International English: A Guide to the Varieties of Standard English

The book presents an illustrative overview of standard varieties of English and (English-based creoles) around the world. It departs from the two main standard varieties, English English and American English, and contrasts all other varieties of standard English with these two, showing tendencies of divergence (phonology) and convergence (grammar, lexis). The major part of the volume is dedicated to differences between English English and North American English. More than other introductions to varieties of English Trudgill/Hannah deal with differences in language use (aside from differences in the language system). They include a survey of usage and stylistic differences with prepositions, auxiliaries, verb phrase substitutions, articles, pronouns etc. The book doesn't get 5 stars, however, for two reasons: (1) The authors don't give the sources for their (statistical) results; they don't say what corpus has been analyzed, nor do they show exactly (in figures) how salient a statistical difference between varieties is (which would enable the reader to decide whether there is a true difference, whether other sociolinguistic factors are more salient etc.); (2) Certain pragmatic areas like politeness strategies and differences related to text-types (which also belong to language use) are neglected. All in all, however, the authors' approach is a pragmatically well-chosen one, which makes the book recommendable to both natives and non-natives, and to both students and teachers of English.