Reviews

'Excellent...comprehensive...a delightful book. '-TLS 'astonishingly comprehensive book...packed with pleasure '-Christopher Hirst, The Independent Magazine 'This is a wonderfully comprehensive resource which will appeal to anyone interested in language. '-Roy Johnson, Open University Long gone are the days when English as proprietarily used by educated people in the tiny triangle of southern England formed by Oxford, Cambridge and London is deemed correct and all other versions wrong. The Oxford Guide to World English takes as its "descriptivist " starting point that English is now spoken in every continent by over a billion people across the world, about a quarter of them native speakers. In 70 countries worldwide English is an official or semi official language and has a significant role in 20 more. And because of the Internet--the language of which is 75 per cent English--the number of English users is rising exponentially with middle classes everywhere seeking it for their children as a global resource owned by nobody and everybody. Sadly, it has also become a very powerful – almost predatory--language which seriously threatens ‘endangered ’ languages. The regional varieties and their evolution make a fascinating study that forms the main body of Tom McArthur’s book, a spin-off from his The Oxford Companion to the English Language (1992). In Singapore