Mark Abley must have a lot of frequent flyer miles accumulated. In gathering material for this book alone, he traveled from Singapore and Japan to India and England, interviewing natives and collecting language data along the way. As a Canadian living in Montreal, he also added on the miles traveling to Los Angeles. In pursuit of his goal of describing how English both affects other languages spoken around the world and is in turn affected by them, Abley has collected in this book an impressive number and variety of facts, anecdotes, descriptions and explanations of how a popular, living language — English — has spread around the world and, as a result, will inevitably change in the future ...