Luciano Canepari's may be the most ambitious attempt to describe the pronunciation of World Englishes since Wells (Reference Wells1982). This 2nd edition of his textbook is divided into three main sections: ‘International, American & British pronunciations’, ‘Territorial accents’ and ‘Foreign accents & languages’.

The first section is divided into nine parts, which represent his notion of the main theoretical aspects of phonetics (vowels, consonants, accents, reduced forms, intonation and word stress). In the first section listed above is his definition of International English, neutral, and mediatic accents of English. The author outlines the way International English differs from ‘standard’ pronunciation. The ‘International accent of English’, Canepari suggests, should be the variety used to teach and describe pronunciation, moving away from the American/British dichotomy. This idea seems quite contradictory because it is based on what Canepari calls ‘CNN [Cable News Network] pronunciation, which covers the whole globe’ (p. 39) but CNN is an American cable and satellite news channel, so is presumably far from neutral. Canepari suggests that International English must have a different set of phonemic symbols in order to differentiate that accent from the rest because some symbols, for example /tʃ/ and /dʒ/, are no longer useful to transcribe words accurately. Canepari states that in English /tʃ/ and /dʒ/ always show an audible plosion and that he prefers to mark it by means of [C*]. For instance, the phrase which cheese should be transcribed, using Canepari's suggestions, as /ˈwɪ^tʃ* ˈtʃhiˑiz̥/ because ‘a semi-stopstrictive contoid (as in which) has a shorter &/or less occlusive part, so that the second part is more evident’ (to his ear, unlike the initial affricate in cheese) (p. 119). In general, Canepari does not fully justify why we should start using his can-IPA transcription system and give up the official IPA system. The idea of introducing new and more precise symbols could be quite confusing if language learners and teachers are mainly used to the IPA system or more traditional linguistic approaches. In addition, he expresses the idea that some symbols are not valid any longer (i.e. /E/ would be a more accurate symbol than /e/ or /ɛ/) because they do not fully represent other varieties of English (Australian, New Zealand and South African accents) and that more accurate and precise phonemic symbols should be used instead (Canepari uses the terms ‘phonemes’ and ‘diaphonemes’, which should be explained in more detail). This first section also describes what Canepari defines as ‘mediatic accents’, which is his term for General American and Estuary English. An International-English pronunciation dictionary is included, which provides the transcription of 2200 words.

The second section, ‘Territorial accents’ provides concise information about accents of English from North America, The British Isles, Australia and New Zealand, South Africa, The Caribbean, The Far East, India, East and West Africa, the Mediterranean and the Falklands. This section is divided into twenty parts and offers an inventory of vowels, consonants, diphthongs and intonation patterns of specific areas of the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom in great detail, Canepari provides vocograms (vowel diagrams) and tonograms (intonation diagrams), to explain the features of each accent. Additionally, the section on Territorial Accents includes maps of what he considers to be the most important accent areas in the English-speaking world. It would have been helpful to include some sample recordings to compare and contrast the different varieties, even though that task would seem really hard to accomplish given the number of examples that the book provides. Perhaps links to IDEA (the International Dialects of English Archive, http://www.dialectsarchive.com/) could be made to help solve this issue. Canepari also suggests using an online companion to the book (http://venus.unive.it/canipa), which appeared to be offline at the time the website was checked.

The third section, ‘Foreign accents & languages’, describes thirty accents characteristic of English-language learners from Europe, Latin America, Japan, China, Taiwan, Korea, Vietnam, Persia, Turkey, Israel, and Senegal, among others. This last part of the book outlines how accents of English are influenced by these languages in terms of vowels, consonants, diphthongs and intonation patterns. The objective of this section is to help identify differences and similarities regarding these languages and English – the International, American and British varieties, which, in turn, will help identify areas to help students learn and improve their pronunciation in English. Relevant differences inside the countries, for example in the case of Spain and Latin America, are mentioned and this is tremendously important because the description of foreign accents of English tends to be generalized or simply neglected. One of Canepari's main claims is that the pronunciation of English should be taught contrastively (showing the differences and similarities among the student's mother tongue and the target language) and also that those concepts should have an impact on the way pronunciation and accents are taught, studied and described.

In conclusion, this book is a comprehensive guide to describing and teaching pronunciation and accents of English. An important aspect is the idea of introducing new symbols, which Canepari considers to be absolutely necessary in order to make transcriptions and accent descriptions more accurate and in line with the current state of English. The book presents some revolutionary and novel ideas to describe and teach pronunciation. It will also help not only English teachers and linguistics students to think and learn about phonetics and accents of English in great detail, but also established linguists and phoneticians, who have prior knowledge about phonetics and pronunciation. However, regular, non-specialist language learners will find it a challenge to study and take advantage of all the material presented in the book because of the enormous amount of new terminology and concepts (socio-diaphoneme, stop unexplosion, etc). As a final point, some concepts need to be clarified and developed more deeply, for instance, the concept of ‘mediatic accents’, which may be confusing at times and also the reasons behind the creation and selection of some new phonetic symbols, which much of Canepari's revolutionary and innovative approach is based on. Similarly, Canepari puts forward many concepts and ideas in his book that try to move away from traditional approaches, but it is not entirely clear whether these new concepts can help phonetic analysis or descriptions to be more precise.