A look at the complex layering of the vocabulary that English has inherited from Germanic, Romance and Greek.

Recent developments in English language include the rise of many Englishes throughout the world and home dialects appearing in broadcasting, which are increasing in salience rather than diminishing with globalisation; huge increases in the international vocabulary held in common by modern languages, particularly technical and scientific words; and the increases in alternatives in communication. Two restricted English vocabularies as a way to increase the accessibility of English language have received publicity; both are called Globish, one by a Frenchman, Jean-Paul Nerrière, of 1500 words (2009), and one by an Indian of 4000 words with an accompanying Indianised spelling (Gogate, 2002).

When can a hyphen be described as ‘intrusive’? As with many other ‘rules’ of grammar and of punctuation, use of the hyphen is limited to a specific syntactical context. Hence, to use a hyphen where it should not be used makes it intrusive. Just like the apostrophe, it cannot be used arbitrarily. There is, for instance, a tattooist parlour in the English town of Oldham whose shopfront advertises Inkcredible Tatoo's (sic) and, with it, both the owner's or owners’ ability to play on words in writing and their inability to sign a plural form correctly – the rule being that apostrophes are not used to mark the plural of either common or proper nouns in written English.

The word however is an adverb and an adverb alone. The current online Oxford (Oxford English Dictionary Online, n.d.) and Cambridge (Cambridge English Dictionary Online, n.d. a) English dictionaries both have it listed solely as an adverb for British English. At the risk of awakening yet another descriptivist versus prescriptivist war, it must however be acknowledged that however is often used as a conjunction. This can, and frequently does, lead to confusion though, as the reader has to read on before realising that in fact that however was actually being used as a conjunction (or ‘connective’ in modern grammatical parlance). ‘However the cat walked down the street …’ surely has the reader thinking something along the lines of ‘In whatever manner the cat walked down the street …’ But a typical case of what I shall in this article call conjunctive howeveritis would reveal a complete (well, incomplete actually) sentence along the lines of, ‘However the cat walked down the street, even though it rarely ventured from the house.’ Not only are we now left with a sentence fragment, but in such an instance the reader would have to backtrack and subsequently assume the However was in fact being used as a coordinating conjunction. To me this is inefficient and an enemy of lucid writing. The Cambridge English Dictionary raises the warning flag high with the following example (Cambridge English Dictionary Online, n.d. b):

Warning:
We can't use however as a conjunction instead of but to connect words and phrases:
My teacher is very nice but a bit strict.
Not:
My teacher is very nice however a bit strict.

An account of syllabic stress in English words which emphasizes the regularity of many patterns of word stress

MICHAEL ERARD discusses the role of the colon in a major aspect of academic life

Two detailed reviews of four key publications in the EFL world in 1995, the first by a British lexicographer, the second by a Belgian language teacher

An assessment of what English has inherited from Anglo-Saxon, Low German and the Scandinavian languages

The debate continues over whether the primacy of English should be enshrined in the U.S. constitution. Here, it takes the form of ‘language restrictionism’ versus ‘English plus at least one other language’ for every citizen who so chooses.

Some of the things that can go wrong as children learn their language

On the 3rd November 1984 there appeared in The Guardian newspaper (London and Manchester) an article entitled ‘The earth lay gloog, the cattle bollowed deep’. It was the work of MAGGIE COOK, the founder of the Boscobel Poets of Hastings, and lies squarely in the tradition of English literate nonsense. The article is reproduced below, with a commentary by TOM McARTHUR.

LANGSCAPE is a Cambridge University Press project associated with both ‘English Today’ and a new international usage guide for the year 2000 by Pam Peters, author of the ‘Cambridge Australian English Style Guide’ (1995). Like the Australian publication, the international work will be distinctive in its use of empirical evidence from computer corpora as well as data elicited from surveys of users of English round the world. Because English is a world language, any account of usage that is limited to one person's views and resources is inadequate.

This issue presents a selection of articles on English in various contexts and settings, with a significant focus on education in the first four. Susan Van Rooy describes the language experiences of South Korean academics and their families in a small town in South Africa, and the consequences of their stay abroad for their English language proficiency. She reminds us that not all EFL learners of English have the ‘Inner Circle’ mainstream as their model: Potchefstroom, South Africa offers a mix between Inner and Outer Circle, probably having more features of the latter. Christian Burrows writes about methodologies of EFL classrooms in Japan, where cultural constraints make TBL (Task-Based Learning) more challenging than its Western proponents realise. The next two articles emphasise the need to pay attention to colloquial spoken language. Manfred Markus writes about the need to focus on phonetic accuracy in EFL teaching, or at least to try and replicate mainstream norms as much as possible. Fan Xianlong contributes a paper on the ever-changing spoken norms of the mainstream, based on his experiences as a visiting scholar in the United States. Although many of the features he describes are well known to Western sociolinguists, the article presents a refreshing perspective of how complex the notion of ‘target language’ must be to users of ESL and EFL. More often it is a moving and mystifying target, with its cultural and political minefields that find their way into everyday usage.

PAUL RASTALL assesses current issues and possibilities in studying the history of English

“…often…in words contemplated singly, there are boundless stores of moral and historic truth, and no less of passion and imagination are laid up – that from these lessons of infinite worth may be derived…”(Richard C. Trench, 1851, 1)

When we think of “English today”, a range of issues naturally springs to mind. Principally, they are “synchronic” issues. They can be matters “internal” to linguistic systems, or viewpoints “external” to English considered as a communication system. Externally, we might consider, for example, the diversity of geographical, generational or sociolinguistic varieties, teaching and learning conditions and problems, the political and economic issues arising from the enormous spread of English worldwide. Internally, there are the many questions of phonology, grammar, lexicon, usage and textual practices, which are more directly “linguistic” in the narrow sense. A little less obviously, we can consider issues of the future of English both from the “external” point of view, looking at – for example – the selection of varieties for teaching or international communication purposes, and from the “internal” viewpoint, the “synchronic dynamics” of English, looking at the ways in which English is currently changing or tending to change. All of those matters and others are well covered in English Today.

Jacqueline Lam Kam-Mei interviews Michael A. K. Halliday on language and linguistics, English and Chinese, Singaporean and Hong Kong English, and machine translation.

This paper seeks to rationalize the attitude-acquisition conundrum which is witnessed with Cameroon Pidgin English (CPE), an English-based pidgin spoken in Cameroon. According to Baker (1992: 10), ‘attitude’ refers to a hypothetical construct used to explain the direction and persistence of human behavior. In second-language acquisition literature, the use of the term ‘attitude’ has very often conjured up associated notions such as behavior, motivation, prestige and importance, which are seen to be important determinants of levels of success in L2 learning/acquisition. A positive attitude is said to fortify the motivation to learn a language; to be a successful learner, a positive attitude towards the target language is necessary. However, as McKenzie (2008: 4) notes, the relationship between attitude and L2 learning/acquisition is a rather complex one, which varies according to social context. Among other things, a positive attitude towards an L2 is also driven by factors such as (1) the socioeconomic value of the L2, (2) the L2's status-raising potential and (3) its perceived instrumental value.