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Raymond Hickey (ed.), Legacies of Colonial English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 August 2007

Rajend Mesthrie
Rajend Mesthrie
Affiliation:
Linguistics Section, Department of English, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, 7707, South Africa, raj@humanities.uct.ac.za
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Extract

Raymond Hickey (ed.), Legacies of Colonial English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp xx, 713. Hb. £90.

This copious volume deals with the development of English at various overseas locations (the “New World,” the Southern Hemisphere, and Asia) during the heyday of British colonialism between the early 17th and late 19th centuries. The 21 studies in the volume demonstrate the legacies of both standard and nonstandard varieties of English from this period. At the same time they show how 17th to 19th century linguistic forms remain influential in characterizing “transported” Englishes to the present day. Not that the volume attempts to straitjacket its contributors: As Hickey emphasizes in the Foreword (p. xix), there are as many scenarios as there are locations in the study of transported Englishes, with each variety arising from different degrees of exposure to different English dialects, and differential influences from indigenous languages and cultures. The main area to which this book belongs is therefore historical dialectology, though it is certainly of relevance to language contact and general sociolinguistics, as well as the specific sociolinguistics of migration.

Type
BOOK REVIEWS
Information
Language in Society , Volume 36 , Issue 4 , October 2007 , pp. 614 - 620
Copyright
© 2007 Cambridge University Press

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References

REFERENCES

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