This collection of essays covers such topics as: types of English heteronyms; zero coming to naught; British English and international English; Irish English and world English; when did Southern American English begin?; and the spelling of Scots.

1. For Manfred Gorlach on the occasion of his 60th birthday (by Schneider, Edgar W.); 2. Publications by Manfred Gorlach (by Stephan, Christoph); 3. Introduction (by Schneider, Edgar W.); 4. I. General and comparative studies; 5. Types of English heteronyms (by Algeo, John); 6. Zero coming to naught (by Bald, Wolf-Dietrich); 7. The progressive and habitual aspects in non-standard Englishes (by Gachelin, Jean-Marc); 8. Colonisation, migration, and functions of English (by Gupta, Anthea Fraser); 9. British English and International English - two debatable terms (by Hansen, Klaus); 10. Passive-like constructions in English-based and other creoles (by Holm, John); 11. A sub-text of the sixties (by Spencer, John K.); 12. The unknown Englishes? Testing German students'ability to identify varieties of English (by Stephan, Christoph); 13. II. The British Isles; 14. "Oh dearie me!": Dramatic rhetoric and linguistic subversion in the Scottish situation comedy The High Life (by Brown, Ian); 15. High-frequency variables in dialect texts: in, on and of Craven (West Riding of Yorkshire) on the basis of two dialogues from 1828 (by Glauser, Beat); 16. Irish English and Word English: Lexical perspectives (by Kallen, Jeffrey L.); 17. Ayrshire as a linguistic area (by Macaulay, Ronald K.S.); 18. The spelling of Scots: A difficulty (by McClure, J. Derrick); 19. Ma language is disgraceful: Tom Leonard's Glasgow dialect poems (by Milton, Colin); 20. The rediscovery of the Ulster Scots language (by Montgomery, Michael); 21. On some plant names in Britain and beyond (by Viereck, Wolfgang); 22. The use of non-literary manuscript texts for the study of dialect lexis (by Weiner, Edmund); 23. III. North America; 24. When did Southern American English begin? (by Bailey, Guy); 25. On establishing historical relationships between new and old world varieties: Habitual aspect and Newfoundland Vernacular English (by Clarke, Sandra); 26. Change and stability in the use of verbal - s over time in AAVE (by Cukor-Avila, Patricia); 27. American English for the 21st century (by Kretzschmar, Jr., William A.); 28. Addresses of authors; 29. Subject index