Tim William Machan’s book Language Anxiety: Conflict and Change in the History of English illuminates the status of English in the context of a conflictual history. It has been on my desk for some time while I have engaged in inner and outer debate about it, mostly about why I find it so rich and students find it less so. To support my teaching of the history of the English language, I wanted a carefully researched book that displayed English and its evolution as a site of difficulty as well as opportunity. I wanted a book that could show that English is a language whose history is laden with issues of colonialism, hegemony, power imbalances, and prescriptivism—the latter complicit in all the preceding. I wanted a book that would detail the need to nuance notions of grammar and its unproblematic goodness. I wanted a book to ground, historically and socio-linguistically, Deborah Cameron’s (1995) arguments in Verbal Hygiene. Machan provides all those things. This review celebrates Machan’s undoubted achievement in producing such a book, while noting that I still search for a book more persuasive to students.

গবেষকদের এই কাজটি উদ্ধৃত করতে নিম্নলিখিতভাবে উল্লেখ করতে হবে:

• Trowse, N., (2025), "Tim William Machan. (2009). Language Anxiety: Conflict and Change in the History of English. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press", HSSCommons: (DOI: 10.31468/cjsdwr.49)

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1. Discourse and Writing/Rédactologie

Original publication: Trowse, Nadeane. "Tim William Machan. (2009). Language Anxiety: Conflict and Change in the History of English. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press." Discourse and Writing/Rédactologie, vol. 26, 2016, pp. 28-32. DOI: 10.31468/cjsdwr.49. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Discourse and Writing/Rédactologie. Copyright © the author(s). Work published in DW/R is licensed under the Creative Commons CC BY-SA license