The presence of French in advertising communication within largely non-French speaking communities has been noted by a few linguists. Haarmann (1984, 1989) found that French is used in Japanese advertisements as ethno-cultural hieroglyphs which connote refinement, poshness, style and tastefulness – stereotypes of France and French culture. The unintelligibility of French to Japanese patrons is perceived as a non-issue, as social or symbolic meanings are deemed to be more vital to attract patrons than denotational meanings. A parallel case was found in British advertisements of food, fashion and beauty businesses where French symbolism or linguistic fetish is seen as attractive to largely non-French, English-speaking patrons (Kelly-Holmes, 2005). Notably, French symbolic meanings are sometimes accompanied by elaborative messages in English. Kelly-Holmes (2005) noted that English is used only where message comprehension is important for explicit communication. Curtin (2009) documented the fact that ‘vogue’ or ‘display’ French shop names favored by high-end restaurants and beauty salons in Taipei occurred concomitantly with vogue English. Vogue English is relatively more ubiquitous across the city's linguistic landscape due to its connotations being exploited in a wide span of applications vis-à-vis the chic prestige of French, which is tied to food, beauty and fashion businesses. The Taipei case shows that non-idiomatic French is employed as a socio-commercial accessory, similar to the case of decorative English used in Japan (Dougill, 1987) and in Milan, Italy (Ross, 1997). However, a more recent study on Tokyo shop signs gleaned linguistic patterns other than vogue English and vogue French (MacGregor, 2003), such as French + Japanese and English + French + Japanese. A recent study by Serwe et al. (in press) found that French and French-like shop names are increasingly in currency, with local shop owners keen to stand out and appeal to the increasingly cosmopolitan and sophisticated clientele in Singapore, who are nevertheless overwhelmingly non-French speaking. They further found that French and French-inspired shop signs of food businesses can be classified into four categories, namely, monolingual French, French + another language, French function words + another language, and coinages, noting that there are idiomatic usages and non-idiomatic usages in the first three categories. In this paper, we throw the spotlight on coinages, which we argue are mostly explicable as French-English code-switched blends. We focus on localized nominal concoctions used by shop owners across food and beauty commercial entities within Singapore. We borrowed the term ‘Frenglish’ from Martin's (2007) study to refer to the French-English blends. However, we noted that Martin's study focused on the use of English in advertising communication in France, where English is the minority language that is largely sidelined by the Toubon Law. Contrastively, English in Singapore is de facto the national language, while French is a foreign language with few speakers.

The English language has gone through cycles of prominence and decline in China since it arrived on Chinese shores in 1637 for the purposes of trade (Adamson, 2002). Since then the language has evolved in China from the stage when it was regarded as a language spoken by ‘barbarians’ (Adamson, 2002) in the 1700s to the present day which sees an unprecedented surge of enthusiasm for the language. This significant change in the attitudes of the Chinese people towards English has accelerated since China's open door policy gathered steam in the early 1990s. Conservative estimates place the number of people learning English in China at about 200 million. A recent estimate by Crystal (2008) suggests that the number of English speakers in China has, in fact, doubled, with the widespread enthusiasm for English generated by driving forces such as China's entry into the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the hosting of the Beijing Olympic Games, international tourism, foreign investment, the development of Western China, and the China-ASEAN Free Trade Area (CAFTA) launched on January 1, 2010.

In this paper I wish to discuss some aspects of the current debates about the concept of English as a lingua franca. In doing so, I will use a recount of the pre-publication stages of the volume English in the World: Global Rules, Global Roles, co-edited by Rani Rubdy and myself (2006) as a starting point, to set the scene, and will move to more theoretical considerations in the second part of the paper.

English nowadays plays an important role in the political, diplomatic, commercial, economic and cultural activities on the global stage (see, e.g., Graddol, 1997, 2006; Jenkins, 2000; Warschauer, 2000; Crystal, 2003). As a result of the widespread use of English around the globe, several scholars contend that English no longer exclusively represents the culture of native English-speaking countries, nor are they the exclusive ‘owners’ of English (see e.g. Widdowson, 1994).

