Black South African English (henceforth BSAfE) has received more attention from corpus linguists than any other variety in the country. In the early 2000s, two corpus projects were initiated more or less simultaneously: the corpus of spoken Xhosa-English, compiled by Vivian de Klerk at Rhodes University, and the Tswana Learner English corpus that I compiled. A number of further corpora have also been compiled in the more recent past, many of which are available in the public domain for research purposes.

It is often reported that English elements are abundant in Japanese television commercials and print advertising and that the primary function of English words, phrases, and sentences used in advertising texts seems to give the product or service a modern touch.

Research on new varieties of English often reflects specific lexical shifts between a standard variety of English and an outer or expanding variety of English. Studies conducted on Nigerian English, Indian English, Malaysian English, etc., list examples of morphological, syntactical, and lexical nativization without mentioning the evolutionary progression of a post colonial English (PCE). Edgar Schneider (2007) posits a Dynamic Model for plotting the timeline of any post colonial variety of English (PCE). The model reveals five fundamental evolutionary phases to any new English: foundation, exonormative stabilization, nativization, endonormative stabilization, and differentiation. At each phase, the structure of the settler strand (STL) and the indigenous strand (IDG) of English is affected at four different linguistic levels: history/politics, identity construction, sociolinguistics, and linguistic developments. In each phase, researchers of a PCE must find specific instances of development that correspond to the correct phase of evolution. In an attempt to assess the universal applicability of Schneider's (2007) Dynamic Model, this study seeks to use the country of Malta as an example of a new post colonial English residing primarily in phase three: nativization.

A case study of discourse on anglicisms in German.

“By recognizing our uncanny strangeness, we shall neither suffer from it nor enjoy it from the outside. The foreigner is within me, hence we are all foreigners. If I am a foreigner, there are no foreigners.” (Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves (1991)).

Is Kristeva's dissolution of the notion ‘foreign’ also applicable to language? The nature of language as a semiotic system of arbitrarily bound units of meaning and form determines the essential foreignness of signifier and signified. As such, every linguistic unit is indeed intrinsically foreign on the level of designation and, thus, there is no foreign language. On the surface of human communication, however, incomprehensibility among speakers can emerge as a criterion of foreignness. The perception of the foreign in language is particularly tied to situations of contact between different language-cultural areas. Such contact can occur internally in a multilingual speaker or can be observed externally as happening in the speech community. In both ways, crucial to language contact is a perceived intertwining of linguistic units from at least two distant, i.e. incomprehensible, codes culturally rooted in diverse speech communities.

Most recent research on teacher identity in the TESOL field has focused on how non-native English-speaking teachers (non-NESTs) view and position themselves vis-à-vis native English-speaking teachers (NESTs), and which factors influence their construction of their professional identities. However, the perceived native speaker/non-native speaker (NS–NNS) dichotomy greatly oversimplifies a complicated phenomenon by representing it as solely linguistic and disregarding sociocultural and political issues. Beyond the question of nativeness versus non-nativeness, race, ethnicity, nationality, and cultural identity have played key roles in how teachers position themselves within English language teaching (ELT). These other factors may be critical in how others judge the capability of a teacher of English and authenticity of his/her English.

An update on the world's newest lexicographical services. The computer and the Internet have become indispensable to the lives of educated people. As a result, ways of obtaining information have greatly changed. The readership of the printed media appears to have been gradually decreasing, something that may also happen with dictionaries. It has for example been noted that three mediums for dictionaries — paper, electronic gadgets, and the Internet — are now about equally popular with students. Gone therefore are the days when paper dictionaries dominated the reference world. For example, more than 70% of students interviewed at Hong Kong Polytechnic University claim that they use e-dictionaries more often than the traditional bulky paper products: among them, the most ‘bookmarked’ is the online version of the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary. Online dictionaries are now therefore the main force in word reference.

Excerpts from the ‘language biographies’ of children of Asian immigrants who have grown up in America

The first in a series of three reports on the development and use of electronic language corpora and their impact on dictionaries

recent developments in malaysia have brought forth many issues vis-à-vis language planning, notably including the return to english as a medium of instruction. the present review addresses current linguistic issues and their implications for malay as the national official language, bringing together linguistics, sociology, education, psychology, communication, geography, history, politics, finance and management, in a nation which is not only multilingual but also multiethnic, multi-religious and multicultural. to make the matter more complex still, the immigrant population is almost as large as the so-called indigenous ‘majority’.

