The International Civil Aviation Organization now requires all airline pilots to have at least a basic command of conversational English, but Walter Seiler is concerned that an over-emphasis on native-speaker varieties might lead to even more misunderstandings.

A new utopian lexicography – online? Today, dictionary users are Web users: they imagine that a static paper text is necessarily less richly informative than a hyperlinked megatext. They expect to move among texts as interest and curiosity direct, not to be constrained by linear, editorially directed matter of the old-fashioned kind. The nodes of an infinite hyperlinked search may map a universe of small, classically organized texts, but those who travel the Web for information and ideas expect to click around on impulse. Further, they often expect to participate in the public construction of know-ledge, contributing and editing Web content whenever they feel competent to do so. They are hyper-Romantics who have conflated their imaginations and the scapes of human know-ledge into a hypertextual hyperuniverse. Future dictionaries of English should acknowledge these new user inclinations to the extent compatible with the highest lexicographical standards. These ideas are discussed further.

How such words are–and might be–handled

The author argues that, with the development of English as a world language and the burgeoning of new varieties of English (‘New Englishes’, or NE's), and with the inclusion of more and more NE words in international English dictionaries, there is a need for systematic and principled solutions to the proper phonetic representation of these words, instead of arbitrarily imposing the same transcription conventions on them as for ‘Old’ varieties of English (‘Old Englishes’, or OE's).

A survey of attitudes to other people's English among students at a university in the United States. Attitudes toward varieties of English as used in European contexts reflect changing viewpoints among their speakers (see Westergren Axelsson; Söderlund & Modiano; and Mobärg; see also Mobärg 1998). In this paper, I focus on the multifaceted attitudes toward varieties of English held by American undergraduate students in one department of English in the United States. I focus on perceptions of varieties of English, particularly on viewpoints of standard and acceptable spoken varieties of English. The wider aim of this project – described here in its early pilot stages – is to identify to what extent American undergraduates accept regional, national, and international varieties of English. A guiding question is whether American undergraduate students expand their view of which varieties of English are standard as the students gain more exposure to varieties that are not their own.

A discussion of the impact of parental demand on the terms of employment of imported native-speaking and local non-native-speaking teachers in private language schools.

As more and more parents realize the importance of learning the language at an early stage, the teaching of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) to young learners has become a lucrative adventure for Taiwanese entrepreneurs. Taiwanese students and parents alike represent a stable and growing market, at least for now. The demand for both Native Speaking (NS) and Non-Native Speaking (NNS) teachers is also on the rise and can certainly be attributed to the flourishing EFL industry in Taiwan. However, there is a distinctively huge difference in the pay and reward policies and practices for the two kinds of teacher. This article touches on relatively sensitive issues concerning NS/NNS as EFL teachers and as members of staff.

Whenever I've given a lecture on the future of English, the question I am most frequently asked is ‘Will Chinese take over from English as the global language?’. With China's economy continuing to grow fast, whilst those of the west slow down in recession, China has been rising up the world economic rankings and has overtaken other economies faster than predicted. It seems no time since it overhauled the UK economy to become the world's number 4 (2005), and then Germany (2007) to become number 3. During the summer of 2010 it edged past Japan to become the world's second largest economy. It may take another 20 years to overtake the US economy in absolute size, though it may already have become the world's largest exporter (overtaking Germany), and has already overtaken the US in energy consumption. Next year, China is expected to take over from the US as the world's largest manufacturer – a position the US has held since it overtook the UK in the late 1890s.

A concise history of English used in different ways for different purposes

What happens in a small country when every citizen speaks English as well as the national language?

Even in areas which seem not to be particularly linguistic, such as accountancy, English is of prime professional interest worldwide

Some reflections on the nature of ELF. The focus in this article is what scholars of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) have referred to as ‘unilateral idiomaticity’ (UI): the use by speakers and writers of idiomatic language which is not understood by the other participants in the interaction. The writer will attempt to identify actual occurrences of UI, drawing on both corpus evidence and an email survey of fifty L1 and L2 ELF-users and will also draw some implications for what we mean by ‘competence’ in lingua franca contexts.

A description of ‘the mantle of communication ... extended around the planet’

The new perceptions afforded by the era of telecommunications may be compared to those of the Renaissance or the Enlightenment. That the world is a globe, or that blood circulates around the body, became obvious only a few centuries ago...as it now becomes apparent that all spoken and written languages form an organic continuum, a global medium for human communication and the circulation of ideas.

The continuity of communication between communities in contact has always been maintained by those who speak more than one language, by those whose brains have attempted to bridge the differences of viewpoint and expression embodied in the use of differing languages by different communities. It is only in modern times, however, that networks of bilingual links among thousands of speech communities around the world can be seen in global perspective. The ancient continuum of multilingual speech is becoming a system of immediate worldwide communication.

In a downtown Border City, Ontario coffee shop, I interviewed Carlo, an Italian-Canadian man in his late 50s. He explained that his children, who are in their 20s, do not demonstrate much productive use of Italian, but that they have maintained the language in that they understand their grandparents' Italian and can imitate their Italian-accented English. I refer to the linguistic phenomenon that Carlo mentions as Stylized Italian English (SIE), which is the primary focus of this paper.

This paper begins with a brief ethnographic and linguistic background of the community and participants. I then explore specific features of Stylized Italian English as it is used in multigenerational family interactions, showing that second and third generation family members use SIE to index Italianness. Finally, I discuss SIE within larger contexts of language shift and maintenance and language contact research.

