The UK's June 2016 decision to withdraw from the European Union, popularly referred to as Brexit, has had a major political, financial and economic impact worldwide. However, the impact was also linguistic as this event has generated a myriad of neologisms in English, such as breferendum, brexiteer, Brexitsphere, regrexit or Brexitology. The aim of the present study is to give a general overview of these new words, to establish the predominant word-formational patterns as well as to point out the creativity and speed with which speakers of English have reacted linguistically to this change in the socio-political context.

In different parts of the English-speaking world various vowel changes have been taking place in recent years, perhaps the most noticeable of which is the vowel lowering in words like DRESS and TRAP. This lowering would seem to have its origins some few decades ago in North America, probably in California and perhaps simultaneously in Canada. The shift, labelled here short front vowel lowering (SFVL), has spread quickly across the anglophone world and is found in locations as far apart as Ireland, South Africa and Australia. In each case where the change has been adopted there has been an adaptation of the change to local circumstances within the borrowing variety. The transmission of the change is also significant as the spread would seem not to be by direct speaker contact.

This paper investigates the English language spoken by four educated Japanese speakers from an acoustic phonetic perspective. We look closely at how they pronounce and connect segments in reading a short text. Because English has the status of an international language, it is actively used for various purposes within and across countries. English speakers are therefore not necessarily native speakers but have a different first language (L1); English is a second (L2) or foreign language (FL) for them. There are increasing numbers of studies on Japanese English (JE), particularly from attitudinal and perceptual angles (e.g. Tokumoto & Shibata, 2011; Matsuura et al., 2014), but, as McKenzie (2013: 228) notes, there is a dearth of research that documents, or systematically characterizes, the English produced by Japanese speakers.

Over the last 30 years there has been an upsurge in research and theorising on postcolonial Englishes. Beginning with Kachru's (1985) Three Circles model, more recently the focus has shifted to models focusing on identity construction and historical developments (Schneider, 2007), central and peripheral varieties and their spheres of influence (Mair, 2013), and those aiming to provide a more integrated approach to postcolonial and non-postcolonial Englishes (Buschfeld & Kautzsch, 2017). Dedicated corpora such as the International Corpus of English (ICE; Greenbaum, 1991) and the Corpus of Global Web-based English (GloWbe; Davies & Fuchs, 2015) have been designed to allow for a synchronic comparison of Englishes around the world and have since been widely used to study variation on the different levels of linguistic description within and across varieties. Recently, ICE corpora have also been used to test assumptions laid out by Schneider (2007), e.g. by comparing data from ICE corpora of varieties which have progressed to different phases (Mukherjee & Gries, 2009) or by taking an apparent-time approach to test developments within one variety (Fuchs & Gut, 2015).

It is now ten years since I suffered a stroke. I continue to improve, albeit much more slowly than in the first one or two years. Readers of English Today may remember (Schwyter, 2011) that I was head of the English Department at the University of Lausanne, and a graduate of both the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Cambridge. My stroke came really out of the blue; I did not have any of the early warning signs. And the only possible risk factors I was aware of were very long working hours and stress in all its forms – though ‘stress’ is not very well defined medically, being not one symptom but rather a cluster of symptoms (Kivimäki et al., 2015).

Recently, a regional newspaper agency in Mainland China reported on the Chinese celebrity Angelababy by using her English name (Net Ease Entertainment, 2016). A reader complained about this, suggesting that Angelababy's Chinese name needs to be in the report as well. The reader's comment and the name Angelababy went viral on many online news outlets, and comments were posted about the problems associated with such an English name from a large number of Chinese netizens.

The number of Korean students studying abroad has dropped drastically in the last decade. In 2014, 10,907 students ranging from age six to 18 went abroad, just over one-third of the total in 2006 when the number hit its highest peak at 29,511 (Korea Herald, 2015). There are a number of reasons for this apparent trend. First, study abroad students have a hard time adjusting themselves to life in the host country, and it is also common for them to experience readjustment difficulties when returning to Korea. Second, parents believe that children can learn ‘authentic’ English in Korea: various English immersion programmes are now available for young learners. Third, studying abroad no longer guarantees children's future success. Returnees are not preferred in the job market due to their in-between identity.