Global Mother Tongue: The Eight Flavours of English Howard Richler [Language] "The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use." --Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe For centuries, the English language has been raiding other languages for words. It has accumulated the largest vocabulary in the world, with only 30% of its words deriving from the original Anglo-Saxon word stock. English, in all of its unique forms and permutations, is spoken by 1.6 billion people in the world—almost a third of the planet's population. Global Mother Tongue celebrates the truly international flavour of this global language. In Global Mother Tongue, Howard Richler entertains us with his exploration of English--a growth industry among world languages. He looks at the myriad factors that are changing the language and the unique forms of English that have developed the world over. Zombie, squash, billabong, cairn, multiculturalism, dreadlocks, adobo, tiffin. Richler envisions English as coming in eight flavours—African, American, Australian/New Zealand, British, Canadian, Caribbean, East Asian, and South Asian—each of which he further subdivides. For example, East Asian incorporates Hong Kong English, Malaysian English, Philippines English, and Singapore English. It is the author's view that these new "Englishes" are altering the landscape of the language, and that English literature would be greatly impoverished without them. Since 1992, Howard Richler has been writing a weekly "Speaking of Language" column for the Montreal Gazette. He is the author of three books: The Dead Sea Scroll Palindromes, Take My Words, and A Bawdy Language: How a Second-Rate Language Slept its Way to the Top. CANADIAN RELEASE DATE: JANUARY 2007 US RELEASE DATE: APRIL 2007

ISBN:  1-55065-215-X, 978-1-55065-215-4 Price: CDN $18.95 US $16.95 Illustrated: No Cover:  Trade Paper Size: 5.5 x 8.5 No. of Pages: 180 In Print: Not yet in print