Are contractions like don't and it's typical of ‘modern’ English? To what extent were they present in early modern English? This paper endeavours to answer these questions. However, it also sets out to answer another one: early modern English had a set of contractions of its own, and the question is why they disappeared and whether they are still in any way relevant to contemporary English.

While World Englishes scholarship has always been concerned with different types of English varieties, Expanding Circle (i.e., non-postcolonial) Englishes have had a ‘late start’ in being added to its research remit. As a result, much important work in this area remains to be done. Expanding Circle Englishes in general and Asian Expanding Circle Englishes in particular are still neglected in many handbooks of World Englishes (e.g., in The Cambridge Handbook of World Englishes; Schreier, Hundt & Schneider, 2020). Notable exceptions here are, for example, The Routledge Handbook of World Englishes (Kirkpatrick, 2020; including, among others, chapters on Japanese, Chinese, and Slavic Englishes) and The Handbook of Asian Englishes (Bolton, Botha & Kirkpatrick, 2020; including, among others, chapters on Taiwanese, Cambodian, and Indonesian Englishes). While traditionally much focus has been laid on matters of language policies, education, and attitudes, corpus linguistic approaches to Expanding Circle Englishes have become more and more relevant (see, e.g., Edwards, 2016 for the Netherlands; Rüdiger, 2019 for South Korea). In this article, we present the first results from a corpus-based study of Taiwanese English, drawing on the pilot version of a spoken Taiwanese English corpus.

Usually focusing on linguistic/semiotic signs in culturally and linguistically diverse communities, linguistic landscape (hereafter LL) has appeared as a methodological paradigm for the investigation of the representation and visibility of languages across geographical contexts (Landry & Bourhis, 1997; Scollon & Scollon, 2003). Highlighting the informative and symbolic functions of languages, this paradigm enables the combination of a quantitatively distributive lens with a refined ethnographic perspective to generate insights into the ethnolinguistic vitality of a given territory and the spread of international lingua francas – in most cases English – in localized settings (Backhaus, 2007; Jaworski & Thurlow, 2010; Li, 2015).

English as a lingua franca (ELF) is now the most extensive sociolinguistic use of English around the world (Jenkins, 2015). As a widespread language phenomenon, ELF serves as ‘a “contact language” between persons who share neither a common native tongue nor a common (national) culture and for whom English is the chosen foreign language of communication’ (Firth, 1996: 240). More specifically, ELF refers to communication in English between speakers from different first language (L1) backgrounds (Mauranen, 2012; Seidlhofer, 2011). Instead of being a single variety of English, ELF is also conceptualized as a set of practices involving translingual uses of English (Jenkins, 2015; Seidlhofer, 2017).

In the past two decades, South Korean universities’ ‘top-down’ implementation of English-medium instruction (EMI) policy has been critiqued for inadequately addressing the linguistic challenges students and instructors face (Kim, 2017). Research suggests that rapid implementation of such policy is primarily motivated by the pursuit of internationalisation, where global ranking takes precedence over the appropriateness of the policy (D. W. Cho, 2012) resulting in issues of injustices (Williams & Stelma, 2022). As a result, of these injustices, taking EMI courses is not a popular choice amongst South Korean higher education students.

A discussion of the difficulties that beset teaching the history of the English language in American universities.

THE THIRD College Edition of Webster's New World Dictionary was published by Simon & Schuster in September 1988. The work contains 170,000 entries and 800 illustrations in 1600 pages. Recent college dictionaries have contained about 150,000 entries. The increase is due in part to the steady proliferation of the vocabulary and in part to competition among the four rivals. The others are American Heritage Dictionary, College Edition (Houghton Mifflin, published in 1982); Random House College Dictionary (1984), and Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary (Merriam-Webster, 1983). By comparison, Noah Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1828, contained 70,000 words. The college dictionary is one of a family of New World dictionaries that have sold more than 80 million copies since 1951.

Taxi's stop here says a sign – Bus' across the street says another. – Joes hamburger's says a third: a descriptive/prescriptive look at a troublesome symbol

ON DECEMBER 2, 1993, David Nyhan of the Boston Globe published an article entitled “The Thought Police Strike Again.” In a parody of novelist Raymond Chandler's immortal Los Angeles detective, Philip Marlowe, Nyhan wrote:

“I was in my office, on the fringe of the ghetto, feeling gypped because a check had bounced, watching the crazy divorcée in the next office, a real babe who used to be a nifty co-ed before she married her hillbilly. He was a piece of white trash whose holy roller ancestors fought the Indians.

