A report on a distinguishing feature of the disputed but nonetheless vigorous Pidgin English of India

This article focuses on Anglophone writing of a British postcolonial legacy as opposed to writing of a Lusophone, Francophone, Belgian, Dutch, or German legacy. Moreover, this specific phrase of ‘Anglophone writing of a British postcolonial legacy’ is employed in recognition of a move away from the label ‘postcolonial writing’. The article will suggest that recently published texts are engaged in new departures which seemingly appear to be taking us away from the classic ‘postcolonial’ text. Thus, in recognition of these new departures, the terminology used in this article will attempt to better encapsulate the sense of the provenance of the writing and yet at the same time move the terminology ‘forward’, away from the label of the ‘postcolonial’.

Probably my favourite study of American/British linguistic differences is Gail Jefferson's (2002) paper on no. The research was inspired by a Dutch colleague's suggestion that no can be used as an acknowledgement token for a negative statement – that is, no can be used instead of ‘positive’ indicators like mm-hmm or yeah to indicate that the listener has heard and understood a negative sentence like I didn't see her. Jefferson's first response to this suggestion was: but English no can't be an emotionally neutral acknowledgement token. And it turned out that she was right – but only for (her native) American English. Examining British telephone conversation data, Jefferson found that 87% of the tokens in response to negative statements were negative (usually no). In the American data, that number was 27%. Americans use negative response tokens less because for them a no response signals not just acknowledgement (‘I received your message and understood it’), but affiliation – communicating ‘I'd do the same thing’ or ‘I'm with you on that’. Affiliative no shows an emotional commitment, and people commit themselves less often than they simply acknowledge what's been said. Here's a slightly simplified version of an example from Jefferson's British data.

A novel and dynamic approach to teaching English by starting in Chinese.

In China, many schools start teaching EFL to their first graders, aged 6–7. Children have to repeat words and sentences that are meaningless to them. They learn to read EFL not by reading but by going through mechanical drills in letters, words and phonic skills. F. Smith asserts that ‘children learn to read only by reading’. But there is a Catch-22 situation here: to learn to read, you have to read, but you cannot read if you have not learned to read. This situation is, however, being tackled by a new experimental approach over the past five years – a ‘sandwich story’ methodology.

Grammarians and teachers would admit that modality is one of the most difficult areas to deal with in English grammar, and it is particularly difficult for learners of English to master this area of grammar. Modality can be achieved by different means (see, for example, Huddleston & Pullum, 2002; Lyons, 1977; Quirk et al., 1985). The following examples illustrate modality by the use of words of various categories:

1. (1) Maybe you are right.

2. (2) You may be right.

3. (3) I think you are right.

4. (4) I am certain you are right.

Reporting on a new research project describing and analysing English in Finland in the early twenty-first century.

In a recent article, Taavitsainen and Pahta (2008) conclude that English in today's Finland has entered a new phase in which it is increasingly used alongside the country's national languages (also McArthur, 2002; Graddol, 2006). The new uses, they suggest, constitute a new form of second language in which English is used (a) as a lingua franca, and (b) as a language serving ‘glocalized’ needs to express local meanings in a global setting. Their evidence consists of various forms of language mixing in public discourse. Other forms of evidence, with similar conclusions, come from the recent national survey on Finns' uses of and attitudes to English, carried out at the University of Jyväskylä in 2007 (Leppänen et al. 2009). This survey provides evidence on the changing role of English in Finland, and attempts to answer questions such as where, how and by whom English is used alongside the other languages in the country.

A foray into an oddity of word-making. Outside the province of jokelore, this type of abbreviation appears to have escaped notice in the literature on word-formation, perhaps because its productivity, besides being quite low, can best be seen in the most informal – and therefore supposedly ‘abnormal’ and ‘disreputable’ – levels of discourse. Of course, one does not have to be a genius to be aware that most knock-knock words (KKWs) stand as much chance of surviving as a snowball in hell. However, they are to be cherished for the unique insight they provide into language play and linguistic creativity at large. In what follows, I will describe the structural and semantic features of these words and present a glossary with a sprinkling of specimens gathered from a variety of sources.

The present study reports on the history and current circumstances of the English language in Malawi (formerly the British protectorate of Nyasaland), where the standard of English, in terms both of teaching and use, has been in decline since the time of Dr Hastings Banda, the first president (who insisted on high standards in English and education). The study also describes and analyses Malawi's currently rising appetite for English in an environment in which the language is more or less synonymous with education itself.

how the polysemous nature of the word quality can cause problems for readers of articles on quality assurance in higher education. scholarly literature on quality assurance in higher education will always run the risk of confusing or repelling non-specialist readers. that is inevitable since, by its nature, such literature often uses technical jargon in dealing with abstract concepts. yet, a further and more fundamental problem exists, one that may not always be recognized by writers in the field: namely, that the word quality itself has different senses, combines with other words, with unusual semantic effects, and can function both as a noun and an adjective. these factors combine to increase the possibility that general readers may misconstrue key points in texts about quality.

This paper investigates the notion of ‘translated English’, in contrast to ‘non-translated English’. Its focal point is that translated English texts differ from comparable non-translated texts in English, the target language (TL), in the sense that they have specific properties that cannot be found in the latter. Translated English, therefore, is a distinct variety of English. What makes it distinct is that, on the one hand, translated English texts, regardless of the source language (SL), have been found to share significant lexical, syntactic, and textual features and, on the other hand, they are inevitably SL-specific, exhibiting unique characteristics due to, among other factors, features of the source language and the translation tradition involved.

Although a large number of varieties of English in Asia have gained recognition as independent varieties, this has not been the case for Hong Kong English (HKE) (Jenkins, 2015: 162). The city has a low level of affiliation towards HKE (Jenkins, 2015: 167) and often laments its ever-falling standard of English (Leung, 2015). There exists a phenomenon of ‘linguistic schizophrenia’ – the community may recognise that a local variety of English exists and conform to its features in practice, but it still looks to native varieties as the norm and views local features as evidence of deteriorating language standards (Kachru, 1983: 118).

African American Language (AAL) is the most widely recognized – and controversial – ethnic variety of English in the world. In the United States national controversies about the speech of African Americans have erupted periodically for more than a half-century now, from the difference-deficit debates in the 1960s (Labov, 1972) to the Ebonics controversy in the 1990s (Rickford, 1999) and linguistic profiling in the 2000s (Baugh, 2003, 2018). Further, the adoption of performance genres from AAL into languages other than English, such as hip-hop and rap, has given the speech of African Americans even wider international recognition and global status (Omoniyi, 2006). The curiosities and controversies about African American speech symbolically reveal (1) the depth of people's beliefs and opinions about language differences; (2) the widespread level of public misinformation about language diversity; and (3) the need for informed knowledge about language variation in public life and in education.

Leading dictionaries do not always provide guidance on the incorporation of exotic words into the English spelling system, as this article abundantly demonstrates.

The introduction from the writer's new book, A Dictionary of Cliches, Bloomsbury 1996, outlining a novel family of kinds of hackneyed and overused expressions

I may not be alone among readers of ET in finding Katie Wales' article ‘Royalese: the rise and fall of “The Queen's English’” (July 1994) frequently muddled, misleading, and inaccurate.