An examination of the give and take between local varieties and the expectations of classroom English. Like a microcosm of World Englishes, English in Malaysia is spoken in a multitude of accents characterizing different ethnic groups, socio-economic, education, language and geographical backgrounds. It is also not unusual for Malaysians to accent-switch according to context. Amidst the cacophony of local accents arise issues about whether such accents are correct or good or acceptable. This paper discusses the tension between speaking English with a Malaysian accent and the need for a pronunciation model from another variety, typically British English, in the teaching of English in Malaysia. Based on ongoing research on the pronunciation of Malaysian English, this paper suggests how this tension can be alleviated.

An account of a highly distinctive variety of English in India. When the British set up colonies worldwide they brought with them a legacy that included their language, which many of the natives accepted and acculturated: it would after all be unreasonable to expect an imperial language to function in a vacuum with no local nuances. Indeed, gradual acculturation produced a number of varieties of English used as second languages. In their almost 200 years of not-so-peaceful stay on the subcontinent, the British and many Indians used English, fulfilling in at least a linguistic sense Macaulay's dream of an ‘imperishable empire’. In these 200 years, English in India slowly went through a process now labelled Indianization, evolving into the variety (or group of varieties) called Indian English. One subvariety, generally referred to as Butler English, though by no means confined to butlers, is described and discussed here.

Within American sociolinguistics there is a substantial body of research on race as a social variable that conditions language behavior, particularly with regard to black speakers of African American English (AAE) in contact with their white neighbors (e.g., Wolfram, 1971; Rickford, 1985; Myhill, 1986; Bailey, 2001; Cukor-Avila, 2001). Today, the communities that sociolinguists study are more multi-layered than ever, particularly in a metropolis like New York City, thus warranting more complex analyses of the interaction between race and language. Along these lines, Spears (1988) notes the sorely underestimated social and linguistic heterogeneity of the black population in the U.S., which needs to be considered in studies of the language of black speakers. This critique is addressed in work of Winer and Jack (1997), as well as Nero (2001), for example, on the use of Caribbean English in New York City. These two studies broaden our notions of the Englishes spoken in the United States by black people, particularly first generation immigrants. The current research goes one step further with an examination of the English spoken by children of black immigrants to New York City.

We focus on second generation Caribbean populations whose parents migrated from the English-speaking Caribbean to the United States, and who commonly refer to themselves as West Indians.

An analysis of loanwords from German into English, found through computer-assisted lexical research

Due to its rise as a global means of communication, the English language has been increasingly used by and between non-native speakers (henceforth NNSs), leading to a growing interest in what has come to be known as English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) in English language teaching (ELT). As noted by Jenkins (2006: 159), ‘many of those who start out thinking they are learning English as a foreign language end up using it as a lingua franca’. This suggests that ELT materials need to be developed in ways that correspond with the emerging needs of such language learners. However, ‘the prevailing orientation in […] ELT materials still remains undoubtedly towards ENL [English as a Native Language]’ (Jenkins, 2012: 487). It is not yet clear how well ELF perspectives have been integrated into teaching materials to date.

Are the other varieties of English under threat from the United States? This paper reviews the place of the United States of America (her English and culture) in the contemporary world, especially with regard to the spread and use of the English language. World War II and its aftermath raised America to the height of political, economic, commercial, technological strength which saw the transformation of English from being a reserve of the British Isles and their queen, to a code of international linguistic transaction. English today is no longer just spreading world-wide, but is overwhelmingly adopting a predominant American touch, given the pride and prestige of the American lifestyle and pop culture. This paper therefore observes that in a quite foreseeable future the world Englishes will gradually subsume their heterogeneous identities into the sweeping current of the American variety of English.

The idea that speaking in a certain way can make people do things – persuasion on steroids, so to say – is understandably fascinating. This holy grail of communication studies is sought after by ‘professional persuaders’, politicians and copywriters, but also in non-professional situations. One example of wishful thinking of what is possible when it comes to the power of language is the Pick-up Artist (PUA) paradigm. PUAs are a community of self-designated or aspiring seduction experts; and it should come as no surprise that most members are men. While it is possible for PUAs to meet face-to-face, for example, at workshops organized by the so-called gurus (at no little cost to the students of pick-up), much of the interaction between the members takes place in PUA Internet forums and similar online venues.

English, in the course of its progressive evolution and global spread, has had contacts with different languages (Hogg & Denison, 2006) which have led to the emergence of native and non-native varieties spoken in different countries of the world. This, in part, has resulted in variable pronunciations of English lexical items, such as anti- pronounced as /ænti/ or /æntaɪ/ at the segmental level and adult as /'ædʌlt/ or /ə'dʌlt/ at the suprasegmental level of stress (Hogg & Denison, 2006). In addition to this, phonological free variation in English has been motivated by phonetic processes, phonological changes and sociolinguistic factors, among others (Shitara, 1993; Mompean, 2010).