Singapore's Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) railway system is a highly effective and rather inexpensive way of getting around the Lion City, although locals sometimes complain about overcrowding in the carriages and about noise levels experienced in apartment blocks situated near the lines. Generally speaking, passengers are well provided with information too, including maps of the MRT system in the stations, screen data about train arrivals, and clearly enunciated announcements (in English, Mandarin, Malay and Tamil) inside the carriages about upcoming stations and connections. However, one quibble can be raised about the English version of these announcements, which sometimes features the verb ‘to alight’. This is explored.

The attitudes of Slavic speakers towards English accents have been under-researched. The only language and accent attitude research in the Slavic context with the involvement of Polish speakers was conducted by Jenkins in her questionnaire study (Jenkins, 2007). The study, whose interest lay in assessing native and non-native English accents, showed a strong attachment of non-native speakers toward native varieties and accents of English, although non-native speakers mostly used English for communication with other non-native speakers of English.

A proposal for Federal status for English as a Swiss language. I have written previously on the role of English as a vehicular language in plurilingual Switzerland (ET42, April 1995) and more recently on the cachet of English in the Swiss media (ET95, September 2008). Switzerland sits at the heart of Europe, not as a member of the European Union but with continually negotiated bi-lateral arrangements and now relatively open borders. As elsewhere in Europe English is widely used in academia, administration and the big corporations, but there is a surprising suggestion from the Swiss scientific community that English should now be given formal recognition as a Swiss language.

Some religious etymologies in English.

Whatever religious beliefs we hold or do not hold, there is no denying the fact that all cultures are affected to a greater or lesser degree by religion. Whether or not we attend church on a Sunday, the mosque on a Friday or the synagogue on the Sabbath the language we use during the rest of the week will be peppered with words and phrases which can be traced back to religious rites and practices of one sort or another. In the case of English, which has absorbed some of the vocabulary of most of the main religions in the world, the dominant influence has to be Christianity. And because the early church texts and documents were frequently written in, and heavily dependant upon, Latin and ancient Greek their influence is still detected in many of the religious and cultural references we make in everyday speech.

Final consonant cluster simplification, or what variationists have traditionally labelled (t, d)-deletion, remains one of the most well studied variables in the analysis of English (e.g. Labov, 2001: 13). In this body of work, (t, d)-deletion refers to the process whereby /t/ or /d/ can be omitted in word final Ct or Cd coda clusters (e.g. last, mind). However, despite the attention paid to this feature of connected speech, very little (if any) focus has been dedicated to the complementary distribution of the coronal stops /t/ and /d/ in monomorphemic final clusters, as well as other phonological influences, such as the effect of intonational boundaries (IBs) on deletion patterns. This has led to a consistent practice of analysing (t, d) as a single linguistic variable, instead of considering the value of their separation, based on both sound linguistic reasoning and empirical evidence. After a brief review of current literature on multivariate analyses of (t, d)-deletion, this paper presents a socio-phonologically oriented research design that has been used to gather data from a peripheral southeastern variety of English. We martial these data to illustrate how (t) and (d) can be modelled as distinct dependent variables that are sensitive to particular factor groups: we focus in particular on the role of IBs in the deletion process.

One of the ways a language is learned, especially a foreign language, is by personal extensive reading. When people read widely, they are exposed to the linguistic structure of what they read and so learn it consciously or unconsciously. What they come across in their reading remains in their minds and adds to their general knowledge. This includes knowledge of the language they read. General wide reading reinforces the language students have been formally taught in their language classes. Exposure to grammatically correct language would improve their language skills. On the other hand, exposure to incorrect language would negatively affect the language skills of foreign learners and cause them to use wrong language comfortably, not knowing that they are erroneous in their usage.

A practical demonstration of how the language of statutes can be made more accessible without losing its legal soul

JEROME BETTS considers the use of in and on in such frames as ‘I met him – the street’.

Today it is difficult to find a truly atrocious British government form being issued to the public. OUT are the acres of grey small print, the 60-word sentences, the endless use of that bureaucratic knee jerk, the passive verb. IN are forms that look good, read well, and even save money through their greater efficiency.

An account of how and why a mysterious new word more or less replaced a once-universal predecessor