Corpus Linguistics and African Englishes is an exposition of the nature and applications of corpora and a glimpse into African English. In its 15 chapters, it offers a comprehensive picture of (African-English-based) corpus linguistics: from what the field is and what the process of compiling a corpus involves, to how a corpus can be exploited to detect specific usages and how these can inform real-life decisions.

Chapter 1.1, by Esimaje & Hunston, is a simply written introduction to corpus linguistics. Section 1 defines ‘corpus linguistics’ beyond the traditional ‘collection of written or spoken material’ to include signed languages, gives its history, explains its significance, and describes the historical debates around it. Section 2 explains the three key concepts in corpus linguistics: ‘corpus design’, ‘corpus output’, and ‘corpus annotation’. Section 3 presents types of corpora, software to search them, and their applications.

In Chapter 1.2, Fuchs, van Rooy and Gut stress the need for corpora to be representative. They highlight the role of the International Corpus of English (ICE) project in enabling research on (six) African English varieties and also describe other corpora of African Englishes, the most prominent of which being the Global Web-Based English Corpus (GloWbE). They then formulate ‘the guidelines that the compilers of a new corpus should bear in mind’ and illustrate corpus-based studies of African Englishes with three case studies. However, many African-English researchers are likely to take issue with one methodological point: the authors illustrating with features (appearing in GloWbE) which would be hard to ‘sell’ as ‘African English’, e.g. the spellings bra, bru, dat, dis, neva, and shem reported for Kenyan English.

In Chapter 1.3, Esimaje presents ‘[t]he purpose, design and use of the Corpus of Nigerian and Cameroonian English Learner Language (Conacell)’, a 442,939 words-long corpus consisting of data produced by ‘intermediate learners’ and ‘advanced learners’. She demonstrates the usefulness of Conacell in identifying misspelt words and in examining tense uses by university students.

Chapter 1.4, by Steigertahl, describes the methodology used to compile the 190,000-word ‘Corpus of English(es) Spoken by Black Namibians post Independence (Corpus of ESBNaPI)’. Although the chapter opens the door for ‘Namibian English’ to be considered for addition to the map of African Englishes, the five morphosyntactic structures it discusses based on such a very small corpus cannot represent ‘southern Africa’, which, beyond Namibia and South Africa referred to in the discussion, includes another six English-speaking countries.

In Chapter 1.5, after concisely introducing a ‘600,000-word corpus of written Ghanaian English (GhE) from [ … ] 1966 to 1975’, Brato outlines ‘the sociolinguistic and historical evolution of English in Ghana’. One key statement he makes is that ‘Ghana is currently on the verge of moving into the endonormative stabilization phase [ … ]’ (p. 123). The chapter's aim was to produce empirical evidence of what Ghanaian English looked like during the preceding stage, i.e. the nativization phase, and ‘how GhE has changed in real time’ (p. 134).

In Chapter 1.6, Ozón, FitzGerald & Green present a 240,000-word spoken corpus of Cameroon Pidgin English (CPE) and illustrate its potential uses through a set of case studies. However, when they conclude that the corpus ‘also allows comparison of CPE with other pidgin/creole languages [ … ] and other varieties of post-colonial English’, and that ‘[r]esearchers and teachers can exploit [it] and design their own investigations into [CPE]’ (p. 162), that amounts to courting controversy. Firstly, expecting teachers (presumably of standard English) to ‘exploit’ the content of ‘a largely uncodified variety’ (p. 162) is to be unrealistic; secondly, expecting CPE to be compared with ‘other varieties of post-colonial English’ is to contribute to a potentially distracting debate on what African English is and what it is not.

Chapter 1.7, by Nkemleke, is a scholarly discussion of the findings made in the Corpus of Cameroon English (CCE) about some modal verbs. Extensively referring to the literature, the chapter compares Cameroon English with British English on the ‘frequencies and common senses of [those] modals’ (p. 178). Despite its title (‘Practical corpus linguistics’), the chapter is all but theoretical.

In Chapter 2.1, investigating Nigerian and Black South African English, van Rooy evaluates five ‘explanations’, proposed in the literature, ‘for past-time reference with unmarked verb forms in African Englishes’. The five are: (i) the ‘use of the present tense to denote past events’, (ii) transfer from ‘the native languages of speakers of World Englishes’ where ‘consecutive tenses’ in subordinate clauses are not marked for past tense, (iii) the use of ‘[a]dverbials [ … ] to mark the time of the event’, (iv) ‘[p]honological reduction [ … ] where complex consonant clusters [involving tense marker /t/ or /d/] are avoided’, and (v) ‘level of education’. The author reports that ‘no convincing support is found for any of [these] explanations’ (p. 185).

In Chapter 2.2, comparing both Nigerian English (NigE) and Ghanaian English (GhE) with British English (BrE), Gut and Unuabonah aim to uncover similarities and differences in ‘the use of stance markers in West African Englishes’ and to answer the question of whether NigE and GhE are similar enough to represent ‘West African English’. Drawing on the NigE, GhE, and BrE components of ICE, they test four hypotheses: a) speakers of NigE and GhE overall use fewer stance markers than speakers of BrE; b) they employ a more restricted inventory of stance markers; c) they overuse some stance markers compared to speakers of BrE; and d) there is less stylistic variation in the use of stance markers (p. 208). The first hypothesis was ‘mostly confirmed’, the second ‘partly confirmed’, while the other two were not supported (p. 218).

