is ‘overt’ in his terminology while grammar is ‘covert.’ This, however, largely recapitulates what all models of borrowability hierarchies in language contact study have long charted and explained.

Paula Prescod presents English speakers with written samples of Jamaican Patois, Sranan Creole, Gullah and San Andres Creole and finds that they tend to find Gullah easiest to read and Sranan the hardest. But this is expected, given that Gullah is close enough to English to be considered a dialect of it, while Sranan is a different language entirely despite English being the source of most of its lexicon. Moreover, Prescod's conclusion that orthographical differences between the varieties determine their intelligibility to English speakers is something few would find unexpected. David Frank's comparison of time reference in Gullah and English simply presents basic features of Caribbean English creoles well documented in decades of creolistic work, in a chapter that would be better aimed at Caribbean language teachers or general readers.

To be sure, there are more intriguing insights in other chapters. Arthur Spears recapitulates his longstanding claim that there are camouflaged creole features in African-American English (AAE). His argument suffers from lack of reference to nonstandard Englishes of England and Ireland that AAE's creators would have been exposed to, as well as largely leaving the reader to look to previous works of his for actual sentences proving that the features occur in creoles. However, his basic idea is interesting, and consonant with Schneider's research on Gullah and its relationship to AAE. Christian Go Go's description of online usage of Nonstandard Philippine English covers interesting nuances such as some posters deliberately using it unidiomatically – ‘performed illiteracy,’ as Go Go terms it – in order to attract attention.

The chapters in the volume celebrating Augustin Simo Bobda generally have more to teach, many of them documenting hitherto unknown aspects of West African Englishes. Rajend Mesthrie and Yolandi Ribbens–Klein reveal that in Black South African English, the TRAP vowel is splitting, with the original raised vowel now often realized non-high, such as before nasals, /l/ and under some other conditions. Maria Mazzoli examines Nigerian Pidgin speakers’ degree of consciousness of the tonal difference between imperfective marker dè and copula dé. On Nigerian English, Akinmade Akande documents that the progresssive is used with stative verbs (‘I am loving you’) more than in other West African Englishes (although Akande infelicitously designates this as ‘misuse’. John Singler analyzes number marking in Kolokwa (which he in earlier work has termed Vernacular Liberian English), finding that it patterns largely the way it does in Caribbean English creoles, but may also have been influenced by the substrate language Bassa.

Two chapters address code-switching: Christian Mair and Bridget Fonokeu's account of West African pidgin use among speakers in Germany is useful simply for the data given how little-studied the interaction between German and these languages is, while Ogechi Agbo and Ingo Plag show that Nigerian Pidgin is used in code-switching most by less educated men, and specifically ones acquainted with one another. On Ghanaian English, understudied just as Ghanaian Pidgin English is, Jemima Anderson analyzes the use of the expression excuse me to say and shows that it is a calque on the Akan word sɛbɩ.

The flubs in this second volume are fewer than in the first. Hans–Georg Wolf and Arne Peters’ examination of the meaning of the word witchcraft in Nigerian and Black South African English is much longer than their rather compact point requires. Ian Hancock's introduction to Krio is similar to David Frank's chapter in the Schneider volume, in being a kind of report more appropriate in a reference volume. The chapter also presents an account of Krio's history tracing its origins to an English pidgin used on the west African coast in the 1700s, introduced by Hancock in the 1970s but incompatible with research since by others (and which he neglects to even cite).

These are volumes in which the older, late-career contributors largely summarize their earlier work while the younger scholars’ work leaves it unclear what the criteria were for publication. Perhaps the most generous assessment of these fascicles is that they contain something for everybody. They are unlikely, however, to be embraced as significant volumes overall.