System 121 (2024) 103245

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

System
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/system

Book review

New Englishes, New Methods, , Guyanne Wilson, Michael Westphal (Eds.). John Benjamins (2023). vii þ
276

As a linguist, I have research interests in New Englishes, (corpus) pragmatics and discourse analysis. In the past few years, I have
paid special attention to English pragmatic features such as pragmatic markers, general extenders and speech acts in Nigerian English
as well as borrowed discourse-pragmatic features from indigenous African languages in Ghanaian, Kenyan, Nigerian, South African
and Tanzanian Englishes (e.g. Unuabonah & Muro, 2022). All these kindled my interests in the edited book by Guyanne Wilson and
Michael Westphal (2023), New Englishes, New Methods, John Benjamins, especially as I had an opportunity of co-presenting a paper at
one of the workshops that led to the publication of this volume. Indeed, after reading through this edited book, I can confirm that the
volume is an insightful and stimulating book, which contributes immensely to methodological matters in New Englishes.
The volume is made up of eleven chapters written by established and emerging scholars in the field of New Englishes, apart from
introductory and concluding chapters written by the editors. What will quickly catch readers’ attention from the Table of contents is
the division of the chapters into four parts: corpora, phonetics and phonology, language attitudes and ethnography, with four out of the
eleven chapters dedicated to corpus studies, even though some chapters in other parts of the book also utilise corpus data for their
analyses. This can be expected as corpus linguistics is quickly gaining ground as a very useful method in the study of New Englishes. I
am sure readers will be impressed by the variety of New Englishes explored in the volume, including Nigerian English, Jamaican
English, Trinidadian & Tobagonian English, St Kitts English, Pennsylvania German English, Indian English, Philippine English,
Malaysian English, Vietnamese English, Pakistani English, Indonesian English and Chinese English, some of which are very rarely
studied in the field of New Englishes. Readers will not help but notice that five of the chapters focus on Nigerian English, which is not
surprising as Nigerian English is one of the fastest growing Englishes in the world (Jowitt, 2019).
From the introductory chapter, Wilson and Westphal quickly provide the aim of the volume, which is to “critically explore the
gamut of familiar and unfamiliar methods applied in data collection and analysis in order to improve upon old methods and develop
new methods for the study of English around the world” (p. 1). Readers will see that the different chapters stay true to this overarching
aim. To clear any doubts, they also define New Englishes as “varieties of English which have developed out of colonial contact sit­
uations” and which function as official and second/subsequent languages (p. 2). What I also find interesting in the volume is the focus
on different linguistic sub-fields engaged in the chapters. Asides from the two parts that focus on phonetics and phonology (Folajimi
Oyebola and Warsa Melles; Robert Fuchs) and language attitudes (Kingsley Ugwuanyi; Giuliana Regnoli; Mirjam Schmalz), the other
chapters address verbal past inflection (Axel Bohmann and Adesoji Babalola), code-switching (Muhammad Shakir), conversational
analysis (Theresa Neumaier) and critical discourse analysis (Michael Westphal and Guyanne Wilson). The last two sub-fields in
particular are very rarely studied in New Englishes. All these indicate that the volume is useful for scholars with different foci in New
Englishes. As a corpus pragmatician myself, I have already started thinking of how to incorporate these areas into my research on
African Englishes.
In terms of methodology, apart from the use of corpora, some of the chapters utilise Acceptability Judgement Tasks (Kingsley
Ugwuanyi) and (digital) ethnography (Miriam Neuhausen; Theresa Heyd). A number of the chapters, in fact, use mixed-methods
approaches, which I find very interesting and insightful. For example, Axel Bohmann and Adesoji Babalola combine corpus data
and sociolinguistic interviews in their study of verbal past inflection in Nigerian English and call for a ‘sociolinguistic compound
vision,’ which involves “an active effort to include diverse data sets in order to avoid homogenizing accounts of New Englishes” (p.16).
This methodology worked for them because they find rich systematicity in the choice of past inflection in Nigerian English, contrary to
findings in previous studies. Similarly, Kingsley Ugwuanyi integrates quantitative and qualitative methods in his examination of the
acceptability of Nigerian English features with the use of Acceptability Judgement Tasks. I find this approach fascinating as he probes
the use of metalinguistic features, which the participants employ in indicating why they accept some of the features. Furthermore,
Giuliana Regnoli combines map-drawing tasks and a Verbal Guise Test to explore language attitudes towards accent variation in Indian
English, using a transient community of Indian students in Heidelberg, Germany. Mirjam Schmalz equally integrates map-drawing
tasks and semi-structured interviews in exploring language attitudes in St Kitts and Nevis. A key conclusion that emerges from

