LAUSR

As a non-native speaker of English, I have often wondered what it must feel like to be born speaking a language that you can use more or less all over the world. To be an English speaker is indeed to be in possession of a quasi-universal tool of communication. Few would have imagined that the Germanic dialect brought to the shores of England in the 5 century would one day conquer the world. But conquer it, it did, and, like a living organism, in order to survive it had to change and adapt. From mono-centric, it morphed into a poli-centric language, gaining in variation at all levels. To acknowledge this immense variety a new term was coined, and a new field of study created: World Englishes. The volume under review, intelligently edited by Seoane and Suárez-Gómez, brings together a collection of ten articles on the current state of affairs in the burgeoning field of World Englishes. As the editors note (p. 5), ‘[d]espite the proliferation of high quality publications, it remains the case [ . . . ] that “we lack thorough and more comprehensive empirical documentation and especially quantitative investigations and correlative studies of most of these varieties”’. The contributors to this volume address a number of issues and take different approaches. Interestingly, they do it both from a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. They explore central aspects of language change and dialect evolution. These aspects are actually of interest not only to the scholar of World Englishes but also, crucially, to anyone interested in sociolinguistics and language change and variation. The collection opens with a chapter (p. 17) by Mair on the current state of World Englishes research across the globe. This is a very useful and interesting contribution which will be appreciated by the expert but that can also be used as an introduction to the topic. Using a specific example, the use of African American rhetorical devices of augmentation in a Nigerian diasporic community, he problematises the traditional model of the spread of varieties. Hunt (p. 36) uses a corpus linguistics approach to investigate the potential of ‘errors’ influenced by the interference of substrate varieties to become features of a new variety. Hundt looks at the unusual auxiliaryparticiple combination (BE been) which, she argues, has the potential of being an emergent contact feature or, more interestingly, an instance of incipient language change. Her discussion is useful because it allows her to reflect on the methodologies used in the description of World Englishes, as well as grammaticality and norms more generally. Palacios Martínez (p. 62) compares the use of third-person don’t versus doesn’t in the language of British teenagers and adults, using a corpus-based methodology. In so doing, the author clearly demonstrates the values of corpora and computer-assisted research in analysing variation in general and the emergence and spread of varieties in World English. Interestingly, Palacios Martínez takes into account variables such as gender, as well as age and ethnic group. The standards of English in the Caribbean, their history, attitudes to them, features and functions are the topic of Hackert’s chapter (p. 85). In her paper, the author presents and discusses a report of the state of research into standards of English in the Anglophone Caribbean. This very clear contribution is likely to be, like so much in this volume, of interest not only to World Englishes students and scholars but also to those with an interest in the literature of the Caribbean, whose study it can facilitate by focussing on the linguistic aspect of it. Werner (p. 113) examines aspects of the Present Perfect (PrPf + V-en) in World Englishes. This is not