This study focuses on the residential neighbourhoods of Johor Bahru city, the administrative and business centre of the Johor Bahru region and the Malaysian state of Johor. Johor Bahru is a border town, located in the very south of peninsular Malaysia, less than one mile away from Singapore. According to City Population (2018), the Johor Bahru region has a multi-ethnic population of almost 1.4 million, comprised of native ‘Bumiputera’ (52%), Chinese (37.4%), Indian (9.9%) and ‘other’ (0.6%) citizens. Hutchinson and Bhattacharya (2019: 1) describe economic links with Singapore as ‘long standing, far-reaching, spanning trade in goods and services, as well as foreign direct investment (FDI) and movement of people’; both countries are one another's ‘second most important trading partner, in both cases surpassed only by China and outranking traditional commercial allies such as the United States and Japan’.

Of all the levels of linguistic analysis, it is at the phonological level that differences in the dialects of a language are more easily noticed (Ogu, 1992: 82). The phonology of a language can be investigated at two sub-levels: segmental and suprasegmental. Investigating the segmental micro-level entails looking at phonemes – the vowels and the consonants. Suprasegmentals are linguistically significant elements that go beyond individual segments, and include syllable, tone, stress, rhythm and intonation.

A report on two prominent dialectal variables in England. Using rather informally collected data, The author looks here at two well-known variables in the English of England: first, whether there is a short or long vowel in words such as grass and bath; second, what regional words people know for streams. The treatment of these variables is consistent over time, and seems to have little to do with social status or carefulness of speech.

If you met me and listened to me speaking English, you might ask yourself why I talk so funny; why I can't find the right words; and why I make so many grammatical errors. I am, after all, the Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, and I have degrees in English language and linguistics from Cambridge University and the University of Pennsylvania.

One tricky problem with English spelling is the variation in the nominalization suffix often represented in discourse as ‘shun’, mainly between -tion and -sion. Current ELT textbooks have generally not discussed rules for its spelling. However, following online resources, some basic rules are in current debate, with two main schools of thought, each falling in line with one of two approaches that can be called the ‘word-based model’ and the ‘base-word model’. In this article, I show the base-word model to be preferred, determine the actual suffix and its underlying form, and elaborate on base-word ending clues to yield a general synchronic rule for changing from -tion to -sion, albeit with exceptions.

The study of lesser-known varieties of English is opening up new research. Over the last twenty years or so, the role(s) and function(s) of English around the world have received a great deal of interest from linguists concerned with research on topics as diverse as sociolinguistics, variation and change, contact linguistics, language typology, genetic linguistics, etc. Kachru's work (The Inner Circle, the Outer Circle, and the Expanding Circle) inspired others and alternative models were put forward by McArthur (1987) and Görlach (1990). Though they differ on how the varieties should be classified (varying in criteria such as geographic distribution, usage and function, development history, etc.), they share the idea that varieties of English can be grouped in first- (or native-), second- and foreign-speaker groups.

THE TEACHING of traditional grammar has been on the wane in education for the last 25 to 50 years, in the face of more interactive classrooms, more exotic developments in transformational grammar, and research suggesting that it may not play an effective role in improving student's writing. Recently, however, there has been a resurgence of interest in teaching at least some of its fundamental concepts. This new interest has taken on a more imperative bent as secondary schools and to some extent primary schools have been feeling pressure to teach basic grammatical concepts in order to prepare students for the 45 multiple-choice questions on grammar and usage in the new SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test). Teachers and schools that have not done well enough in this area will be held to account by parents and politicians, both of whom tend to believe that instruction in traditional formal grammar is the best means to this end. Teachers who send students off, without this training, to undergo the new SAT will have some serious questions to answer if those students scores are too low.

Intensifying adverbs are devices which scale a quality up, down, or somewhere between the two (Bolinger 1972: 17). To intensify the adjective cool, speakers of British English have a variety of functionally equivalent intensifiers at their disposal. They can use very, really, so, dead, bloody, right and well, among many others. A seemingly recent arrival to the British intensifier system is proper, as in that was proper cool. Believed to have entered English from the Latin proprius via Norman French (OED, proper), proper now has a variety of denotations in Present Day English. As an adjective, it can denote suitability (e.g., wear the proper equipment), etiquette (e.g., it wouldn't be proper to do that) and worthiness/authenticity (e.g., it's proper street food). As an adverb, proper can function as an adverb of manner (e.g., we like to do things proper in our house), and a marker of degree (e.g., he is proper tall); the degree function applying exclusively to British English. Some examples of proper intensifying adjectives from the present dataset are reported in (1).

