The Cambridge Handbook of World Englishes

A comprehensive, state-of-the-art survey of research on World Englishes by a team of leading experts in the field.

A comprehensive, state-of-the-art survey of English as a world language. It pinpoints the global spread of the English language from 1600 to the present day, while also covering global models and related fields and applications, such as second language acquisition, language politics, lexicography, and the media.The plural form 'Englishes' conveys the diversity of English as a global language, pinpointing the growth and existence of a large number of national, regional and social forms. The global spread of English and the new varieties that have emerged around the world has grown to be a vast area of study and research, which intersects multiple disciplines. This Handbook provides a comprehensive and authoritative survey of World Englishes from 1600 to the present day. Covering topics such as variationist sociolinguistics, pragmatics, contact linguistics, linguistic anthropology, corpus- and applied linguistics and language history, it combines discussion of traditional topics with a variety of innovative approaches. The chapters, all written by internationally acclaimed authorities, provide up-to-date discussions of the evolution of different Englishes around the globe, a comprehensive coverage of different models and approaches, and some original perspectives on current challenges.