Almost every single researcher in the field of World Englishes is – implicitly or explicitly – working to contribute to answers to the following questions: When is a specific feature in a New English an innovation rather than just a mistake? How ‘different’ in terms of their linguistic structure do postcolonial varieties of English have to be from their historical input variety (typically British English) in order to qualify as fully fledged varieties in their own right? Which sociocultural conditions have to hold for a postcolonial speech community to embrace the local variety of English as their own? And which explanatory parameters account best for the divergence between a New English and British English: substrate influence in multilingual contact scenarios, theories of second language acquisition (SLA), universals of some kind?

Edgar Schneider’s Dynamic Model of the evolution of Postcolonial Englishes (Schneider Reference Schneider2007) has been invaluable as the framework for advancing research on Postcolonial Englishes (PCEs), proposing

In From Deficit to Dialect: The Evolution of English in India and Singapore, Devyani Sharma takes on all of the preceding questions at once, including in the scope of her research every single italicised concept in the quote above. She does so by comparing two vastly different linguistic ecologies: India and Singapore. On the one hand, India is a subcontinent with around 1.4 billion inhabitants and hundreds of local languages, whose ‘mega-variety’ Indian English (IndE) developed over several centuries (p. 248). The two official languages Hindi and English are deeply entrenched, but not uniformly so across the nation. Access to English is highly unequal, stratified along the lines of class and caste as well as the urban–rural divide. Hindi is the largest majority language, but still spoken by less than half of the overall population and particularly in the North; the southern Dravidian states display their opposition to Hindi partly by not teaching Hindi as a subject in schools (e.g. Tamil Nadu). Singapore, on the other hand, is an island state with a population of around 4.1 million residents, four official languages (Malay, Tamil, Mandarin Chinese, English), and a prominent example of language shift towards English in progress. There is register differentiation between standard Singapore English (SingE) and colloquial Singapore English (Singlish); the latter has been extensively described as a highly nativised contact variety, indicating progress towards phase 5 of Schneider’s model (‘Differentiation’). For each of these two prominent representatives of ‘New Englishes’, the term she chooses ‘to refer specifically to indigenized postcolonial Englishes’ (p. 255), the cognitive, structural, and social dimensions impinging upon emerging varieties will be compared and evaluated within a wider theory of new dialect formation in multilingual settings. Chapter 1 (‘Introduction’, pp. 1–15) provides a snapshot of the volume’s scope by introducing the main research questions, the datasets and the methodological range that is called upon to tackle these questions.

Part I, ‘English in India’ (pp. 19–152), draws upon the author’s extensive research on IndE over two decades, which in turn was and is informed by her longstanding interest in integrating sociolinguistics, contact linguistics and SLA into the study of World Englishes. Chapter 2, ‘Histories of English in India’ (pp. 19–51), first sketches the history of English in India in four phases: from the earliest colonial contact (phase I, 1600–1857), direct British rule (phase II, 1858–1947) and the Independence movement (phase III, 1905–47), to the time of independence and beyond (phase IV, from 1947 onwards). What sets this account apart from the many other available overviews (e.g. Lange Reference Lange, Schreier, Schneider and Hundt2020; Mukherjee & Bernaisch Reference Mukherjee, Bernaisch and Kirkpatrick2021) is its emphasis on the uneven trajectory of the diffusion of English and the concomitant heterogeneity of the IndE speech community. For Sharma’s line of argumentation, it is crucial to acknowledge that English became entrenched in specific communities much earlier and much more thoroughly than elsewhere. The Anglo-Indian and Christian communities, for example, may have had a ‘founder effect on wider IndE’ (p. 25) due to their role and their prestige as English teachers in convent schools. On the other hand, contemporary IndE still covers the full range of Kachru’s ‘cline of bilingualism’ (e.g. Kachru Reference Kachru and Burchfield1994), from highly proficient, largely metropolitan speakers with emergent positive attitudes towards their own variety, to learners of English as a second/foreign language. This perspective does not refute other accounts that follow Schneider’s stages more closely, but adds a layer of complexity by arguing for the ‘simultaneous emergence of varieties at different social strata’ (p. 48).

Chapter 3, ‘Errors or innovations?’ (pp. 52–78), takes up ‘the basic descriptive challenge of all New Englishes’ (p. 52). Explicitly acknowledging different Indian Englishes rather than one monolithic entity then allows Sharma to steer clear of ideological debates surrounding the concept of the ‘native speaker’. Her notion of a ‘usage cline’ that ‘brings together two notional ends of a proficiency continuum’ (p. 52) is derived from her original PhD research (Sharma Reference Sharma2003). Her original dataset (introduced in section 1.6 of this monograph) came from sociolinguistic interviews in 2001 with twelve speakers of IndE residing in California, plus interviews conducted in 2005 with twelve IndE speakers residing in Delhi.