A tale of two cities (Zurich and Uppsala)and their street and store signs

An account of the nature and key features of an East African variety

This article discusses recent attempts to describe English as a lingua franca (ELF). In it, I will consider claims made for ELF as a variety of English ‘with a life of its own’, which is said to be emerging among users of English for whom it is not their mother tongue. I examine a number of weaknesses in the case made for ELF by a school of thinking in mainland Europe, focusing on: the role of the native speaker in ELF; the relationship between ELF and Standard English; and the search for a grammatical common core for contexts in which English is used as an international lingua franca. The article draws on research which suggests that the aspect of Standard English which may be inappropriate for ELF is not in the grammatical system but the area of idiomaticity. I conclude with a consideration of the pedagogic implications of the ELF debate.

In a 2016 article published in this journal (Roig–Marín, 2016), I argued that the coinage of cyber-blends reflects our blended digital/physical relationships in today's world. The current pandemic has put a halt to our everyday lives and all forms of physical contact, and so technologies and digital experiences now play a more conspicuous role than ever. We have gone online and got used to vocabulary whose usage prior to COVID-19 was very limited (e.g. quarantine and pandemic) or known to very few (coronavirus, super-spreader, or the abbreviations PPE ‘personal protective equipment’ or WFH ‘working from home’), while coming to terms with the implications of others such as self-isolation, lockdown, or social distancing (which should be better called physical distancing as social closeness, albeit non-physically, is very much needed to get through these difficult times). Short pieces on coroneologisms have attested to the rise of many new lexical formations, mostly blends. According to Thorne (2020; also cited in CBC, 2020), more than 1,000 new words – both non-specialised and technical terminology – have been created during the current pandemic. Journalists and Twitter users are particularly prone to coin words displaying a high level of linguistic ingenuity; yet, the circulation of that lexis may be very limited. The present note overviews some of the most widely spread vocabulary related to our new COVID-19 reality, coming from the laity rather than from medical or scientific professionals. Alongside terms like social distancing and lockdown, less technical and more playful vocabulary has transcended linguistic boundaries. Particular attention will be paid to examples from European languages whose word-stocks share a common Latinate substratum, likewise central to scientific communication.

In recent years it has become increasingly popular to study Englishes in countries traditionally belonging to the Expanding Circle of World Englishes, such as China (see e.g. He & Li, 2009), Russia (see e.g. Davydova, 2012) or the Netherlands (Edwards, 2010, 2011). South Korea (henceforth Korea) belongs to the Expanding Circle as well, which means that English has the official status of a foreign language. Active use of English among Koreans themselves is limited but English has a very prestigious status in Korean society. In the following discussion, the sociolinguistic situation in Korea will be introduced, with a special focus on the status of English. Using data from a pilot corpus, I will argue for the development of several patterns of Koreanized English which seem to be partly influenced by the Korean language but are also possible results of the language learning process in general and idiosyncratic features.

Perspectives from both World Englishes (WE) and English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) can assist in the description of Hong Kong English phonology. Mario Saraceni's article (English Today 94) provides some useful insights into the current debates about English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). His discussion of the background to this debate identifies three viewpoints: a traditional ENL view with its adherence to native-speaker models; the WE (World Englishes) paradigm with its ‘pluralised and pluricentric view of English in the world’; and the emerging ELF position, with its rejection of native-speaker norms in favour of ‘endonormative realisations of lingua franca varieties’ (Alessa Cogo, English Today 95). However, Cogo believes that the second and third positions are not separate paradigms, and that ELF sits ‘comfortably within a WE framework’, as claimed by Jenkins (2007:17). In this article, I would like to show how the two positions can work together to inform pedagogy by exploring the possible options for English pronunciation models in Hong Kong.

