imperialist policy in the Philippines in the early years of the twentieth century, where it clearly and explicitly was decreed that English would be the language of education for as many of the local subjugated population as possible. A telling contrast I have not noticed in WE writings before is made with U.S. The claim is supported by empirical studies of particular situations, most notably and originally, the use of British Colonial Oce papers to demonstrate very convincingly that English was more often withheld and denied than imposed by colonial minorities on passive and unwilling native populations. `World English is not simply made through speakers of other languages but by them' (p. These important theoretical foundations are laid in Chapters 1 and 2, and I will return to this point in due course At the heart of the book lies the claim that the study of WE, in Phillipson and the others, has taken the ethnocentric or deterministic form of understanding English as a forced colonial imposition, stressing the colonial in postcolonial, at the expense of the activities and agency of English users in varying global contexts. Where I think the book is weaker and will make less of an impact, is in a somewhat misdirected, or at least belated, attack on Phillipson's (1992) historical linguistic imperialism thesis, and the rather undierentiated lumping together of earlier commentators like Pennycook or Canagarajah with Phillipson, which ¯ies in the face of their own explicitly articulated points of dierence as well as their practice and publications. The title refuses fashionable pluralisations of the language, marked in these postmodern times, and is an indicator of the claim (in the face of others' denials) that there is indeed such a thing as World English (WE), rather than a ®ssiparous smattering ofènglishes' of uncertain relationship to each other. The book is of particular interest for its insistence on the need for a more centrally linguistic rather than political or philosophical approach to the issues. Brutt-Grier has produced a welcome attempt to theorise and model in a uni®ed and historically informed way the spread and change of English at the global level.
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