Sharma coded her dataset for nine grammatical features that are frequently associated with IndE and then used implicational scaling, originally developed in the context of Pidgin and Creole studies, to establish a usage cline, with a pronounced distinction emerging between ‘Learner features’ (section 3.4.3) and ‘New dialect features’ (section 3.4.4). Lack of subject–verb agreement, omission of past tense markers and copula omission turn out to be learner features, restricted to speakers with lower proficiency, while other features such as article omission, stative progressives, only as presentational focus marker and extended uses of modal would have stabilised across all speakers. Sharma has thus arrived at a solution to the ‘basic descriptive challenge’ (p. 52) as noted above and has further provided a template for other researchers in the field. A standard procedure in corpus-based World Englishes research would be to choose one specific feature in one or several New Englishes, then comparing its frequency and distribution with the historical input variety, then correlating any quantitative or qualitative divergences from the input variety with the degree of the variety’s nativisation in terms of Schneider’s model, and finally trying to account for divergences in terms of, for instance, substrate influence, universals of SLA, etc. Sharma has shown that a ‘whole-dialect approach’ (p. 247) requires taking a more extensive set of features into consideration. Further, ‘small is beautiful’ (Hundt & Leech Reference Hundt, Leech, Nevalainen and Traugott2012) when it comes to the database: she has created her own corpus of spoken IndE, but similar datasets are already available in the direct conversation files for the varieties represented in the International Corpus of English (ICE) project – in fact, Sharma makes use of a subset of these files from ICE-Singapore in part II of this monograph. ‘Small is beautiful’ is also to be preferred over ‘big data’ because the highly context-sensitive coding of the chosen grammatical features requires a high degree of familiarity with the individual texts as well as the relevant substrate languages.

Chapters 4 and 5, the case studies of the IndE article system (pp. 49–105) and verbal system (pp. 106–36), draw on Sharma’s extensive previous research and form the empirical backbone of part I, in the sense that the individual features under discussion together with their motivation are then compared to their realisations in SingE in subsequent chapters. Her analysis of in/definite article omission as a stable dialect feature of IndE is informed by her careful scrutiny of the substrate language’s grammar and discourse conventions, in this case Hindi. It thus goes far beyond the general explanation for divergent article usage in New Englishes that was originally proposed by Platt et al. (Reference Platt, Weber and Mian Lian1984: 52–9), namely that New Englishes are sensitive to specificity rather than definiteness:

That is, ‘rather than acting as opposing forces or hypotheses, language transfer and universals can establish a complementary “feeding” relationship’ (p. 104). Such a ‘third grammar’ also emerges from the tense system (chapter 5). Juxtaposing the English and Hindi tense and aspect systems with their difference in the overt morphological marking of specific categories shows the potential for substrate influence or transfer, again not in a simplistic and/or deterministic fashion. In this section, meticulous coding of the chosen features reveals a highly sophisticated interplay of several motivating factors for a ‘third grammar’ in IndE. Each of the selected English forms (past tense, progressive aspect, perfect, modals will/would) was coded for ‘Hindi-like extended semantic meanings’ (p. 121). The subsequent analysis of the data leads her to conclude:

The overuse of the modals will/would turns out to be subject to different constraints: IndE speakers’ overgeneralisations appear as ‘a sociopragmatic reallocation of the form’ (p. 133) from very formal and polite to more general contexts.

Chapter 6, ‘Dialect identity’ (pp. 135–52), adds the ‘social correlates’ to ‘the structural and cognitive dimensions of new dialect formation’ (p. 135). First of all, an additional layer of phonetic features is introduced to complement her morphosyntactic data: aspiration, l-velarisation, and rhoticity, realised as more American or more Indian English by her informants. Surprisingly, the phonetic variables do not correlate at all with speakers’ proficiency in her sample as determined on the basis of the grammatical features described in chapters 4 and 5. To account for this divergence, Sharma can rely on her informants’ metalinguistic comments to reveal the indicators for an emerging IndE dialect identity. She concludes:

The wider theoretical ramifications of this observation are, then, that ‘[s]tabilization of a dialect can thus be internally heterogeneous, with different degrees of endonormative stabilization in different parts of the language’ (p. 151).

At the end of part I, we are left with a highly nuanced picture of Indian (or Indians’) English, embedded in a multilingual, transnational linguistic ecology that cuts across several stages of Schneider’s model. In part II, ‘Comparing India and Singapore’ (pp. 155–251), Singapore enters the picture, in order to get closer to the question of how the specific structural, cognitive and social factors in each language-contact setting interact and why specific features become indexical of a new dialect.

