Reviewed by: Indian and British English: A handbook of usage and pronunciationby Paroo Nihalni, R. K. Tongue, Priya Hosali, and Jonathan Crowther Niladri Sekhar Dash Indian and British English: A handbook of usage and pronunciation. 2ndedn. By Paroo Nihalni, R. K. Tongue, Priya Hosali, and Jonathan Crowther. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004. Pp. x, 260. ISBN 0195666569. $15.95. The present handbook is divided into two main parts. The first part (‘Lexicon of usage’) is designed to provide English users with information about the way in which certain words, idioms, collocations, phrases, and similar expressions of English used in India differ from British Standard English (BSE)—a model that has the closest affinity to Indian English. This part includes a thousand English words, which are used in a distinctive manner by large numbers of educated Indian speakers of English irrespective of their place, profession, education, gender, or other sociolinguistic factors. The words included in the handbook are selected from the speech or writing samples of the persons (such as university and school teachers, journalists, and radio commentators) who are likely to influence the English use of Indian learners. The handbook also contains many European words that have been Indianized over the years. Thus, it serves as a handy resource for Indian speakers of English, illustrating the many, often quite subtle, ways in which Indian English differs from standard British English usage, and where these differences are regarded as acceptable or substandard in the subcontinent. Examples in the handbook, which supplement the texts, are helpful to Indian users of English who are uncertain about the ‘correctness’ of their speech and writing, and serve those scholars who want to explore the differences between Indian and British uses of English. The book also has the potential to address special problems faced by learners of English, who are often impeded by the difficulties of recognizing finer nuances of meaning and usage. The second part of the handbook includes a brief report on the development of the pronunciation dictionary in India and abroad, followed by insightful discussions on standards of pronunciation in second/ foreign language teaching, the phonological systems of the British Received Pronunciation (BRP) and Educated Indian English (EIE), and the role of supraseg-mental properties (i.e. word stress, sentence stress, rhythm, intonation, etc.) in Indian English. The introduction contains a list of keywords for phonetic symbols used in the following part, ‘Dictionary of pronunciation’. Two types of pronunciation (Indian Recommended Pronunciation and the BRP) are supplied for more than two thousand words collected from the original lexical database of Michael West’s General service list of English wordstogether with a few additions compiled from the language resources available to the compilers. Each entry of the dictionary is tagged with relevant phonological information. This second edition also includes additional information on lexical collocation (the tendency of words to be used together in fixed phrases). In essence, the handbook not only serves as an invaluable reference guide for students and teachers of English, but also makes a valuable contribution for applied linguists, lexicographers, journalists, and scholars who write in Indian English. [End Page 465] Niladri Sekhar Dash Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata Copyright © 2007 Linguistic Society of America