A response to Pearl Ntlhakana, ‘People's English’, on the language situation in South Africa, in ET62 (16:2), Apr 2000.

If you have a non-standard local form of English, what do you do with it?

Pearl Ntlhakana gives a bold answer, supporting her arguments by reference to an article by Chick and Wade (1997), also on the South African situation. By “People's English”, Ntlhakana means what is usually referred to as Black South African English (BSAE), the English that is said to be characteristic of the indigenous African population of South Africa. What she suggests is that “a restandardised variety would actually replace the current standard (White South African English with Southern British English as its model), performing the whole range of formal functions”.

Chinese and English belong to different language families, so they often have different forms of expression. Chinese has no definite grammatical category of number and has almost no number inflection. Plural meaning is usually implied in the syntactic structure or in the context by a bare noun, or is expressed through the plural marker 们 and the numerical adjectives such as many, numerous and each, as well as by quantifiers and reduplications. However, English nouns express number category by inflection as well as by quantifiers at times, so their grammatical number is far more complicated than that of Chinese nouns. From the point of view of grammatical form, English nouns are often considered as countable and uncountable nouns. Uncountable nouns cannot be directly modified by a numeral without unit specification, nor can they be combined with an indefinite article. Thus, cheese is quantified as three slices of cheese. However, uncountable nouns can also be quantified without specifying a unit of measurement, such as much coal. A number of uncountable nouns can be used in the plural form to mean ‘a large amount of’ as in the following example from Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (hereinafter, LDCE) ‘The ship drifted into Turkish territorial waters’. In such cases, although water is uncountable, it has the plural form. In some cases, native English speakers can turn the theoretical uncountable nouns into countable ones (Landau, 2001). There seems to be no absolute boundary between countable and uncountable nouns.

English has had centuries of ‘traditional orthography’, but novel varieties of English have no orthography at all until it is created for them. How are these spelling systems developed and how close to, or distant from, ‘real’ spelling need they be?

A wide range of newsletters, clippings and cuttings, catalogues and correspondence arrives (and is welcomed) on ET's editorial desk. From the mass that goes into our files comes this mix of curious usages, arcane acronyms, neologisms and nonce forms.

A professor of English reports on what may be a growing challenge to conventional orthography

Tales of the unexpected in editing a general encyclopedia

What separates the two major varieties of the language, apart from a great deal of water? An American domiciled in Britain looks at both the obvious and the not-quite-so-obvious in what unites and divides them.

In 2015, England saw the introduction of a new GCSE English Language, as part of changes to the National Curriculum (NC). At the time, concerns about and protests against the proposed new GCSE English Literature were widely reported (Kennedy, 2014; Tickle, 2013), while the proposed new GCSE English Language attracted less popular attention and criticism. However, GCSE Results Day on the 22nd of August 2019 saw criticism about English Language taking centre stage (Andrews, 2019; Leedham, 2019). The main concerns are that:

1. 1. the exams for GCSE English Language are too difficult for a significant number of students, without any real alternative English qualification on offer;

2. 2. students aged 16–19 who fail to achieve at least a Grade 4 (pass) are required to re-take their GCSE English Language;

3. 3. the repetitive, narrow focus of the GCSE English Language course itself means that significantly fewer students are taking up English Language at A level (Leedham, 2019; Whittaker, 2019).

KATIE WALES reviews names and naming conventions in the world of pop music

A letter to the Editor and an article discussing pronouns and gender in the drafting of laws in English and French in Canada

A survey of recent developments in modes of literacy

PAM PETERS of Macquarie University, New South Wales, Australia, provides the first part of a two-part general concluding review of the Langscape Project, a major contribution to the creation of her prospective world English style guide (to be published by Cambridge University Press)

In ET17, Tony Fairman claimed that some descriptive grammarians are becoming prescriptive and that they risk presenting ‘Standard English’ as if it were all of English or at least the only English that matters. ET asked four professional grammarians to respond to his observations. Sidney Greenbaum and John Sinclair were specifically named by Tony Fairman.