Pam Peters of Macquarie University, New South Wales, Australia, provides the second part of a two-part concluding review of a project which is an important contribution to the creation of her prospective international English style guide (to be published by Cambridge University Press).

In ‘Murdering the language’ Moya Cannon imagines Ireland as a shore washed over by human tides. Each invasion added fresh layers to landscape, community and language, until:

As a global language, English is taken up and used in local contexts in ways that cannot be accounted for by limited World Englishes (WE) paradigm. This can be illustrated through an analysis of the performative agency of individuals’ language usage in specific contact contexts. After a brief overview of the WE paradigm, this article offers a consideration of the Malaysian linguistic context and Malaysian English from a ‘post-WE’ perspective. The conclusion is that, rather than think of the respective WE and post-WE approaches as opposed to one another, it is more useful to characterize them as distinctive theoretical prisms that illuminate divergent issues.

On 22 May 2013, programmer Steve Wilhite was honoured with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 17th Annual Webby Awards in New York. Wilhite received this award chiefly in recognition of the Graphics Interchange Format, popularly known as GIF, which was developed by him and his team at CompuServe in the 1980s. This format is best known for the short animations that it enables, which have become a staple of the Internet, especially since platforms such as Facebook and WhatsApp started providing support for the format in their messaging services.

An analysis of dialect variability in the use of BE in the island of Bequia. Bequia (pronounced /bekwei/) is the northernmost of the Grenadine islands in St Vincent and the Grenadines. Like most of the Caribbean, Bequia has a long history of language contact, but most of the evidence for this must be inferred. It appears that the Carib population living on the island before European colonization settled Bequia in successive waves of migration ultimately originating from the coast of South America indeed the name ‘Bequia’ is said to derive from a Carib word becouya, meaning ‘Island of the clouds’, but as yet I have been unable to trace this etymon reliably to a particular Carib language. Based on what we know about St Vincent, and the limited mentions of Bequia in the eighteenth century, we can infer that, at times, there may have been contact between some combination of speakers of a Carib language or languages, French, English, African languages and/or possibly a relatively new creole-like or contact variety of English.

A leading American journalist points out that the world speaks English – but often none too well

There are some subtle influences from English at work on other languages, graphically demonstrated by this account of how mainly American movies and TV programmes are dubbed into Italian

A review of recent research in the acquisition of pronunciation skills in learners of English and other languages and of the implications for teachers

ELIZABETH-ANNE MALISCHEWSKI describes how, through transliteration and adaptation, English words have been adopted into Chinese. The term KĀI FÀNG, whose characters are shown above, means ‘open-free’ and is used for Deng Xiao-ping's ‘open-door policy’.

Following from Tom McArthur's ‘Models of English’ (ET32, Oct 92), a consideration of such models and the singularity or plurality of the language(s)

Popular journalism in Britain has a language all its own, shaped by the pressures of editorial deadlines and a perennial need for stereotyped characters performing in life's daily dramas

An examination of the many similarities in the English of West Africa and South Asia

A consideration of whether there has been more Celtic influence on English than commentators have traditionally conceded

Sri Lankan English belongs to the family of South Asian Englishes, of which Indian English is the best known and most established example – although Indian English itself is of course hugely diverse. Indian English and Sri Lankan English have much in common, as both varieties evolved from the English of the British colonials of the nineteenth century, and much common vocabulary developed to describe the common flora and fauna of the two countries, as well as their shared religious and cultural aspects. Both varieties include a number of words of Tamil origin, and many others derived from Sanskrit roots.

The main aims of this paper are to present the argument for the recognition of Sri Lankan English as a distinct variety of English, and to discuss some of the practical issues encountered in compiling a dictionary of this nature.

To understand the role of a global language in different societies, one needs to distinguish between imperial or colonial and post-imperial or post-colonial societies. As a rule, imperial societies strongly resist any kind of linguistic globalization which they consider to be an imminent threat to their language and culture. Post-imperial societies, such as Azerbaijan, tend to have a more open attitude to the realities of a global language since they feel more secure in their cultural identities. Therefore, the spread of global English creates an excellent opportunity for building multilingualism and plurilingualism in post-imperial societies.

Following on from Virginia Pulcini's article on English in Italy (ET40, Oct 94), an account of English in Switzerland

Some problems encountered in the compilation of ‘Collins COBUILD English Guides 10: Determiners and Quantifiers’

A controversial author considers the reception that his recent book ‘Language is power’ has been receiving from some fellow scholars of language