Sometimes, less can be more. In ET's twenty years of publication, this issue has the smallest number of contributions ever listed: seven titles in all, whereas traditionally there have been ten or more. It also has the usual number of pages (sixty-four), which means that some or all of the articles are way beyond our long-established norm. Yet at some point this had to happen.

Like so many other innovations, the idea of one common language for all mankind appeared for the first time, in European thought, during the Renaissance. It has been estimated that since then nearly ‘seven hundred such artificial languages’ have been tried. Undoubtedly, this had to do with the collapse of Latin as the common language of education, soon to be replaced by the various, rising national languages. Europe's great expansion overseas, in this epoch, also created the need for a unified vehicle of communication.

In many ways, the world, and not just Europe, is now facing a similar challenge. While English has become the Latin of the contemporary world, such a position, one can say in the light of historical experience, has always been precarious. Whether English will be unanimously accepted as the one unifying, international language of the globe, whether it will share this role with one or more other languages, or whether an artificial language will be adopted for that purpose is the question that sooner or later we will all be facing.

Do we need fairer names for speakers of English? A discussion of current popular early 3rd-millennium definitions attached to the phrase native speaker (meaning ‘someone born and raised speaking correct English’), including an examination of global changes which suggest that a profoundly changed and changing world requires radically new linguistic terms.

[The text of a plenary paper presented as Distinguished Speaker at the conference Globalization and World Englishes: Identity and Creativity, convened by the International Association of World Englishes (IAWE) at Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York, USA, 16–18 July 2004.]

I MUST START with two disclaimers: First, my name is not James E. Alatis. It is Demetrious Efstathiou Alatis. In the early days of the 20th century, when many Greeks emigrated to the United States, the immigration authorities were troubled with the polysyllabic Greek names. They proceeded therefore to shorten them or otherwise change them to fit the American assimilationist mold. This was done either by transliteration, phonetic respelling, translation, or shortening: that is to say, initial, medial, or final clipping. The Greeks, of course, had a word for each of these processes: procope, syncope, and apocope. Thus, Papatriandaphilopoulos, became Papas or Poulos or Triandaphilos or Triandos or even just Tree. I knew a man whose name was Constantinous Papatriandaphilopoulos who had his name changed to Gus Rose. My own name, Demetrious, was shortened to Dim, and the closest thing to Dim was Jim. Most Demetriouses in those days became Jims.

English/Spanish contact in Puerto Rico.

ONE OUTCOME of language contact is lexical borrowing. Borrowing in Puerto Rico (for political, economic, and social reasons) is evident in the influence English has had on Spanish, especially in lexical terms. This paper explores the impact of American English on the lexicon of Puerto Rican Spanish, specifically on vocabulary relating to food. Data were collected through participant observation in selected fast food restaurants from different regions in P.R. An analysis of the corpus provides the basis for five categories useful in understanding the influence of English on Spanish in this domain. The study indicates that English borrowings have had a tremendous influence on the Puerto Rican lexicon, and predicts that, even though Spanish will continue to be the dominant Puerto Rican language, it will continue to change under the influence of English.

An account of consonantal ‘twinning’ in English and other languages.

THIS ESSAY concerns itself with gemination in English, but more specifically, it asks whether English has consonantal gemination (CG), as has been reported by some in the literature. Gemination is usually defined as a phonetic doubling (cf. Latin geminus ‘twin’); however, phonetic length (as opposed to a single or nongeminated segment) is a more accurate designation (see Matthews 1997:141, who cites Italian atto [at[Length mark]o] ‘act’, making reference only to ‘doubling’). It has long been known that English does not have contrastive CG as is recognized, say, from the phonemic difference between Classical and Modern Standard Arabic kasara (‘he broke’) and kassara (‘he smashed’) or darasa (‘he studied’) and darrasa (‘he taught’).

The status of the English language as the lingua franca of the global information society is beyond dispute, but what is not so clear is whether it is capable of fulfilling that role efficiently. In the following article Ross Smith responds to the supporters of Global English by examining the qualities that an ideal international auxiliary language would possess and then discussing the extent to which those qualities are to be found in modern English.

THIS ARTICLE springs from my experiences when I submitted a piece to English Today that contained characters from the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). I had used a font containing such characters that came with my word-processing program, and I submitted the article electronically as a file attachment. Unfortunately, the characters did not arrive in the same form as they had left, owing to incompatibility between the two computer systems, and so there were parts of the article that did not make much sense. The editor graciously reprinted it in its correct form in the following issue (ET80).