For those of us who teach courses on varieties of English, the appearance of these volumes will be very welcome indeed. Yes, there are books which already provide introductory accounts of English around the world, but they are either rather outdated or concentrate on one aspect of variation (e.g. phonology), are not meaty enough to provide a thorough appreciation of each variety or do not offer a typological overview of what is going on in English right now. None of these accusations can be levelled at the volumes under review here. Almost 2400 pages of text provide valuable and detailed snapshots of English varieties at the start of the twenty-first century. Students will most certainly appreciate being able to begin their research on a variety in just one place, and academics can be confident that the handbook is up-to-date, fairly exhaustive, and points the reader in the direction of relevant further research. Both students and academics will wince, though, at the price – 598 Euro at the time of writing – and the weight – over 3.8 kg! – so we can only hope that Mouton will very soon turn this into an affordable paperback so that we might reasonably expect serious students (i) to acquire it, and (ii) not to need a lorry to bring it to class. But putting price and size to one side, these volumes will undoubtedly serve as the encyclopaedic reference point for some time. The handbook contains chapters by leading figures working on the respective varieties. In commenting in more detail on the volumes, I will begin therefore with what I believe to be real strengths of this handbook, before I turn to a few problematic aspects, many of which the volume editors admit in their relevant introductions to the volumes and the subsections within them.

The editors had to somehow tie together 111 chapters across the two volumes. In the circumstances, therefore, a clustering of chapters by country and continent would have been fully understandable. But the handbook's editors went further than this, providing not only summary introductions to each major country or continent, but also synopses of the variation found in the English across that country or continent at the back of each volume, and a terrific global typological synopsis at the very end. The latter is particularly useful because often we want to be able not just to look at variation in English country by country but also to see the connections and similarities between varieties. While varieties sometimes show similarities because they have a common geographical ancestor, similarities can also be seen across Englishes that show no geographical linkages but which have been formed in similar ways, varieties which have, for example, similar contact histories. The handbook's synopsis makes the task of finding connections and similarities much easier and is a commendable enterprise undertaken by the editors. Courses in variation in English can quite easily become simply a geographical tour, but the typological investigation by the editors at the end of the volumes ensures that readers can see the wood for the trees (see also Szmrecsanyi & Kortmann Reference Szmrecsanyi and Kortmann2006) and that they can see what has driven English varieties to differ in the way that they do.

Also commendable are the lengths the editors have gone to in ensuring that many of the less well-known Englishes, especially the English-as-a-second-language varieties, are well represented here. It can actually be quite difficult to gain much useful detailed information about these otherwise, especially if a library lacks a subscription to a key journal such as English World-Wide or World Englishes.

Many varieties-of-English courses rely on John Wells' classic 1982 trilogy, Accents of English. In the twenty-five years since its publication, a massive amount of research has been carried out, enabling the authors here to fill in the many gaps and correct any errors. Because no similar volume existed covering grammatical variation, and because the existence of very large corpora facilitating robust studies of grammatical variation is a fairly recent phenomenon, grammatical variation has often had to play second fiddle to phonological variation. This imbalance is rectified in these volumes, and we now have at our fingertips a much more detailed and sophisticated account of grammatical variation around the English-speaking world than ever before, and all in one (albeit heavy) place. Another positive aspect of these volumes is that some entries represent the first detailed systematic overviews of the varieties concerned – notable in this respect, for example, is Urszula Clark's chapter on the phonology of the English West Midlands.

I turn now to a few somewhat problematic aspects of the handbook, all of which are minor in comparison with the considerable strengths of this enterprise.

Lack of parallel coverage in the two volumes. The volume on phonology and that on morphosyntax are not directly parallel to each other. For example, there is no morphosyntactic counterpart to Clark's chapter on the phonology of the British West Midlands, and the introduction to the British Isles in the volume on morphosyntactic variation does not tell us if and where that area is covered elsewhere. Similarly, while there is a chapter on the Received Pronunciation accent, there is no similar chapter on Standard British English morphology and syntax. Conversely, Belize and other Central American varieties have a chapter on morphosyntax but not on phonology. We have to recognise, of course, that these gaps are often a result of lack of research in those particular places: the morphosyntax of the British West Midlands, for example, is sorely underinvestigated.

