The editor of a quarterly devoted to the analysis and exposure of doublespeak describes some prize specimens and how his organization counters them.

In ET1, Jenny Cheshire looked at male bias and in ET2 Mary Brown Parlee discussed ‘genderlects’ and conversational politics. A Danish linguist now presents some evidence that women and men do use the language differently.

there are, as it were, three levels in the title of the discussion, each going further ‘out’ from hong kong, although the direction and perspective could as easily have been reversed, moving ‘inwards’ from the world to china to hong kong, one of history's most successful social, cultural, political, and economic anomalies. there could equally easily have been four levels: hong kong, china, asia, and the world, a framework that would even then have been simpler than, say, ‘london, england, the united kingdom, the european union, europe at large, and the world’, but much the same as ‘lagos, nigeria, africa, and the world’ or ‘los angeles, california, the united states, and the world’.

A report on the background and nature of the general English usage of the island nation of Singapore

It goes without saying that a common culture and a common language make trade easier between individuals and countries, and for this reason the human being has always tried to find a way to communicate with foreign people in order to buy and sell goods and services. But learning as many languages as the market requires has always been a rather difficult issue, so since ancient times some languages have played the role of lingua franca. Throughout history there have been various lingua francas in the world, used as working languages or bridge languages, based on the prestige and economic relevance of some countries in particular phases of history, as is the case with Latin in the Roman Empire; in the Eastern provinces of the Empire Greek served the same purpose (De Houwer & Wilton, 2011).

China's stunning economic growth is now widely recognized around the globe (Wong, 2009). Its gross domestic product (GDP) is now the second largest in the world, and, according to the World Bank (2015), in terms of GDP based on purchasing power parity (PPP), it already has the world's largest economy, surpassing that of the United States. It is commonly claimed that China will be the strongest economic power in the near future, and that it will have a concomitantly more potent political and cultural influence on the rest of the world.

A survey-related classification of kinds of writing and writers, and people's preferences about the implements they use, from the pen to the PC

Kachru (1965, 1966) has presented a detailed analysis of the idiosyncratic vocabulary items of Indian English (hereafter IE). He observes that “in India an idiom of English has developed which is Indian in the sense that there are formal and contextual exponents of Indianness in such writing, and the defining-context of such idiom is Indian setting” (1965:396). To illustrate how IE has become culture bound in India, he mentions many formations, such as confusion of caste, dung wash, saltgiver, rape-sister, etc., drawn from IE fiction, and calls them Indianisms.

Euphemisms have no doubt been used ever since the birth of languages, and surely constitute a linguistic universal. We are all aware of them and we all use them when it is desirable to avoid drawing attention to the less pleasant aspects of daily life such as the need to empty one's bladder or bowel. They are respectful in that they show concern for the feelings of our fellow human beings; the more delicate the social situation and the more unpleasant the subject matter we refer to, the more careful we must be in selecting a euphemism for the purpose. Perhaps the most painful fact to deal with socially is the death of someone known to the person we are addressing, and for this purpose the English language puts a copious word-hoard at our disposal.

The development and use of the Italian cousin of franglais.

THIS STUDY investigates how speakers of Educated Yoruba English (EYE) produce the vowels in typically unstressed syllables of English words whose suffixes require a shift of stress and a consequent reduction of vowels, as in atómic from átom and dramátic from dráma. Twenty suffixed English words were read by one hundred Yoruba subjects, with a Briton who studied at the University of London serving as the control. The focus is on Yoruba English because of both its many speakers and the need for a ‘geo-tribal’ approach to defining the concept Nigerian English. The data was analysed by converting tokens of occurrence to percentages, the higher percentages being taken as the norm. The acoustic analysis was done in a computerized speech laboratory. The study establishes that vowels occurring in typically unstressed syllables in traditional Standard English remain strong and full in educated Yoruba English.

With the intensification of globalization and advancement of digital communication, interactions online have gained increasing vitality in our life. Online communication now influences the spread of various languages (e.g., English) and semiotic signs (e.g., emoticons) to many countries, especially for those characterized by Kachru (1986) as belonging to the Expanding Circle (e.g., Japan, China — countries where English is usually practiced as a foreign language). Recent inquiries of digital discourse analysis have researched how English and its features are adopted in countries of the Expanding Circle (e.g., Crystal, 2008; Zhang, 2012). This paper continues to explore the linguistic landscape of English practices online, and specifically focuses on how micro-blogging users in mainland China adopt English as a resource for meaningful multilingual communication.

