PUBLICATION OF THE VOLUME ENGLISHES TODAY: MULTIPLE VARIETIES, MULTIPLE PERSPECTIVES

We are glad to announce the publication of the volume Englishes Today: Multiple Varieties, Multiple Perspectives (http://www.cambridgescholars.com/englishes-today).

This volume is the result of a selection of thematically-focussed presentations on the spread of English, delivered at the international conference Englishes Today: Theoretical and Methodological Issues, held on October 18-19, 2013, in Vigo. It is a response to the recent emergence of English as “the world’s first truly global language” (Crystal 2004, 4), currently spoken by nearly a third of the world population. The idea of English as a transnational language has motivated new fields of research with a primary focus on the English language in this context, which form the thematic backbone of the present volume. From a methodological perspective, the study of Englishes poses a number of challenges, and attempts have been made to address these in corpus linguistics, sociolinguistic fieldwork and variationist studies. As such, this volume contributes to this increasingly fashionable, but still somewhat under-explored field of research by drawing together ideas from different frameworks and approaches dealing with English today.

The different chapters reflect current trends in English linguistics research, and can be characterized broadly in terms of the study of the different diatopic and diastratic varieties of English, and the adoption of various theoretical and methodological perspectives. The chapters deal with the globalisation of English in itself and with the origin, development and status of varieties of English, often seen as a testing ground for different research traditions, including typological linguistics, second language acquisition, contact linguistics and sociolinguistics.