Edgar W. Schneider

This loses half a star because it doesn't get much into perceptual and cultural stuff, which for a series that has the pretensions to authoritativeness on a massive scale that this one appears to (you can even see it in the packaging), is a flaw. But taken as a more modest--yet still huge--project, giving us historical, phonological, and phonetic information and notable syntactic features of every English dialect spoken in the new world, it's basically perfect. There needs to be a fifth book on notable sociolects, on historical principle, but taken on its own this book is indispensable to anyone with an interest.… (meer)

Schneider says things at much greater length than he needs to, with a lot more caveats and a lot more weird asscovering of the sort where he's always explaining what he means by, say, "indigenous," when there was never any confusion about that in the first place. But all that means is that you can read with relative inattention - not because this is worthless but because it is not dense - which is a relief in academic context. And Schneider's ideas about the spread of colonial/postcolonial Englishes - the 5-step evolutionary model of foundation (where the new English gels from various settler forms), exonormative stabilization (emergence of a standard with norms based on reference to the "mother country"), nativization (just what it sounds, characterized by pidginization, widespread native bilingualism, borrowings, and general blossoming innovation), endonormative stabilization (where it has its own internal norms - and to give an example, this is 19th-century American English with Webster's dictionary and so on), and differentiation (where the various roiling dialects of the colonial English begin to develop their own standards in a somewhat analogious process to steps 1-2) is quite interesting and useful and deserves a place in the time capsule.… (meer)