An assessment of what English has inherited from Anglo-Saxon, Low German and the Scandinavian languages

A review of the ties that bind English, Latin and the languages derived from Latin

A look at the complex layering of the vocabulary that English has inherited from Germanic, Romance and Greek.

IBRAHIM K GYASI considers that ‘English in Ghana is very ill’.

A reprint of the main part of the editorial of‘Cross Currents: An International Journal of Language Teaching and Cross-Cultural Communication’, a Publication of the Language Institute of Japan, Vol. XVI, No. 2, 1989. Both ‘Cross-Currents' and ‘English Today’ welcome readers' comments, which could appear in future issues of both periodicals.

The nature and prospects of one of Africa's ‘new Englishes’

‘All other regions of the Third World made economic progress in the 1980s; not sub-Saharan Africa. Arms are not the only reason. Every year at least $15 billion in capital leaves Africa. Much of it is booty, siphoned off by vampire elites. For example, last April the Christian Association of Nigeria revealed that more than 3,000 Nigerians operated Swiss bank accounts and that Nigerians were near the top of the list of Third World patrons of Swiss banks.

A report on the nature and evolution of on-line e-messages

In ET (Jul 89), Peter Williams reviewed ‘A Dictionary of Surnames’ by Patrick Hanks & Flavia Hodges (Oxford, 1988). One possibility not envisaged in that review, and probably not in the dictionary either, is the use to which LAURENCE URDANG has put surnames in the following poem, an echo of Longfellow composed to ‘celebrate’ St Valentine's Day, 1990. As part of his work, the writer alternates between Old Lyme, Connecticut, and Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, where every name italicized in the poem can be found in the local telephone directory.