Understanding English as a Lingua Franca: A Complete Introduction to the Theoretical Nature and Practical Implications of English used as a Lingua Franca (Oxford Applied Linguistics). Barbara Seidlhofer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. xvii+244 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-437500-9 (pbk). £32.00.

Barbara Seidlhofer’s latest monograph, Understanding English as a Lingua Franca, comes at a moment when the English language, while serving this function since the first colonizations in the sixteenth century (Jenkins et al. 2011), has truly established itself as a language of nearly global communication, a language for which the predominant reason for learning has become to interact primarily not with its native speakers, but with other non-native users. The past two decades have accordingly witnessed a burgeoning of articles, dissertations, conferences, corpora, and a dedicated journal devoted to the topic; yet in many circles the phenomenon has still remained unnoticed or unacknowledged, acquired many misunderstandings, is raising mixed opinions or encountering strong resistance. Barbara Seidlhofer, a long-time expert on the subject and one of the pioneers of research in the field, explores and elucidates the many facets and repercussions of the controversial topic at hand.