The ‘English’ have an ambiguous relationship with the language of their nearest neighbour, France. There is a history, ‘1066 and all that’. Christmas Day 2016 saw the 950th anniversary of the crowning at Westminster Abbey of the French Duke William of Normandy as King of England (not, please note, of ‘Britain’); William having defeated King Harold – and so the very last ‘English’ monarch – at the battle of Hastings. (The other ‘nations’ of these European off-shore islands have different trajectories.) Sooner or later the English at least would have to come to terms with French.

Due to a growing concern with the English language competence of international airline pilots, a growing body of research has been conducted on issues related to the International Aviation English Test, which pilots need to pass in order to fly on international routes (e.g. Jones, 2003; Ragan, 1997; Seiler, 2009). This paper contributes to this research by reporting on a mixed method inquiry into Chinese pilots’ engagement with learning English for aviation. The study involved a survey of 165 pilots working for a major Chinese cargo airline, and follow-up interviews with two of the surveyed participants (one senior and one junior) to explore their International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) test preparation and learning engagement. The findings of the study indicate that policy-makers and relevant English language education specialists need to develop tailor made courses that will better help these pilots to improve their command of English and thus ensure aviation safety.

Tanzania is, like most countries in East Africa, extremely culturally and linguistically diverse. Language counts range from 125 (Lewis, Simons & Fennig, 2016) to 164 living languages mentioned by the ‘Languages of Tanzania project’ (2009). Given this extreme multilingualism, institutional languages had to be chosen on a national level after independence. Kiswahili is the proclaimed national language and lingua franca of the East African region, also spoken in Kenya, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, for instance, and is used as medium of instruction (MoI) in primary education. English, the former colonial language, is the de facto national working language and medium of instruction in secondary and higher education. However, English remains a minority language, spoken by approximately 5% of the population, most of whom are members of a higher social class (Tibategeza, 2010). This leads to English being an international rather than a second language as in other former British colonies (Schmied, 1990, 1991). Rubanza (2002: 45) goes so far as to argue that ‘the society Tanzanians work and live in does not demand the use of English’. That is why it has been claimed that English will never replace the African languages in Tanzania but remain an additional language in certain spheres (Schmied, 1991).

Many Chinese university students are bilingual or multilingual, increasingly switching between various Chinese language varieties and the English language (Bolton, 2013; Botha, 2014, Bolton & Botha, 2015). Bolton and Botha (2015) reported that undergraduate students at a national university in China used English for a range of social activities including ‘reading’, ‘Internet searches’, ‘online socialising’ and ‘socializing with friends’, among others. There is a need to investigate the extent to which these students actually use English in these contexts, especially in the productive use of the English language in their social lives. In examining such practices, the following questions are addressed in this article: (i) How is the English language used in the personal life of a student in Southern China; (ii) What are some of the functions of spoken and written English-Chinese code-mixing and switching between members of this student's social network; and (iii) What kind of social information is conveyed through the use of English in this student's social network? In order to examine the sociolinguistic reality of language use by these students, this article explores some of the social dynamics underlying the emerging use of English-Chinese code-switching and mixing within a particular social network: that of ‘Natalie’, a Chinese university student who speaks Putonghua (Mandarin, as a first language) and members within her social network, conversing within a range of modalities. This case study focuses in particular on the use of English-Chinese code-switching and mixing practices, and the extent to which these communicative practices are shaped by various social factors, ranging from the status of English as a perceived ‘international’ language, to aspects of stance and the affective quality of the relationships between members in this social network, to the intertextual nature of many of the linguistic instances to these practices.

This is a response to John E. Booth's (2015) article, ‘The fossilization of non-current English pronunciation in German EFL teaching’, published in English Today. Booth makes a number of claims in his paper, but the focus here is on his main claim that German pronunciation of English is based on an archaic accent of British English.

In recent years, the use of foreign loanwords in Chinese has increased significantly. It has been estimated that there are currently about 3,000 foreign words in Chinese, most of which are related to English (Zhang, 2006). Of these, more than 500 words are frequently used, together with their abbreviations and translations. In response to this situation, the Chinese government established the Inter-ministerial Joint Meeting on Chinese Language Translation and Writing Specifications (IJM-CLTWS) in 2012, consisting of ten state-level ministries and institutions such as the State Language Commission, the Central Compilation & Translation Bureau, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Education. Thus far, the expert committee of the IJM-CLTWS has identified four groups of foreign words and their standard Chinese translations.

China's stunning economic growth is now widely recognized around the globe (Wong, 2009). Its gross domestic product (GDP) is now the second largest in the world, and, according to the World Bank (2015), in terms of GDP based on purchasing power parity (PPP), it already has the world's largest economy, surpassing that of the United States. It is commonly claimed that China will be the strongest economic power in the near future, and that it will have a concomitantly more potent political and cultural influence on the rest of the world.

The aim of this short article is to offer a belated defense of L. M. Boyd (author of a daily, nationally syndicated column ‘Trivia’ in numerous newspapers throughout the USA) against a critique published in English Today over a decade ago by Alan S. Kaye (2006), and present arguments in support of Boyd's beleaguered claim. Kaye (2006: 54) writes:

Whereas the influence of English in form of Anglicisms has attracted considerable attention, little has been written on how English is interacting with autochthonous word-formation processes in modern languages. The present paper attempts to shed some light on a phenomenon that has been very recently attested in Spanish: the coinage of blend words involving overlap and combination of material from both English and the recipient language (in this case Spanish). I argue that these ad hoc words give us important insights into the state and status of English in what Kachru (1982) called the ‘Expanding Circle’.