Even before one opens this book, a potential reader is impressed by the suggested coverage and by the quality of the authors, two of whom are very well known in the fields of creolistics, education and linguistics. A closer survey confirms the coverage, revealing a listing and categorisation of 1626 (p. xviii) or 1624 (p. xix) texts written over the last fifty years and covering.

World Englishes, like other topics covered in the Routledge Introduction to Applied Linguistics series (ELT, Classroom Discourse, Corpus Linguistics), is increasingly a feature of the curriculum of Applied Linguistics and TESOL programmes. Philip Seargeant's book is aimed at master's-level students who are teachers in training or language professionals returning to study, and final year undergraduates. The first part of the book is what you would expect: everything applied linguistics students need to know about WES (World English Studies). The second part is a meditation on WES as academic discipline which is likely to provide food for thought for researchers as well as students. Fortunately the long tradition of undergraduate textbooks which offer region-by-region descriptions of English is on the wane. More recent textbooks such as Jenkins (2003) and Schneider (2011), and the more advanced Mesthrie and Bhatt (2008), whilst individually reflecting the preoccupations of their authors, all address the twin strands of World Englishes. These are, on the one hand, variation which has emerged over time through the dynamics of language contact, and on the other, the global character of English, which now sets it apart from the study of other languages. This, for Seargeant, is a paradox at the heart of WES: English is celebrated around the world for the way it can express the identity of particular communities (authenticity) but also for its universality and neutrality (anonymity).

Language observers may have noticed the existence of two past tense forms for the verb to sneak in American English, sneaked and snuck. Interestingly, both forms have not always coexisted; the original form is sneaked, and snuck has only recently become a real competitor for sneaked (Hogg, 1988: 31–32). The verb to drag seems to be somewhat in the same situation with the original past tense form dragged as well as the new form drug (Bybee & Moder, 1983: 252). However, drug is much less frequent than snuck. Murray's (1998) study on the attitudes towards snuck and drug suggests some difference in the usage of these forms across registers.

The Irish English Resource Centre is a website developed and maintained by Raymond Hickey, Professor in Linguistics at the University of Duisburg and Essen, a renowned expert on the variety of English spoken in Ireland. The website aims to ‘make material on the historical and regional diversity of Irish English, in the north and south of the country, and information on the sociolinguistics of present-day varieties, available to the interested public’. The contents are divided into twelve sections, which can be accessed in different ways: (i) Introduction, (ii) Levels, (iii) Urban varieties, (iv) Ulster, (v) Surveys and data, (vi) Transportation, (vii) Wider context, (viii) Search, (ix) Links, (x) Research, (xi) References, and (xii) Maps.

Does spelling matter? Simon Horobin says that it matters because spelling shows ‘the richness of our language and its history’. He argues for retaining spelling unchanged as a testimony to the ‘richness of our linguistic heritage and a connection with our literary past’. His book shows that until the last two hundred years it was constantly changing, but ‘rather than lamenting the inconsistencies and complexities of English spelling’, Horobin traces ‘how these developed and what they tell us about the fascinating history of our language’.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are big news in higher education at the moment, with hundreds of the world's leading universities offering free access to lectures and other resources. Many MOOC providers operate through platforms such as edX, a not-for-profit consortium formed by MIT, Harvard and Berkeley, or commercially oriented platforms such as Udacity and Coursera. The last two provide the courses free, but aim to make money by charging for certification, or by making data on MOOC graduates available to recruiters. And the numbers involved are huge: MOOCs can attract tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of enrolments.

The Oxford History of English is an updated version of a work whose first edition appeared in 2006. The content is essentially the same as that of the first edition, with the same fourteen chapters covering a chronology stretching from prehistory (‘Before English’, pp. 9–38) to the present (‘Into the Twenty-first Century’, pp. 488–513). Apart from the addition of some post-2006 publications to the references and suggestions for further reading that accompany the chapters, this updating is most obvious in the last chapter, where David Crystal considers, alongside globalization and changes in educational policy, the influence of electronic communication. The latter, in particular, is an area of rapid change: the appended timeline (pp. 514–29) informs us that Twitter was launched in the same year as the first edition of The Oxford History of English was published, and by the time this second edition appeared it had reached 10 million users in the UK.

This is the third edition, revised and updated as well as greatly embellished with a number of additional attractive features, of a book first published in 2005. This fact alone speaks volumes for the book's immense popularity amongst its target readership primarily composed of students with no specialist knowledge about its subject matter. As part of the series “Oxford Textbooks in Linguistics,” of which there already are over a score of widely appreciated titles on the market, the book is true to the stated objective of the series which is to cater to “second and third-year undergraduate, and postgraduate university students” who “have completed a first-year introductory course in general linguistics.”

This book examines the acquisition of syntax in Seselwa and Morisyen children. Seselwa and Morisyen are historically related creoles spoken in the Seychelles and Mauritius, respectively. Working within Chomsky's (1981) framework, Adone focuses on the acquisition of (non-)reflexive pronouns, double object constructions (DOCs), passive and serial verb constructions (SVCs).

The Politics of English is an important book. Its subject is not English as a discrete, isolated linguistic entity, but the complex set of policies, values and practices that it is an inextricable part of. In exploring a range of interrelated themes, the focus is very much on English as a lived language or, better, as lived experience. In a textbook, this approach is particularly welcomed. There is great availability, nearly an inflation, of texts about English as a world language and the many varieties that have emerged in the last two centuries. By and large, these volumes tend to provide historical, geographical and linguistic overviews of the spread of English. While this is certainly very important, The Politics of English distinguishes itself by offering a different and critical perspective and extremely useful insights into what English actually means to its many users around the world.