The post-World War II emergence of the linguistic phenomenon called ‘World English’ has given rise to seemingly endless discussion and much speculation among scholars and the lay public alike. The topics of discussion range from horrified exclamations at the mysterious apparition (like Horatio's ‘Look my Lord it comes! It beckons you to go with it, as if it some impartment did desire’, in Shakespeare's Hamlet), to what exactly we should call it or how at all should we otherwise identify it or make it identify itself (as in ‘Stay, speak, speak, I charge thee speak!’) and, finally to an attitude of familiarity breeding – for a change – conviviality and comfort (as in the somewhat resigned ‘Custom hath made it in him a property of easiness’).

Of all the major colonial varieties of English, South African English (SAfE) is arguably the most under-studied. Its linguistic history is also one of the most complex, South Africa having been the site of a series of immigration events involving English-speakers from a vast array of regional and social backgrounds. On top of this the English spoken by native speakers of other languages also, conceivably, had a role to play in this dialect's formation. This paper provides a brief historical reconstruction of the formation of SAfE, drawing on recent work which seems to indicate that in many important respects SAfE is younger than many might suspect.

In the Arab world, English is having substantial effects on the region's educational systems, language policies and patterns of language use (Nunan, 2003; Bolton, 2008; Kirkpatrick, 2008). Having realized the importance of English in all domains of life, Arab countries have encouraged the acquisition of English by their people. Most Arab countries have introduced English as a main subject in the school curriculum. In most government and private sectors, most business organizations ask for proof of English proficiency before hiring people for employment.

Standard English need not be a matter of prescriptivism or any attempt to ‘create’ a particular standard, but, rather, can be a matter of observation of actual linguistic behaviour. For Hudson (2000), standard English is the kind of English which is written in published work, which is spoken in situations where published writing is most influential – especially in university level education and so in post-university professions – and which is spoken ‘natively’ at home by the ‘professional class’, i.e. people who are most influenced by published writing. In the papers in Bex and Watts (eds, 1999), it is recurrently claimed that, when speaking English, what the ‘social group with highest degree of power, wealth or prestige’ or more neutrally ‘educated people’ or ‘socially admired people’ speak is the variety known as ‘standard English’. However, ‘standard English’ may also mean that shared aspect of English which makes global communication possible. This latter perspective allows for two meanings of ‘standard’: it may refer both to an idealised set of shared features, and also to different sets of national features, reflecting different demographic and political histories and language influences. The methodology adopted in the International Corpus of English (henceforth ICE – cf. Greenbaum, 1996) enables us to observe and investigate each set of features, showing what everybody shares and also what makes each national variety of English different.

Japan not only borrows words from English; it often changes them radically. The present study reviews both the historical background to contact between English and Japanese and the periods in which English loans entered the Japanese language. Such loans are particularly significant sociolinguistically because they shed light on the exposure of the Japanese to English since they opened up to the world. Discussing the inflow of such borrowings both provides a background to the many English-derived words currently in daily use in Japanese and makes a broader point about the adoption of loanwords as a cultural process involving both acculturation and deculturation.

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.

WE ARGUE here that a ‘paradigm gap’ has prevented recent research into world Englishes (WEs) and contrastive rhetoric (CR) from being mutually useful, and suggest particular areas in which insights from CR may benefit in particular the study of WEs. English in its standard ‘native’ form(s) is fast becoming the world’s lingua franca of science, commerce, the mass media, and entertainment. As a result, its non-native uses and users have become significant in at least the following eleven fields: applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, critical linguistics, contrastive rhetoric, second language acquisition, traditional English studies, lexicography, mass communication studies, cultural studies, pragmatics, and text linguistics (cf. Bolton, 2003a). We hope that the present study will contribute to the debate.

Some observations on using motion pictures to teach Business English. THE USE of motion pictures or other captioned films as part of teaching English as a foreign language has markedly increased in recent years in China. Because of this, we undertook a four-year experiment to determine how effective the use of English-language movies has been in the teaching of business. From this experiment it became clear that a cavalier use of movies in effect misused them. The appropriate and effective use of motion pictures requires a range of elements: (1) movies that are at one and the same time educational, informative, and entertaining; (2) a workbook linked to such movies that enables students to get ready beforehand; (3) most importantly, a range of classroom activities to induce and elicit timely and optimal output from the students, so as to make talking and writing about communication easier and more effective. Activities such as dubbing, story retelling, acting, discussing, debating, and role playing are only a few of the effective techniques a teacher can employ to engage the students.