Book re iews Sidney Greenbaum ( ed . ) , Comparing English Worldwide : The International

Most of the work that has gone into compiling English-language corpora since the pioneering Brown Corpus in the 1960s has been devoted to American or British English, which are the standard languages of the two societies with the largest communities of English-speaking computational linguists, and the English varieties with most significance in the context of commercial language engineering. But Britain and the USA are not the only English-speaking countries. The International Corpus of English (ICE), an enterprise initiated by Sidney Greenbaum in 1989 whose participants are oriented more towards arts-based language studies than to industrial applications, aims to develop a coordinated collection of ' World Englishes '. When complete, ICE will contain a subcorpus for each of 18 countries or regions, in some of which (e.g. Australia) English is the native language, while in others (e.g. Nigeria) it is the common language of public life although few inhabitants' mother tongue. This book, containing 19 chapters by different participants in the ICE effort, is the first easily accessible survey of what is planned and what has been achieved. Each ICE subcorpus is intended to resemble Brown and LOB in comprising 500 samples each of 2000 words, but half the samples will be speech, and the written samples will include manuscript as well as printed material. The period represented will be the 1990s, though some teams have had to ignore the original planned cutoff of 1994. Samples are intended to represent the ' educated ' or ' standard ' English of the respective country, but this is a highly problematic concept – the book contains many references to debates about whether countries such as Nigeria can be described as having a separate local standard variety of English, and\or whether it is desirable for them to develop one. Like Brown and LOB, the ICE subcorpora aim to allot subsets of their samples to different genres in a systematic way, but mechanical equivalence is not possible because of the varying roles of English in different societies ; thus Philip Bolt and Kingsley Bolton of the ICE-Hong Kong team point out that newsreaders on English-language television and radio stations in Hong Kong are usually expatriates. ICE itself does not include the English of people who have learned English as a foreign language in countries such as France, but a chapter by Sylviane Granger describes a sister project, the International Corpus of Learner English, which aims …