Book Review: Gender in World Englishes

Abstract

Gender in World Englishes presents a new and exciting collection of case studies that utilize corpus linguistic methods to examine different linguistic features in a range of "Outer Circle" Englishes, thereby giving prominence to varieties often overlooked in comparison to British, American, Australian, and Canadian English. Each chapter in the book, edited by Tobias Bernaisch, draws on the International Corpus of English (ICE), looking at the frequencies, dispersions, and usages of a range of grammatical features in these different varieties by speakers' sex (despite the title of the volume, the authors conflate sex and gender, a problem I discuss later in this review).Chapter 1 (Bernaisch) provides a succinct overview of the current literature on language and gender and draws attention to the fact that the edited collection deals with under-researched varieties of English. Chapter 2 (Beke Hansen) analyzes the quotative system in Ghanaian English, focusing on whether women are more likely to use the quotative "be like." Hansen considers findings from previous studies and incorporates an element of diachronic analysis. She finds evidence of increasing usage of quotatives such as "say" and "be like" in Ghanaian English over time-arguing that such features, which are stereotypically associated with young female American-English speakersmight be the by-product of globalization. Chapter 3 (Robert Fuchs) examines the use of intensifiers in Indian English-taking into account the interaction between speaker's gender, the formality of the situation, the age of the speakers, and whether the speaker is in a same-sex group. This analysis is laudable: it resembles an "intersectional" approach, which, importantly, considers how multiple identities (which are treated as variables) might interact to influence language use. Fuchs finds several interesting trends within the data, such as how, in informal registers, women use more intensifiers than men, but in formal contexts, men are more likely to use more intensifiers.