RAYMOND HICKEY is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Duisburg Essen, Germany. He is the editor of The Handbook of Language Contact (Wiley Blackwell, 2010), and the author of many books, most recently Standards of English: Codified Varieties around the World (2012), Areal Features of the Anglophone World (2012), Irish English in Today's World (2011), Eighteenth-Century English: Ideology and Change (2010) and Varieties of English in Writing (2010). He has also published over 100 articles on various issues in linguistics.