Chapter 7, ‘Rates of change’ (pp. 155–70), outlines the historical trajectory of English in Singapore in direct comparison to IndE, concluding that ‘language shift, linguistic restructuring, endonormative stabilization, and internal dialect differentiation (as evidenced in extensive diglossia) are underway in Singapore to a degree not witnessed at all in India’ (p. 169). In order to account for these quite different outcomes of language contact with English in (post-)colonial settings, Sharma devotes the first sections of chapter 8, entitled ‘Grammatical universals?’ (pp. 171–98), to the investigation of the SingE realisation of a subset of the features analysed for IndE, namely article use, past tense morphology, extended uses of the progressive, copula deletion and variable modal use. To do this, she draws on a range of earlier research, re-arranging existing datasets to match her framework, and complements these data with her own, based on a sample of ten direct conversation files from ICE-Singapore. Her careful scrutiny ultimately reveals ‘robust and specific influence from substrate systems, whether in encouraging similar or divergent usage practices in the two varieties’ (p. 194). However, ‘substrate influence’ as an abstract cover term comprises a range of different processes and outcomes as summarised on p. 195. Still, ‘transfer in fact overpredicts change and cannot fully account for the selective stabilization of dialect features’ (p. 196). Chapter 9, ‘The role of input’ (pp. 197–211), therefore turns to theories of SLA as an additional explanatory parameter beyond the purely structural effects of language contact. Sharma develops her notion of ‘input demand’ with reference to two relevant theories in SLA: the ‘Subset Principle’ and the ‘Interface Hypothesis’ (p. 200). Her prediction that grammatical features which require rich input for native-like acquisition are more prone to substrate influence and thus restructuring in a ‘third grammar’ is borne out for IndE, but only partially for SingE (pp. 208–9) – in contrast to IndE, past marker omission and copula absence have become stable dialect features despite requiring only limited input for their acquisition. Sharma finds a ‘domino effect’ rippling through the system: prevalent phonological processes such as consonant cluster reduction cross over into syntax, motivating, for instance, zero past tense marking.

Chapter 10, ‘Style range and attitudinal change’ (pp. 212–40), returns to the social dynamics of dialect birth or dialect differentiation, stage 5 of Schneider’s model. As already discussed in chapter 2, the discontinuous nature of the IndE speech community gives rise to supraregionalisation and vernacularisation simultaneously. Sharma notes that ‘[i]n general, IndE has moved steadily away from, not toward, a British norm. IndE speakers in urban centers are becoming more similar to one another (i.e. less regional), but simultaneously recognizably Indian (i.e. less extranational)’ (pp. 216–17). While supraregionalisation may thus be a specifically metropolitan phenomenon, vernacularisation may occur from both ends of the cline of bilingualism: ‘the continued influx of nondominant English speakers’ (p. 217) as well as the young urban speakers of Hinglish contribute new vernacular features to IndE. Still, the marked contrast to SingE remains when it comes to IndE speakers’ ‘relatively limited style shifting and style range’ (p. 220). Drawing together evidence from attitude studies, official and unofficial metalinguistic comments concerning specific usages and subvarieties such as Singlish, Sharma concludes with all due caution that the pronounced differences between IndE and SingE on the level of style mirror those on the structural level.

Chapter 11, ‘Summary and implications’ (pp. 241–51), presents the book’s main arguments and achievements in a nutshell, describing the ‘feedback loops’ (p. 240) between the cognitive, structural and social levels at work in new dialect formation as well as highlighting the theoretical and methodological implications for future research in World Englishes. These are indeed manifold and extend far beyond the two main protagonists IndE and SingE.

First of all, Sharma’s tour de force has truly integrated SLA into World Englishes research, at different stages of her analysis. She has demonstrated how to solve the error-innovation conundrum: implicational scaling applied to a wide range of features has brought out the demarcation line between learner and stable new dialect features. The SLA-inspired notion of ‘input demand’ can explain why some features are more prone to substrate influence than others. Secondly, even if the observation that speech communities are not uniform is not exactly new, it is Sharma’s meticulous analysis of IndE which drives the message home: proficient speakers of English and nondominant speakers of English may interact continually and contribute to the variety’s feature pool (cognitive and structural level) as well as to overall attitudes to the variety (social level). Next, the multi-method approach with its blend of qualitative and quantitative data has raised important issues concerning aspects of Schneider’s Dynamic Model. The stage of exonormative stabilisation, for example, does not necessarily affect all levels of language equally: speakers may selectively choose to adhere to exonormative syntactic patterns while at the same time drawing on phonological features to index their identity as new dialect speakers. Sharma also suggests that the role of identity in the Dynamic Model might have to be recalibrated, since ‘identity did not emerge as a clear basis for change’ (p. 248).

Sharma’s book represents both an inspiration and a challenge for the scholarly community. Using her ‘whole-dialect approach’ on other speech communities would not only be extremely time-consuming, it would also require intimate knowledge of relevant substrate languages as well as personal access to the speech community. However, her re-purposing of existing data has demonstrated that many different research strands can be integrated into a larger picture. The only criticism, or rather caveat, might do double duty as an inspiration to World Englishes scholars: some of the data are quite old, for example the files derived from ICE-India and ICE-Singapore, or the data for SingE from Ho & Platt (Reference Ho and Platt1993). This should rather be taken as an invitation to the scholarly community to replicate Sharma’s findings and test her conclusions with more recent research, and then also with data from a host of other New Englishes.