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2024.103245
Received 22 December 2023; Received in revised form 18 January 2024; Accepted 18 January 2024
Available online 28 January 2024
0346-251X/© 2024 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Book review System 121 (2024) 103245

these studies: merging qualitative and quantitative methods as well as diverse methods of data collection are extremely valuable and
useful in providing a fuller understanding of internal variation in New Englishes.
Robert Fuchs performed excellently well in not only exploring speech rhythm in three New Englishes: Pakistani, Nigerian and
Philippine Englishes, but also in providing a step-by step guide for researchers who are interested in studying speech rhythm in New
Englishes “in order ensure the reliability of results as well as their comparability across studies” (p.139). Miriam Neuhausen also offers
very useful insights and guidelines for carrying out ethnographic work among speech communities that are segregated from the outside
world, such as the Pennsylvanian Old Order Mennonite Community, which has very little contact with the secular world. She identifies
social behaviour that researchers should embrace in order to succeed in the fieldwork as well as sociolinguistic realities in the com­
munity, which aid the detection of new social variables and access to the speakers. She also advises researchers on the “need to ensure
that their representation of the community is in line with the community’s interests” (p. 222).
While ethnography can be useful in investigating New Englishes, as shown in the chapter by Miriam Neuhausen, ethnography may
also be carried out digitally, which is to be expected with the increase in the use of online data for the investigation of New Englishes.
Thus, Theresa Heyd’s chapter is illuminating as she discusses the increasing role of digital communication in world Englishes as well as
the use of digital ethnography as a methodological framework. She points her searchlight to three case studies: the engagement of
multilingual resources while online or offline by migrants in British settings; emerging English practices by a Mongolian Facebook
community as well as quantitative and qualitative analysis of digital narratives in a sub-corpus of Nigerian online discussion forum,
Nairaland. Heyd invites readers to consider ethical practices which are necessary for digital ethnography of world Englishes and which
prove useful for New Englishes as well.
Speaking of the role of digital communication in New Englishes research, Muhammad Shakir investigates sociolinguistic functions
of codeswitching into indigenous languages by Pakistani English users in a 1.2 million-word corpus compiled from different Pakistani
online communities. His study brings to fore the importance of sociolinguistic features in New Englishes, which is also emphasised in
Folajimi Oyebola and Warsa Melles’s chapter that examines the effect of social factors of gender and ethnicity on question intonation
patterns in Nigerian English. Their study highlights the importance of focusing on New Englishes, without comparing them with British
or other native Englishes. With detailed attention on New Englishes, researchers can focus on internal variation within these varieties.
These social factors are definitely aspects that I will consider in my research as a corpus pragmatician.
As a discourse analyst, I am also intrigued by Theresa Neumaier’s chapter on turn-taking as a factor in explaining syntactic
variation in the Asian Corpus of English and the Jamaican and Trinidadian and Tobagonian components of the International Corpus of
English. She argues that Conversational Analysis can expand “our understanding of how grammatical patterns become entrenched in a
variety’s linguistic repertoire” (p. 80). I am sure researchers who are interested in corpus-assisted discourse analysis but wonder how
they can use the ICE corpora will find Michael Westphal and Guyanne Wilson’s chapter on Creole and power in Caribbean courtrooms
very helpful.
Altogether, Wilson and Westphal have done an exceptional work in bringing together chapters that deal with expanding old
methods as well as utilising new methods, which are instrumental in investigating New Englishes. However, I would have appreciated
seeing one or two more chapters that focus on other New Englishes which are rarely studied, such as Botswana or Lesotho English. It
would have also been interesting to see how Discourse Completion Tasks could be adapted to the study of some of these New Englishes.
Notwithstanding, the editors have provided an excellent road map for scholars and students within the fields of world Englishes,
sociolinguistics, (digital) ethnography, (critical) discourse analysis, morphosyntax, phonetics and phonology, who want to expand the
frontiers of New Englishes.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Foluke Olayinka Unuabonah: Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Resources, Methodology, Conceptualization.

References

Jowitt, D. (2019). Nigerian English. De Gruyter Mouton.

Unuabonah, F. O., & Muro, L. P. (2022). Borrowed Swahili discourse-pragmatic features in Kenyan and Tanzanian Englishes. Intercultural Pragmatics, 19(4), 489–512.
https://doi.org/10.1515/ip-2022-4003
Wilson, G., & Westphal, M. (Eds.). (2023). New Englishes, new methods. John Benjamins.

Foluke Olayinka Unuabonah

Department of English, Redeemer’s University, PMB 230, Ede, Osun State, Nigeria
E-mail address: unuabonahf@run.edu.ng.