KATE BURRIDGE places PC usage within the long tradition of euphemistic expression

A report on an interdisciplinary e-course experiment on language, literature and culture in the Indian Diaspora.

One of the rich potentials of the World Wide Web is to enable international and interdisciplinary projects by utilizing e-learning technologies. Further, contemporary students are used to structuring much of their public and private life and learning around the use of electronic technologies. Certainly, when learning, thinking and working are no longer solitary activities, then traditional notions of teaching must be redesigned throughout our educational institutions in order to meet the challenges of the communication age – language teaching and the humanities at our universities cannot be an. Since the classroom can transcend spatially limited locations, it can transform the ‘traditional scene of instruction […] into a joint venture involving many scholars, including our students as active researchers’.

To become lifelong learners is the ultimate goal of many if not most learners irrespective of their target of learning, and being able to self-learn is one major prerequisite of this goal. As far as the learning of a second language is concerned, dictionaries are among the most readily available and easily accessible self-learning tools available on the market, and are regarded as the most systematic and comprehensive lexical descriptions that users have access to (Jackson & Amvela, 2000). An increasing number of dictionaries are now available for learners at different levels and for different learning purposes, including general dictionaries, learners' dictionaries, translation dictionaries, pictorial dictionaries, collocation dictionaries, specialized dictionaries and encyclopaedic dictionaries (Jackson & Amvela, 2000). Of these, learners' dictionaries are among the most popular for second or foreign language learners, providing a range of information including word meanings, pronunciations, collocations, correct usage and syntactic behaviour.

In this essay, I examine language use among Puerto Ricans in the U.S., and evaluate evidence that suggests that they are shifting to English more quickly than other Latino groups. This accelerated adoption of English might seem to be a positive trend to proponents of English-only or to those who fetishize assimilation as the route to success in the U.S.; however, the fact that it is very often accompanied by a loss of Spanish is troubling to those who value multiculturalism and bilingualism. The idea that Puerto Ricans are the group that takes the lead in the loss of bilingualism among Latinos is a source of debate for observers of the sociolinguistic reality of Latinos in the U.S.

With a particular focus on the Puerto Rican community in Chicago, I first discuss language loss among Latino populations in the U.S. Then, I offer a brief overview of Puerto Rican immigration history, and of Latino presence in Chicago. Lastly, I address the allegedly exceptionally rapid shift of Puerto Ricans to English, and discuss possible reasons for this phenomenon. I conclude that even though there are sites where this assertion seems to be true, we need more evidence that captures actual language use patterns across a range of contexts before we can arrive at a definitive characterization of Puerto Rican speech practices.

The present paper discusses the use of the prepositions after different in present-day spoken American English, using the Corpus of Spoken Professional American-English [sic] (CSPAE), which includes transcriptions of conversations recorded between 1994 and 1998. As the corpus consists of four different professional settings (i.e. press conferences held at the White House and other locations, faculty meetings of the University of North Carolina, national meetings on mathematics tests, and national meetings on reading tests), it provides useful data for stylistic analyses. It is also useful for gender analyses of English, since it provides some personal data for most speakers and indicates whether they are male or female.

The area of East Anglia in which its traditional dialects are spoken has shrunk significantly over the past few decades and seen a marked decline in the use of traditional features. These include lack of -s marking on third-person singular forms (Kingston, 2000; Potter, 2018), as well as the long-standing distinction between those words descended from Middle English /ɔ:/ and /ɔu/, as in ‘moan’ vs ‘mown’, which failed to become homophonous as part of the Long Mid Mergers (Wells, 1982a). Like other relics, this distinction now only remains in East Anglia's more northern locales (Trudgill & Foxcroft, 1978; Trudgill, 2004; Butcher, 2019). This apparent ‘dialect death’ situation (Trudgill, 1986: 68) is the outcome of continued supralocalisation, a situation in which locally specific linguistic forms lose out to linguistic variants with greater socio-spatial currency, usually as a result of mobility and dialect contact (Britain, 2010). In East Anglia's case, Trudgill (2001) argues that dialect levelling has largely been driven by the impact of London and Home Counties varieties of English. This process is predicted to continue (Trudgill, 1986; Kingston, 2000), though is unlikely to be straightforward. Britain (2011) reports that substantial intra-regional differences are found in relation to route and rate of sound change in East Anglia. This calls for more comprehensive analyses of East Anglian English to better understand the workings of this ‘heterogenous homogenisation’ (Britain, 2011: 57), and how individual case studies relate to the overall shrinkage of the area in which traditional East Anglian dialects are spoken. This paper presents data in this vein from two studies undertaken in Suffolk, southern East Anglia. The first presents data on unstressed vowel tensing, which refers to the alternation between [ə] and [ɪ] in those unstressed syllables where /ɪ/ occurs in other varieties of Southern British English (SBE) e.g. ‘carpet’ [kɑ:pɪt] / [ka:pəʔ]. The second reports data on yod dropping, i.e. the absence of /j/ from sequences of C+/ju/ e.g. ‘huge’ [hju:dʒ] / [hu:dʒ]. Both variables are well known from descriptions of East Anglian dialects but, as we will see later, they appear to behave differently in this study of contemporary East Anglian English.

The evolution of the syllabus in teaching English as a foreign language.