What separates the two major varieties of the language, apart from a great deal of water? An American domiciled in Britain looks at both the obvious and the not-quite-so-obvious in what unites and divides them.

What are the processes of change at work on British English? A veteran in the business of words takes a look at what the 20th century has been doing to the language of Dickens and Disraeli.

For sixty years a periodical currently published in the Deep South has been reporting on the complexities of U.S. usage. To mark the anniversary, a Southerner now reviews the journal of the American Dialect Society for English Today.

Below we celebrate both a German anniversary and a coming together not just of languages but of language varieties. In this issue, KALEIDOSCOPE looks at the unusual, world-girdling hobby of MANFRED GÖRLACH, Professor of English at the University of Köln, West Germany, editor of the specialist journal English World-Wide, and co-editor of the one-volume survey English as a World Language.

EFL is now a famous – or notorious – acronym for one of the youngest of the world's service industries: the teaching of English as a foreign language. What animates it and what is its current condition around the world?

Randolph Quirk Well, the Survey is in part a collection of data. Now this makes it sound very dull – to contemplate filing cabinets filled with slips registering the repertoire of the educated, mature native speaker. But that is, of course, only part of what constitutes our data in the Survey. The Survey has always from the outset had two deliberate and quite specific aims: first, to collect samples of continuous usage of that mature, educated native speaker, and, secondly, to devise psycholinguistic techniques that would elicit from a sample of such adults constructions and usages which would only by a sort of happy accident come to be enshrined in the texts, whether spoken or written, that they actually recorded.

The fourth of a four-part gazetteer of the basic geopolitical vocabulary of the English language, dealing with the facts, fancies, fallacies, ambiguities and subtle implications of such words. For convenience of presentation, the material is not always in strict alphabetical order.

What happens when people translate ‘works of literature’? Do we lose more than we gain whenever a text is rendered from one language into another, or is accessibility in any form better than no translation at all?

A great deal of vivid, everyday English dates from the heyday of the sailing ship. BILL BEAVIS, himself a sailor, gets cracking with some nautical word histories that might take you aback.