Starts with excerpt from Jenny Cheshire, A question of masculine bias? (ET1, 1985). The author says; My 1985 article ended on an upbeat note, confidently predicting that as more people take care to remove masculine bias from their own English, so the language will gradually stop distorting our perceptions of women. The twenty-two years that have passed represent pretty much a generation of speakers, making this a good time to consider whether or not my confidence was misplaced. How successful have language reforms been?

English as a lingua franca (ELF) first emerged in the academic literature at the end of the 20th century. Since then, there has been an ever-increasing amount of research devoted to this topic. This line of research has identified new challenges that educators will likely face as their previous training and current practice might not match the changing landscape of English language use. ELF research has yielded new information related to how individuals communicate in an ELF context; therefore, most researchers have emphasized the need to fully explore the pedagogical impact of the findings from ELF research (Jenkins, 2006; Jenkins, Cogo & Dewey, 2011; Mauranen, 2012).

Semantic shifts have been explored via a range of methods (Allan & Robinson 2012). Typically, semantic shifts were usually noted or described with methods such as a literature review or dictionary checking (e.g. Blank & Koch, 1999; Stockwell & Minkova, 2001; Williams, 1976), which are very labour-intensive and time-consuming methods. Other more recently developed methods involve sociolinguistic interviews (Robinson, 2012; Sandow & Robinson, 2018). However, with the development of large-sized corpora and computational semantics, diachronic semantic shifts have started to be captured in a data-driven way (Kutuzov et al., 2018). Recently, the word embeddings technique (Mikolov et al., 2013) has been proven to be a promising tool for the tracking of semantic shifts (e.g. Hamilton, Leskovec & Jurafsky, 2016a, 2016b; Kulkarni et al., 2015; Kutuzov et al., 2017). For example, Hamilton et al. (2016b) exemplified how to use the technique to capture the subjectification process of the word ‘actually’ during the 20th century.

A rebuttal of the article ‘Singlish’ by Duncan Forbes in a recent issue of ET

In recent years, linguists have become interested in ‘interactional’ aspects of English: resources which are used as two or more interlocutors dynamically adapt their expression to an ongoing exchange (Biber et al., 1999: 1045). This process occurs mainly in conversation, but it is also an aspect of informal ‘dialogic’ writing. Features such as intensifiers (They soundreallythick), colloquial discourse markers (You know he'slikeupset that nobody got killed), and quotative forms (Hewent, ‘Gran’, and Granwent, ‘Yeah’) vary so widely and change so rapidly that they have attracted the attention of folk and professional linguists alike, and interesting work now regularly appears in the research literature (see, for example Dailey-O'Cain, 2000, Ito and Tagliamonte, 2003, Anderson, 2006). My purpose in this article is to offer an initial account of geet/git, a vernacular feature used in North East England. Drawing on data from social websites, I explore the range of functions it performs in discourse. In doing so, I hope to contribute to a developing body of research which considers such features not only in terms of their function, but also as markers of geographical identity (see, for example, Macaulay's work on pure in the west of Scotland (2006) and Bucholtz et al. (2007) on hella in Northern California).

A survey of styles in e-mailing and an e-invitation to interested readers

Italians' zeal for lacing their language with English words is well-known and on-going. Both everyday conversation and the mass media make widespread use of English terms and expressions, but their unphonetic spelling and pronunciation – full of insidious traps round every syllable – can create misunderstanding, confusion, and much humour, because Italians often tend to pronounce these international imports as they are written, much as they do in their mother tongue: either that, or they over-generalize the rules they they've learnt. A TV programme may be interrupted to announce a news flash that however comes out meatier, as ‘news flesh’. When giving business news, the phrase fiscal drag (whatever that may mean) becomes a truly obfuscating ‘fiscal drug’. And fashion news informs us of an exclusive ‘pullover’ by Missoni, whose stress shift unfortunately turns it into an order (from policeman to motorist): ‘pull over’.

In several (colloquial) varieties of English around the world, the tag question is reduced to a single generalized invariant tag ‘isn't it?’. This is used irrespective of the general structure and semantic content of the matrix or main, superordinate clause that embeds it. Linguists started debating seriously on the actual use of tag questions in English since the early 1960s and 70s. The debates then were particularly focused on the use of tags on (elliptical) imperatives, with many concluding that the auxiliary in the imperative main clause is an elliptical will that serves as the source of input for the tag that is appended (Katz & Postal, 1964; Postal, 1966). Arbini (1969) discussed the putative parallel between tag imperatives and tag questions, and other early discussions on tags include Bolinger (1967), Huddleston (1970), and Klima (1964). The present discussion looks to a different direction. As already implied, it focuses on the emergence of isn't it? as a generalized invariant tag.

Are all linguistic varieties of English simply convenient fictions?