A handbook of varieties of English (review)

Probably the most ambitious attempt of its kind to date, A handbook of varieties of English surveys the diverse shapes that the language has taken around the world. With each of the two volumes weighing in at well over a thousand pages and with each having an accompanying cd-rom that supplements the printed matter, the Handbook has three salient virtues. First, for most of the varieties described it gives roughly equal coverage to grammar and to pronunciation, that is, to morphological and syntactic variation (in the second volume) and to phonetic and phonological variation (in the first). Second, it offers coverage of certain regions and groups that have deserved more attention than they have traditionally gotten. Thus, for example, one can now easily find out about characteristics of the dialect of the Shetland Islands and of the pidgins of Australian aborigines.

A third noteworthy strength of the Handbook is ample coverage of not only the countries of the English-speaking world in what Kachru (1985) has termed the ‘inner circle’ regions, such as Britain and the United States, but also many of the lands that Kachru termed the ‘outer circle’, such as Malaysia and Nigeria, where English is nonnative to most people yet is widely used in national life. As for the ‘expanding circle’ (e.g. Japan, Finland, and Morocco), there is no coverage, and it obviously would have required many more volumes on the same scale to attempt such coverage—and would have made even more problematic any assumptions about just what a ‘variety of English’ is or just who might or might not be a ‘speaker of English’.

Both volumes follow a similar pattern of organization, with each divided into the following four sections: ‘The British Isles’, ‘The Americas and the Caribbean’, ‘The Pacific and Australasia’, and ‘Africa, South, and Southeast Asia’. Each volume has about five dozen chapters written by specialists, many of them well known. Both volumes also have introductions as well as synopses at the end. Even so, Vol. 1 differs in that it provides not only phonetic and phonological descriptions but also historical accounts in most chapters. These discussions are especially valuable in the chapters covering areas less familiar to those who study variation in English. For example, in the chapter on Norfolk Island and Pitcairn English, the authors describe not only the ontogenesis of the Pitcairn variety but also its relation to Norfolk Island. Pitkern-Norfok, as it is spelled in the written vernacular, resulted from the intermarriage and language contact between Polynesian women and British seamen who took part in the legendary mutiny aboard H. M. S. Bounty; the creole naturally went with later migrants from Pitcairn to Norfolk Island, which lies closer to Australia and which now has more speakers of the creole than does Pitcairn Island itself.

Vol. 1 makes it easy to survey the phonetics and phonology of different dialects. Most chapters list the same set of words that have vowel contrasts in many varieties (e.g. kit, dress, trap, lot). In nearly every chapter the authors list the main vocalic variants for each word; for example, the second syllable of the word happy has a vowel with three common variants in the North of England ([i], [ε], and [i], in the order of decreasing frequency). The uniform word list allows for easy comparisons across chapters, where one might, for example, compare the diphthongs of Gullah and of Southern white vernaculars of the United States. Most chapters, not surprisingly, give more attention to vowels than consonants, since more variation occurs in the former than the latter. Even so, consonants are not neglected: for instance the alternation of [v] and [w] is described for Bahamian varieties in which either consonant is possible as the first segment of a word such as violence. Suprasegmentals are likewise covered...