The alchemy of English: The spread, functions, and models of non-native Englishes By Braj B. Kachru (review)

BOOK NOTICES 231 and the computer version was produced by manual typing of the roughly 100,000 word entries . Accordingly, it is unlikely to be 100% accurate , and I&M mention a few errors found in working with the corpus. As it happens, another computerized version of the database was produced in the U.S. by optical scanning (which of course introduces its own errors as well). I have checked a number of I&M's figures using the U.S. version of Zaliznjak, and they seem to be generally reliable. Minor deviations do occur, especially with larger numbers. I&M have 3,322 3rd-declension feminine nouns ending in r', while I find 3,316; but without access to their lists it is impossible to determine whether one or the other version of the database is in error, or whether unapparent methodological considerations are responsible. One wonders whether book publication was truly appropriate in this case. The U.S. version of the database is in fairly wide use (it is available for $100 from David Hart, 4079D JKHB, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT 84062; (801) 378-4923), so that scholars who regularly need this kind of statistical information can easily find it themselves if they are at all handy with a computer (or have a friend or colleague who is). Moreover, I&M could never anticipate what statistics would interest any individual scholar. For example, I would be interested to find out the number of adjectives with two secondary stresses in addition to the primary stress, but I&M do not include this category. Quite another problem arises when the information cannot be retrieved by a direct stringbased search, e.g. the number of compound adjectives with three roots. This cannot be determined from the number of secondary stresses, as Russian is inconsistent about maintaining secondary stress on each root in a multi-root compound (and Zaliznjak simply used his own Sprachgefühl and that of his assistants in marking secondary stress to begin with). The printed volume is likely merely to tantalize any linguist who is fascinated by this sort ofnumber-crunching : he or she will want the computerized version anyway. [George Fowler, Indiana University.] The alchemy of English: The spread, functions, and models of non-native Englishes. By Braj B. Kachru. Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990 (1986). Pp. xii, 200. $12.95. Braj Kachru is undoubtedly one of the foremost scholars in the field of international English , or, as he would put it, Englishes. He has published widely in the field; the extensive bibliography in this book lists 42 items—articles, books, chapters—under his name, dating from 1962 to 1985. This book is by way of being a compendium of his views. Each of its ten chapters is a reprint—'adapted', 'slightly modified', or otherwise revised—of a paper previously published. This structure gives it certain qualities which can be bothersome to the reader, most notably a high degree of redundancy. The key ideas are frequently repeated, and there is nothing particularly new. K has a habit of supporting virtually every statement with one or more references, usually simply author and date, sometimes including page numbers. An extreme case of this is the Introduction, in which there are 74 references in 16 pages, 23 of them to K's own works. It is exasperating at times to have an important point glossed over by a comment such as, ? detailed treatment of these and other aspects of Indian English is available in Iyengar (1962), Kachru (1983a), Mukherjee (1971), Naik, et ai, (1968) and Narasimhaiah (1967). (For an extensive bibliography see Singh et al., 1981.)' Space and the reader's patience could have been saved by a general statement on sources, perhaps at the head of the bibliography. Such detailed and yet often relatively vague documentation is appropriate to a Ph.D. thesis, but hardly to a summarizing work by a scholar of known erudition. In spite of these exasperations, the book establishes its overall thesis effectively, however repetitiously. I cannot be sure what K meant by the metaphor of his title; perhaps that the alchemy of English is the process by which the lead of a deviant and deficient variety is transformed into the gold of an...