It was about one and a half years ago that I finally I arrived where I had always wanted to be and do what I had always wanted-- teach students, support small language communities and conduct research on African languages on my doorstep. The University of Cape Town and my new colleagues welcomed my efforts to establish the Centre for African Language Diversity-- CALDi as well as The African Language Archive-- TALA and I was recently appointed the Mellon Research Chair: African Language Diversity this initiative. The main aim of CALDi is to train young African scholars in descriptive linguistics and open up space for research into African languages at UCT with the hopes of countering the dominance of African linguistics outside the continent. It has been a great challenge for which my whole career has been a form of preparation...Read more
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Date: Wed, 01 Jun 2005 11:29:38 +0200 From: Monika S. Schmid <ms.schmid@let.vu.nl> Subject: Handbook of Varieties of English
EDITORS: Kortmann, Bernd; Schneider, Edgar W; Burridge, Kate; Mesthrie, Rajend; Upton, Clive TITLE: A Handbook of Varieties of English SUBTITLE: A Multimedia Reference Tool YEAR: 2004 PUBLISHER: Mouton de Gruyter
Monika S. Schmid, English Department, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands
INTRODUCTION
To get straight to the point: The _Handbook of Varieties of English_ is a dream come true, especially so for those of us whose teaching responsibilities include courses on varieties of English around the world. As someone who belongs to this category, I have over the past years spent many weeks in libraries, scanning monographs and collected volumes for adequate teaching materials. Every year, I became become more concerned that Wells' excellent 1982 overview, while a wonderfully useful work, is getting somewhat outdated. If I had been asked to draw up a wishlist describing my ideal teaching tool, I would have fantasized about something comprehensive yet consistent; something covering both phonological and grammatical features; something with multimedia support and audio data from the described varieties (preferably in a comparable format); something treating established as well as colonial and post-colonial varieties; and something I could both teach from and point my students to for their essays and presentations.
The _Handbook of Varieties of English_ is all that. In the words of the editors, its aim is to provide "comprehensive up-to-date accounts of the salient phonological and grammatical properties of the varieties of English around the world" and to supply the linguistic community with "[r] eliable structural information in a somewhat standardized format" (p. 1). The editors have set their sights high - and managed to achieve them admirably.
STRUCTURE
The Handbook comes in two volumes, one on phonology and one on morphology and syntax. After a general introduction (Kortmann & Schneider) and a general list of references, both volumes fall into four parts, each containing between 11 and 18 descriptions of individual varieties (for a full list of the chapters and their authors see the Appendix below): The British Isles (eds. Kortmann & Upton), The Americas and the Caribbean (ed. Schneider), The Pacific and Australasia (eds. Burridge & Kortmann) and Africa, South and Southeast Asia (ed. Meshtrie). Both volumes end with synopses by the section editors, summarizing "the most striking properties of the sets of varieties of English spoken in the individual world regions" (4) and a global synopsis (Vol. I: Schneider, Vol. II: Kortmann & Szmrecsanyi). The volumes are accompanied by a Multimedia Reference Tool (CD-ROM), of which more below. Notable is the wide-ranging inclusion of second-language varieties and English-based pidgins and creoles, which account for more than half of the varieties treated.
The default (and, to the reader, most useful) case is for any one particular variety to be treated in both volumes, generally but by no means in all cases by the same author(s). In this respect, the section edited by Meshtrie is clearly the most consistent, while the Americas and Caribbean chapters (regrettably, perhaps) exhibit substantial variation across the two volumes.
The list of contributors (see Appendix) can only be called impressive, which makes it even more astonishing that a work to which more than a hundred scholars have contributed manages such overall consistency both in the structure and in the quality of the presentations.
EVALUATION
One of the most striking characteristics of the _Handbook_ is its understanding of what constitutes a variety of English. While virtually all dialectologists and sociologists currently would pay lip service to the idea that there is no one inherently and linguistically privileged standard variety, most collections and writings about any number of varieties then proceed to take the standard as their point of departure, particularly when the focus is on the British Isles. Here, however, the structure of the sections follows a strictly geographical order, in the case of the British Isles, north-to-south, with Received Pronunciation appearing very much towards the end of the section. Similarly, it is unusual for varieties of English which originated several centuries ago (as the ones spoken, for example, in the British Isles) to be put on a par with more recent, e.g. (post)colonial, varieties, as is the case here.