Chapter 2.3, by Kautzsch, discusses lexical and morphosyntactic features in his Corpus of Namibian Online Newspapers (CNamON) in the search of evidence of whether Namibian English, ‘a new variety of English in a non-postcolonial context’, is undergoing structural nativization and, hence, is not just ‘an offshoot of South African English’ (p. 254). It reports qualitative and quantitative evidence to that effect, but evidence is based only on a handful of features, lexically represented by loanwords, and grammatically by peculiar uses of the indefinite article, the verb pain, and go + bare infinitive.

Chapter 2.4, by Brato, is a ‘structural and semantic analysis of lexical expansion in the Nativization phase of Ghanaian English based on the Historical Corpus of English in Ghana (HiCE Ghana) and the written-printed sections of the Ghanaian component of ICE’. Its aim is to establish ‘how Ghanaian English lexis has changed over a period of about 40 years’ (p. 259). Based on ‘a comprehensive list of previously attested Ghanaianims discussed by various authors’, it reports that ‘1,078 distinct Ghanaianisms were attested’ across the two corpora (p. 269). This is a massive figure compared to the few dozens of both grammar- and vocabulary-related ‘Africanisms’ which Schmied (Reference Schmied1991: 64–86) compiled for East African, Nigerian, and West African English, and to those compiled by Buregeya (Reference Buregeya2019, chaps. 4 & 5) for Kenyan English (about 350 lexical and semantic features and 60 grammatical ones). But when Brato decides to ‘only consider Ghanaianisms [ … ] found at least five times and in both corpora’, he finds only ‘259 types’ and concludes that ‘[overall] there is a remarkable stability in the usage of Ghanaianisms over time [ … ]’ (p. 283).

In Chapter 2.5, Isingoma & Meierkord discuss the content of ‘the lexicon of Ugandan English’ in the Ugandan component of both ICE (ICE–UG) and Web–UG, as a corpus of Internet texts. They show how written ICE–UG is limited when it comes to adequately reflecting the ‘realities’ of the UgE lexicon in its various aspects of ‘borrowing, calquing, semantic extension, narrowing, and shift’ (p. 293), hence their decision to complement ICE–UG with Web–UG, which is much larger. Beyond the absence, from small and large corpora alike, of some lexical items attested e.g. in newspapers, the authors note another concern: ‘both lack explanatory power when it comes to assessing the acceptability of and familiarity with these words by those users of English apart from the authors represented in the data’ (p. 311). For example, they found that the expression give someone a push ‘walk/accompany someone’ ‘is unattested in [both ICE–UG and Web–UG] but was recognised by all the informants as an expression they have heard’ (p. 320). Thus it appears that not even a large corpus is sufficient to establish the (non)existence of certain lexical items and their meanings.

Chapter 3.1, by Iyabo, addresses two questions: how Nigerian learners (whose English is represented by the Nigerian Learner English Corpus, NLEC) use conjunctions to achieve cohesion in written texts, and whether there is a significant difference between the Nigerian learners’ use of conjunctions and that of their native speaker counterparts (whose English is represented by the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays, LOCNESS). The chapter reports a significant overuse of both additive and causal conjunctions by the NLEC group and a significant underuse of adversative conjunctions by the same group, but a ‘non-significant difference in the use of temporal conjunctions by the [two] groups’ (p. 345).

Chapter 3.2, by Schmied, is ‘a qualitative and quantitative analysis of prepositions and their variation in three case studies’. It analyses ‘three prototypical case studies’ of ‘replacement’, ‘addition’, and ‘omission’ of certain prepositions. Since the author finds these terms ‘too normative’, he replaces them with ‘alternative’ (e.g. using fill in, fill out, and fill up for each other), ‘explicit’ (e.g. adding about in discuss about), and ‘implicit’ (e.g. omitting under in suffer a dictatorship). He puts forward an original proposal in the form of ‘five criteria for accepting non-standard features’ as different from ‘common learner errors’: a) the non-standard features should appear frequently across genres and disciplines and at all educational levels; b) they should be ‘international’; c) they should be ‘acceptable’; d) they should be ‘functionally appropriate’; e) they should be ‘transparent’, i.e. ‘the resulting texts should be intelligible in terms of their sense and pragmatic effect’ (p. 358). He applies these criteria to the ‘prepositions [used] in a (recent) corpus of Cameroon English MA theses’ and validates the observations made from this corpus with those from three other, world-wide corpora, namely the Electronic World Atlas of Varieties of English (eWAVE), GloWbE, and the News on the Web corpus (NOW). He hopes that those traditional errors ‘could be tolerated as functionally “acceptable” and not marked wrong if they [ … ] do not cause particular communication problems’ (p. 370).

Chapter 3.3, by Antia & Hendricks, uses examples from a corpus of the language used by members of a South African political party (the Democratic Alliance, DA) from 1989 to 2015 to illustrate the party's own claim that it has transformed itself from a male-dominated ‘White-only’ party into a more inclusive one. According to the authors, this transformation is manifested in the fact that, over the 25-year period, the language used by the DA contains an increased number of not only names of non-White politicians and places, but also of words, phrases and complete sentences code-mixed (mainly from isiXhosa and isiZulu) into English and Afrikaans. It is this language based on ‘semiotic resources’ (i.e. ‘anthroponyms’, ‘toponyms’, and ‘multilingualism’) that reflects what the authors refer to as ‘semiotic signature’ in the chapter's title, and, less esoterically throughout the paper, as the ‘semiotic potential’ of ‘ethnicity-indexical names, gender-indexical names, and toponyms’ (p. 385) and of ‘language use and code-switching’ (p. 390).

In conclusion, to the ‘uninitiated’ this volume offers all they need to know about corpus linguistics before they can undertake research in the field, to the experts it offers an opportunity to assess the relative strengths and limitations of the various types of corpora, while for researchers on African Englishes in general it contains a wealth of details about which linguistic features are seemingly shared by different varieties.