Missing varieties. Some now relatively well-studied varieties are not represented in these volumes, perhaps the most significant (in linguistic, not demographic terms!) being Tristan da Cunha and the Falkland Islands. Tristan, which is extremely well documented (given its small population size), both historically (Zettersten Reference Zettersten1969) and, particularly, in modern times (see especially Schreier Reference Schreier2003), is a dialectologist's dream. Created through initial contact and until recent times allowed to develop independently almost in total isolation from the rest of the English-speaking world, it offers near-laboratory conditions for the investigation of language and dialect contact and dialect focussing. The Falklands are a very different kettle of fish entirely. Despite their seeming isolation, in the far south of the South Atlantic Ocean, the Falklands' population has always been relatively mobile, a factor which has created a much more mainstream and much less distinctive variety than that on Tristan, but one which was formed at roughly the same time as other Southern Hemisphere Englishes, such as Australian and New Zealand English (see Sudbury Reference Sudbury2000, Reference Sudbury2001), with which it has important typological similarities and differences. A volume including these and other ‘lesser-known’ varieties of English is currently in preparation (Schreier et al., Reference Schreier, Trudgill, Schneider and Williamsto appear) and will serve to fill in some of the other small gaps in this handbook. Another omission, though perhaps one due to lack of primary research, is of variation in Zimbabwean English, in particular that of White, first-language speakers.

Repetition and oversupply. In some places, there seem to be two chapters on the same topic (e.g. ‘Australian English: Morphology and syntax’ and ‘Australian vernacular English: Some grammatical characteristics’) or a chapter whose material should really have been included in one of the other chapters (e.g. ‘Hypocoristics in Australian English’).

The CD-ROM. The CD-ROM accompanying the volumes contains a number of potentially useful features. I have to say, however, that a much more substantial manual is required to make full use of it. One especially interesting feature of the CD-ROM, for instance, is the interactive mapping. The user can see a map of the world, showing lots of locations where English is spoken, and can choose which realisation of which feature s/he wants to see the distribution of. For example, one can examine where the vowel in the STRUT lexical set is high and back, i.e. where it is realised as [ʊ]. Clicking on ‘STRUT – high back’ turns lots of the dots red. Now, what does ‘red’ mean? The map itself provides only a rudimentary key as to what ‘red’ means (‘red’ means ‘A’), which is not explained anywhere on this page. It is only on the page introducing phonology that we are told that ‘all those circles/varieties that share this property are displayed in red’. Three problems remain, however: firstly, the red dots appear in all sorts of places where they should not – for example, East Anglia in England does not have [ʊ] in STRUT (see Britain Reference Britain, Jacek and Peter2001 and Peter Trudgill's chapter in volume 1 of the handbook, page 167) but is displayed in red on my CD-ROM (as is most of the U.S.?!); secondly, the red dots do not appear where they should (as, for example, the North of England; see page 121 of Joan Beal's chapter in volume 1); and thirdly, there are also orange spots on the map. The key tells me ‘orange’ equals ‘B’, but again there is nothing on the map or the key that tells me what ‘B’ means. Perhaps this information is given elsewhere, but I could not find it. There are many more examples where my CD-ROM at least is quite simply wrong – for example, intrusive /r/ triggered red spots only in West Africa. And on my CD-ROM, the Help button did nothing.

There are a number of sample recordings on the CD-ROM, which are very useful indeed. One particularly valuable tool is the ability to click on geographically distributed red dots and hear the same word being pronounced in many different Anglophone speech communities. Unfortunately, not all of the varieties described in the two volumes have voice samples and some fairly important varieties are missing, for example African American Vernacular English, British Creole, ‘colloquial American English’, Jamaican Creole, and Standard American English.

I am sure that considerable technological hurdles must be overcome to create an easy-to-use, flexible and informative CD-ROM providing materials to support these two very substantial volumes. However, while the CD-ROM accompanying the handbook has some very helpful material within it, better keys on each map and a detailed manual would make it significantly easier to fully exploit its possibilities.

Overall, then, these state-of-the-art volumes are a magnificent testimony to the incredible amount of research which has been carried out in the last quarter century on variation in English around the world. The editors should be heartily congratulated, not just for assembling so many chapters from so many of the world's leading scholars working on this topic, but also for encouraging the authors to follow a fairly well-defined template for each chapter – for example, the chapters on the phonology of American English for the most part adopt, unusually for studies of the U.S., Wells' (Reference Wells1982) lexical sets as a way of representing phonemic distinctions. This approach makes comparability across varieties much easier and synthesises the information gathered for the purposes of typological analysis, enabling us to assess the relationships, similarities and differences that are so apparent in English today.