The English language is no longer any one nation's monopoly; practically every nation on earth has a stake in it. This is the overall thrust of the book in the spotlight. The amazing journey of the language from a none-too-conspicuous dialect once spoken on a part of a tiny island off the north-western coast of Continental Europe to a language of wider communication across the world is the topic that the book engages with. In the ten chapters that make up this book, Urszula Clark surveys the current state of the language in its worldwide spread, along with the inevitable phenomenon of the emergence of new regional varieties or ‘Englishes’.

Nigerian English (NigE) is a second language (L2) variety of English that has been domesticated, acculturated and indigenised within the Nigerian socio-cultural and linguistic contexts (Adegbija, 2004). Based on Schneider's (2007) Dynamic Model of the Development of New Englishes, scholars have shown that NigE is currently at the late stage of nativisation (stage 3) and is on the verge of entering the stage of endornormative stabilisation (stage 4) (see Gut, 2012; Collins, 2020). Nativisation, which typically begins with the declaration of independence, is a very active and important stage in which there are large-scale linguistic changes, especially during a time when English is usually the only official language (see Schneider, 2007). Although previous studies have investigated the historical development of English in Nigeria (see Taiwo, 2009), there are limited studies on the particular linguistic features that have changed over time, especially from the time Nigeria gained independence. It is very likely that the rapid increase in the number of universities and other educational institutions managed by Nigerians from independence, as opposed to previous management by Britons, would have affected the variety of English spoken in Nigeria and culminated in the development of NigE today.

This paper focuses on the use of preverbal so in present-day English. While its use as an intensifier (meaning ‘so much’ or ‘very much’) has been attested already in Early Modern English (OED online, s.v. so, adv. and conj., sense 15), it has only recently acquired emphatic meaning (‘truly’ or ‘definitely’, see OED online, s.v. so, adv. and conj., 2005 Draft Additions). Compare:

1. (1) I do so love weddings. They're such joy. (SOAP YR 2005)

2. (2) I'm so ditching school to babysit. (SOAP AMC 2007)

According to Kachru's (1992) concentric circles framework, the use of English across countries can be grouped into three circles: an inner circle in which English is the native language, e.g., the UK; an outer circle in which English serves certain functions due to colonization, e.g., India; and an expanding circle in which English is taught as a foreign language, e.g., Turkey. Although many studies have examined the role of English in higher education in Turkey (e.g., Arik & Arik, 2014; Karakaş, 2016), the use of English in the media has not been explored to the same extent. The present study addresses the use of English in movies in theaters in Turkey. The study shows that English is the language of 50% of the movies shown in theaters in Turkey. Therefore, our findings provide further evidence showing the prevalence of English in Turkish movie theaters.

This paper presents preliminary findings from the lexicographic strand of a British Library (BL) project to document variation in British English. Voices of the UK (VoUK) is the first attempt to present significant amounts of raw data emerging from a nationwide survey of spoken English in the UK since the 1950s. The data derive from the BBC Voices Recordings: a set of group conversations about language, accent and dialect recorded in locations across the UK by BBC Local Radio in 2004 and 2005. The recordings capture speakers from all walks of life exploring their responses to an identical set of prompt words. The result is a large, rich but targeted corpus of lexical variation.

A review of the category ‘Sexual orientation’ in John Ayto's new dictionary (see also p. 58) and a consideration of ‘queer’ slang at large

An innovative analysis of special kinds of lexical ambiguity

A report on developments in pronunciation in the English of New Zealand

The text of a speech given in April 1989 at the celebration marking the 200th Anniversary of the birth of Noah Webster, at Noah Webster House, Hartford, Connecticut.

The Apple Corporation of America, makers of the famous Apple personal computer, are about to launch a brand new and very interesting new machine. Called the MacIntosh, it is a scaled down version of the recent (and very expensive) Apple Lisa … The Mac has its own 9 inch monochrome monitor and a single Sony 3.5 inch, 500kbyte disc drive. Although the option of a second disc drive is offered, few users are likely to take it. This is because the operating system and applications programmes will be in the form of ROM cartridges, leaving the disc for the user.

In this issue, DALE ROBERTS considers a range of recent, especially American, usages.

The present study is an investigation of how English has been conceptualized in the discourses of ten Brazilian English language teachers with diverse language teaching experiences. Discourses of major agents in Brazilian English language teaching (ELT) – mainly the media, language schools, and the Ministry of Education through its national guidelines – usually associate English with notions of mobility, empowerment, and international ownership. The understanding of how English language educators conceptualize the language thus provides a valuable perspective on how these discourses may be taken on and reproduced by teachers. Such understanding is also relevant because educators have first hand experience in what actually goes on inside schools, thus being able to provide important accounts that are based on real life examples of their practices.

Is grammar real or it it just a concept? The following is the opening sentence of the abstract of an article in the Journal of Linguistics, of November 2005: ‘This article argues that of English adjective–noun constructions involving associative adjectives (‘associative AdjNs’), some originate in the lexicon and others in the syntax.’ There has been for many years a divide in what is meant by grammar. For the general public (and in most of the ET articles that deal with it), grammar is understood to refer to a set of abstract terms for defining the forms of words and how they are related in sentences. For some people, however, particularly some linguistics professionals in universities, it is something real to be discovered, and grammatical terms are the means of explaining it. The quotation above is an example of the latter use. If you were unfamiliar with this approach, you might initially take the word lexicon here to mean (as the entries in dictionaries indicate) a list of the words in a language, but then might wonder how a phrase can be said, as here, to ‘originate’ in the lexicon (and whether you can really use the phrase ‘the syntax’ like that).

An account of Sranan, Saramaccan, Ndjuka and other creoles based on English in a former Dutch colony in northern South America