Throughout the text, Görlach provides a wealth of supporting material, historic, social, and linguistic, from a wide assortment of English varieties from every continent. In addition, the inclusion of a fairly extensive annotated bibliography covering many of the book's main topics is quite useful.<br />Görlach's examination of the state of English provides a useful summary of many of the issues that confront researchers in dialectology and variationist studies. It is a very useful text for anyone interested in the history and the development of English beyond a simple analysis of structural change.

- Elizabeth Grace Winkler, University of Arizona in Linguist List Vol-13-3275, 2002,

The virtue of Görlach's work lies in the way he combines his right insights based on diverse areas including language planning, historical linguistics, literature, and sociolinguistics. In addition, Görlach not only argues for careful treatment and compilation of data that can be used for serious comparison and meaningful generalizations but also practises this himself through the book. For this reason, the points he makes are convincing and useful not only to people working on world Englishes but also to people who approach the issue of globalization of English from different perspectives (such as ethnographic or critical perspectives) and sociolinguistics in general.

- Joseph Sung-Yul Park, University of California at Santa Barbara, in Language 79(4), 2003,