In order to maintain consistency of information across chapters, all authors were asked to address the following issues in their contributions:
Vol I: - phonological systems - phonetic realization(s) and (phonotactic) distributions of a selection of phonemes - specific phonological processes - lexical distribution - prosodic features - intonation patterns - observations/generalizations on the basis of lexical sets Vol II: - tense - aspect - modality - auxiliaries - negation - relativization - complementation - other subordination phenomena - agreement - noun phrase structure - pronominal systems - word order - selected salient features of the morphological paradigms
How the editors managed to make all their authors stick to these guidelines is a marvel, but stick to it they did, making the overall appearance of the volumes quite amazingly consistent. In addition, most contributions, while focussing on the above features, contain an introductory section providing information on the socio-historical background of the variety under investigation.
This in itself would have constituted a phenomenally helpful and useful work. However, it is the synopses at the end of both volumes and the Multimedia CD-ROM accompanying the books where the true power of this tool becomes most evident: here, the worldwide distribution of variables is at the reader's fingertips. Both focus on the systematicity of certain features across a wide range of fairly disparate language varieties. This has been visualized in an especially handy format by means of interactive maps on the CD-ROM. Here, a comprehensive collection of 179 phonological and 76 grammatical features are available for selection, upon which they will appear on the world map as red (normal or widespread distribution of the selected feature), yellow (feature occurs occasionally) or grey (feature not documented). This allows the user, for example, to select a monophthongal realization of the FACE diphthong and see at a glance that this is really very widespread, especially in Central Africa, the Caribbean, and in Asian varieties, while _at_ as a relative particle is restricted to occasional use in Northern British and Appalachian English.
These maps are accompanied by a large collection of audio samples in three categories: free data (for 39 varieties), a reading passage (for 36 varieties which, in some cases, has been varied slightly) and lexical sets (for 38 varieties, some of which however are incomplete). The Intercontinental Vowel Comparison feature, furthermore, makes it possible to select for example the lexical set STRUT, click on the places on the world map for which the data are available, and hear it rendered consecutively in Ghanaian English, New York English and Standard Scottish English. (Campus licenses for the Multimedia Tool are available to libraries, I am informed on the Mouton de Gruyter website - price on request.).
It is difficult within the confines of 2,500 words to describe just how comprehensive and useful this tool is. Suffice it to say that this is the kind of reference work that comes along maybe once in a generation, and will revolutionize the ways in which we and our students can work with the English language.
If one were forced to pick something to criticize, the helpfulness of the index might be somewhat questionable. One cannot but wonder how many readers will actually want to look up the close to 100 instances of CURE. On the other hand, for example, there is no entry for Aitken's Law (although the same phenomenon does feature under Scottish Vowel Length Rule).
Furthermore, it is probably inevitable that an interactive tool, such as the CD-ROM, could not have been as stringently edited as the linear printed text, so there are some points which might merit addressing in future editions. For one thing, the user manual (available at www.mouton- online.de) is less than helpful to the user who encounters trouble and turns to it for help -- it bears, in fact, a slightly suspicious resemblance to a somewhat casually edited publishing proposal. The chapter 'Basic Concepts', which is referred to at several points both in the manual and in the section 'Preliminaries' on the CD-ROM, also seems to be missing (although it is represented in a very rudimentary version in the free demo on the publisher's website). Under the heading 'Audio Samples - Maps', the reader is referred to the online edition of the CD- ROM - accompanied, however, by a link which does not work. On the publisher's website, I could only find the demo version. I am informed by the publishers that they are working on a full online edition, but whether owners of the _Handbook_ will be able to get free access, I don't know.
The last point of criticism, although outside the control of the editors, is the fact that the exorbitant price of the Handbook will make it impossible for most of us ever to own what, really, should be on the bookshelf of every linguist working on the English language and its (contact) varieties. It is a great pity that such an outstanding work could not have been more competitively priced. Maybe we can hope for a more affordable paperback edition in the future? In the meantime, if your own budget does not stretch to the _Handbook_, make sure your library gets it. If they only buy one book this year, this should definitely be the one.
Monika S. Schmid graduated in translation of literature in English, French
and German from the Heinrich-Heine Universität Duesseldorf in 1996 and was
awarded her PhD (summa cum laude) in English linguistics from that same
institution in 2000. Since August 2000, she has been a lecturer in English
linguistics (specialty area language variation) and researcher (specialty
area: first language attrition) at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her
recent publications include a monograph and a collected volume on first
language attrition, published with John Benjamins, Amsterdam. In August
2005, she will be co-organizing the 2nd International Conference on First
Language Attrition at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
(www.let.vu.nl/conference/icfla2005).
