Interest in the differences between English in Britain (or more especially England) and the United States supports a small industry, of which I am a small part. But there are those who argue that the differences are so negligible that they are not worth investigating. One of these is University of Edinburgh Professor of General Linguistics Geoffrey Pullum, who wrote a post on the topic for the Lingua Franca blog of the Chronicle of Higher Education. Pullum (2014) concluded:

One of the major achievements of Braj Kachru's (1991) ‘liberation linguistics’ is that it has squarely placed Outer Circle varieties such as Indian English, Nigerian English and Singaporean English on a par with Inner Circle varieties such as American English and British English – in the face of negative attitudes, ranging ‘from amused condescension to racist stereotyping’ (Bruthiaux, 2003: 160). Following in Kachru's footsteps, many scholars have demonstrated that these Outer Circle Englishes are legitimate varieties of English, with distinct characteristics and with growing numbers of native speakers (e.g. Deterding, 2007; Jowitt, 1991; Sailaja, 2009). Indeed these Outer Circle English varieties are increasingly used, in respective countries, not only as the major or default medium of communication but also in the context of important domains such as education, media, government, literature and popular culture. The Kachruvian perspective has also given rise to the ‘egalitarian’ view that Inner Circle English speakers are no longer the only ones who can lay claim to the ownership of English. Outer Circle English speakers are now thought to be as much custodians of English as Inner Circle English speakers are.

Is English usage changing more rapidly than it was before? Judging by the decreasing time between editions of ‘Fowlers’ it would seem so: thirty-nine years between Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926, from here on MEU1) and Gower's second edition (1965, from here on MEU2), and thirty-one years between the latter and Burchfield's The New Fowler's Modern English Usage (1996, from here on NFMEU). This led Manfred Görlach to write in his review of NFMEU that ‘[t]imes change, and we (and usage) change with them. A new edition of Fowler's classic book is thus in order every thirty to forty years’ (Görlach, 1997).

With a rapid increase of electronic communication and online social media, the English language has become a ubiquitous element in global communication. Although change is an inevitable phenomenon in any living language, an infiltration of a foreign language is often resisted by those who fear that a foreign influence would disintegrate the purity of their language, sabotaging its integrity and distinctiveness.

The English language is no longer any one nation's monopoly; practically every nation on earth has a stake in it. This is the overall thrust of the book in the spotlight. The amazing journey of the language from a none-too-conspicuous dialect once spoken on a part of a tiny island off the north-western coast of Continental Europe to a language of wider communication across the world is the topic that the book engages with. In the ten chapters that make up this book, Urszula Clark surveys the current state of the language in its worldwide spread, along with the inevitable phenomenon of the emergence of new regional varieties or ‘Englishes’.

With its subtitle ‘Prescriptivism and Language History’, Fixing English encompasses two senses of ‘fixing’: firstly, attempting to freeze the language at a particular historical moment and prevent it from changing further and, secondly, attempting to improve it and repair it of its faults and shortcomings.

According to the Institute of International Education, China has become a major receiving country of international students, like the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada. The rapid development of international education in China evidences a major progress in the infrastructure of Chinese higher education. While internationalization creates unprecedented opportunities for the knowledge economy in China, it simultaneously poses unparalleled challenges for Chinese higher education (An & Chiang, 2015) and one of these challenges is the medium of instruction (MOI). While English has been widely taught in China since 1978 (McArthur, 2005), it was not until the turn of the century that English was endorsed as the medium of instruction for the so-called Chinese-English bilingual education.

In recent years, many researchers have been studying the spread of English in our globalized world, while others have focused on multilingualism. For Stępkowska the question of multilingualism in Europe is intimately linked with English, and Switzerland represents the perfect place for understanding how these relationships evolve. Her book treats sociolinguistic questions at a macro-level and provides the reader with three main elements: a broad consideration of English (Chapter 1), a discussion about language contact (Chapter 2), and new data on the Swiss language use obtained in the canton of Zurich in 2011, which leads to the development of a ‘Swiss paradigm’ conceptualizing the role of English in Switzerland (Chapter 3).

Landmarks is a book difficult to classify, yet it is of great interest to students of the English language. It is also a book that on publication in early 2015 struck such a chord with the general readership that it spent several months in booksellers’ ‘top ten’ lists.

In many ways, Dalzell's is an exemplary slang dictionary, as one might expect from so experienced a slang lexicographer. Slang dictionaries do not usually explain the principles underlying inclusion, the selection of headword forms, the ordering of senses and the designation of country of origin, although this information is vital to any careful user.

Writing in Slang To-day and Yesterday (1933), his pioneering history of the lexical subset that would become his life's work, Eric Partridge, who in time would become the 20th century's leading expert in its lexis, pondered the etymology of the word ‘slang’. It was, he confessed, a ‘prize-problem word’. 82 years on, and 36 since the death at 85 of the man whose many fans would nickname him ‘The Word King’, it is hard to avoid feeling that in terms of his work and the reputation it brought him, it was Partridge too who represents a ‘prize problem.’

The Mouton World Atlas of Variation in English (WAVE), edited by Bernd Kortmann and Kerstin Lunkenheimer, is an impressive and significant achievement. Consisting of almost 1,000 pages of detailed accounts of morphosyntactic patterns in 55 varieties of English from around the world (with some analysis of a further 19) by an international range of experts (many of whom are native speakers of the varieties they describe), WAVE represents a major step forward in our understanding of dialect variation in English and illustrates in fine detail a vast array of linguistic systems that fall under the umbrella ‘English’ across the world today. Using a list of 235 morphosyntactic features, WAVE explores diatopic variation in L1, L2 and pidgin/creole varieties across the globe, illustrating the results in 96 full-colour maps, and investigates the deeper relationships between the varieties in 23 colour-coded phenetic networks. It is a veritable feast for the eyes, but there is so much detail in it that it is much more than that; it is, in fact, a huge database echoing in many ways The World Atlas of Language Structures (Haspelmath et al. 2005) in its depth and breadth.