For sixty years a periodical currently published in the Deep South has been reporting on the complexities of U.S. usage. To mark the anniversary, a Southerner now reviews the journal of the American Dialect Society for English Today.

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

A description of how a text-retrieval program can search a tagged corpus for words, word elements, and their grammatical roles

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.

Creating the first scholarly dictionary of the English of Trinidad and Tobago

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.

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.

the eu recently forced microsoft to issue a second version of its windows xp operating system without a built-in windows media player, ruling that, by bundling its own media player, microsoft was effectively blocking competition from rivals (particularly real player and quicktime). microsoft's monopolistic approach in this case also landed it a fine of €497.2 million ($665m). the wrangling lasted well over a year, during which time windows xp with bundled media player had been sold so widely in europe as to partly invalidate the eu's attempts at stopping the us company monopolising and controlling the market. ‘the second version of windows will reflect what consumers want, and not what microsoft imposes on them,’ was the triumphant but belated comment of mario monti, the former eu commissioner in charge of competition.

The mission of the English Project (www.englishproject.org) is to explore and explain the English language in order to educate and entertain the English speaker, and 2015 was the year of punctuation for the Project because 6 February 2015 was the 500th anniversary of the death of Aldus Manutius. Aldus was a Venetian printer who shaped the comma, invented the semicolon and created italic fonts. He may have been the greatest punctuator of all time. We ‘punctuated’ the year by looking in turn at the full stop, the semicolon, the colon, the comma, the slash, the hyphen, the parenthesis, the exclamation, the apostrophe, the quotation mark and the question mark. Those twelve provide the fundamentals of English language punctuation, and all of them do more than one job. If we had a complete and unambiguous set of punctuation marks, we might need as many as 50, but the writing world does not want the trouble of such precision. In just same way, the writing world has never accepted the need for 44 separate letters to match the 44 separate sounds of the English language. Providing a separate grapheme (letter) for every phoneme (sound) is the linguist's business. Punctuation marks are ambiguous therefore. They suggest rather than define. They rely on context and the quick wittedness of the reader. If precision is needed, there are proofreader's marks. Merriam-Webster lists 42 of them, but proofreading is a special practice. Punctuation marks are a special set of symbols, and of symbols and signs there is no end. Punctuation marks are regularly appropriated by the devisers of computer languages. Punctuation marks can become logotypes – ‘a single piece of type that prints a word’. The exclamation mark can be made to work like &, $, or @. There are fuzzy edges to the subject of punctuation.

Naming is a linguistic universal. Every known human society distinguishes and individuates its members by their names. In the context of Africa and beyond, names are not just ordinary labels for the identification of their bearers; they mirror the culture, tradition and worldview of the people. Essien (1986: 5) argues that ‘naming is not an arbitrary affair, it is at once a mental, an emotional, a linguistic and a cultural matter’. It is widely believed that names and naming can influence the personality development and behaviour of their bearers. This claim justifies Camden's (1984: 43) admonition that ‘names should be chosen with good and gracious significations to inspire the bearer to good action’. This implies that people are assumed to live according to the message contained in their names. Significantly, names also embed deep cultural insights that reflect their bearers’ social lives, philosophy, religion, emotions and worldview. African names, for instance, are important cultural and symbolic resources that reflect the peculiarities of the African people, and capture their beliefs, values, identity and personality.

Textbooks have long been considered resources for empowering nationalism within historical, social and political contexts. In particular, nations which have experienced socio-political turmoil place emphasis on promoting learners’ national identity through a national curriculum and designated textbooks (So, Kim & Lee, 2012). These textbooks serve as a pedagogical tool that plays a pivotal role in how learners should position themselves in the face of globalization (Matsuda, 2012; Matsuda & Friedrich, 2011). By the same token, they are artifacts that reflect realities alongside certain ideologies and values that society expects its citizens to learn while consolidating national identity through formal language education (Norton, 2013; Pavlenko, 2003; Pavlenko & Norton, 2007). Recent studies have also revealed that government-authorized English textbooks tend to be less hesitant about dealing with historical disputes regarded as contentious in nature (see Kim & Lee, 2023).

The question of which English to teach has been an issue since the late-20th-century advent of the world Englishes (WE) paradigm. In the early 1990s, Quirk and Kachru conducted one of the most significant debates about this controversial issue in applied linguistics. Quirk (1990) argued that only standard native varieties that have no grammar deviations and adhere to mainstream vocabulary usage should be taught in order to counter the contamination of English resulting from tolerance of variations, observing that he was ‘not aware of there being any institutionalized nonnative varieties’ (p. 6). In contrast, Kachru (1991) argued that language variation due to language contact is a common sociolinguistic phenomenon, so Outer Circle varieties are not substandard or deficit languages. Therefore, he contended, traditional notions of standardization are no longer acceptable. He recommended that multiple localized varieties should be taught in Outer Circle contexts because they reflect learners’ linguistic and cultural identity. In relation to Kachru's argument, English as a lingua franca (ELF) has developed as a recent paradigm in TESOL. Kirkpatrick (2012) has argued that a lingua franca approach to English language teaching (ELT) helps prepare learners to use the language successfully in multilingual settings like ASEAN countries, where English functions as a lingua franca. In these settings, the teaching of ELF, in which speakers retain their own grammatical forms, phonological features, and pragmatic norms, needs to be promoted (Kirkpatrick 2011; Kirkpatrick, Subhan & Walkinshaw, 2016).