With the global spread of English, research in World Englishes (WE) has burgeoned in the past two decades. Its concepts have been taken up by researchers in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) to question ‘native-speakerism’ (Holliday, 2005, 2006) in English instruction. However, the implications of this theoretical discussion have so far yet to be realized in EFL classrooms, where teachers and learners alike still largely submit to native-speaker norms. This study therefore aims to examine how discussions of power, politics, and the spread of Englishes might influence students’ perceptions of English and their experiences of learning and using English. The analysis focuses on papers written by students enrolled in a semester-long WE course, and demonstrates the value of bringing WE into English curriculums to help students become critical learners and confident users of English today.

A survey of an ‘organic, evolving and dynamic’ hybrid between writing and speech and language and language

Research exploring the role of English in Pakistani education system usually focuses on the use of English as the medium of instruction. However, in this paper I argue that English language should also be discussed in the context of its indispensibility in social mobility and survival in Pakistan. In fact, English plays a number of crucial roles in some developing countries, of which Pakistan is one (Mansoor, 2003; Rahman, 2002). In Pakistan, English is one of the official languages and a prerequisite for professional jobs (Rahman, 2005). Because of its use in the domains of power, English can be seen as a source of self-improvement and as a means of career success (Mansoor, 2003; Rahman, 2002). Thus, the knowledge of English is a key indicator of social class and people consider it superior to other languages (Shamim, 2008). However, the use of English in education is one of the main sources of failure for many ordinary people (Bruthiaux, 2002). English is used as a control mechanism to play a gate-keeping role in access to higher education and key social positions (Coleman, 2010; Rahman, 2002). The imposition of English in education and its perceived prestige create additional problems for low socioeconomic status (SES) students who often have limited access to English.

A follow-up of Jin-Kyu Park's contribution in ET97 on ‘English Fever’ in South Korea, by examining one of the consequences in Singapore – the destination for thousands of ‘study mothers’ who migrate from South Korea and China to help their young children acquire ‘linguistic capital’ by learning English.

This paper focuses on the existence of around 7000 Chinese (PRC) and 5000 Korean study mothers in 2007 in the Republic of Singapore (Toh, 2008). Known in their respective home countries as ‘wild goose mothers’ (kirogi omma) and ‘study mothers’ (pei du mama), these mothers leave their husbands behind while they accompany their children, some as young as 7 years, to a foreign country in the pursuit of linguistic gold. ‘We have good science and maths at home but we need the English to make it work.’

An examination of a novel UK rising tone, with reference to its use in some other Anglophone countries

The utterance It's raining (of great relevance to the Irish!) can have a variety of different meanings according to who says it, to whom one is talking, and where it is said, amongst other things. The fact that language in use (whether in spoken or written mode) is obviously much more than the sum of its constituent parts – the individual sounds that make up words, the combinations of words that create sentences or utterances, the meaning that can be derived from different words and combinations thereof – has been what has driven pragmatics as a discipline, from its origins in the philosophy of language. Initially, what drove the research agenda was the potential of words to perform acts, or speech act theory (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969), and later, the complexities of the relationship between what is said and what is meant, the study of conversational implicatures (Grice, 1975) or ‘how people can understand one another beyond the literal words that are spoken’ (Eelen, 2001: 2). Pragmatics is now an inherently inter-disciplinary approach which has as its central orientation this study of, essentially, how speaker meaning is interpreted in context. Critical to interpretation is the concept of context itself, a complex and multi-layered notion involving cultural setting, speech situation and shared background assumptions (Goodwin and Duranti, 1992). Linguistic choices made by conversational participants can simultaneously encode situational indices of position and time, and interpersonal and cultural indices such as power, status, gender and age. Pragmatic research comprises a diverse range of research strands including how linguistic choices encode politeness (Brown and Levinson, 1987; Watts, 2003), reference and deixis (Levinson, 2004) and the relationship between domain specific discourse, such as workplace or media discourse, and specialised pragmatic characteristics (O'Keeffe, Clancy and Adolphs, 2011). Thus, pragmatics provides, as Christie (2000: 29) maintains, ‘a theoretical framework that can account for the relationship between the cultural setting, the language user, the linguistic choices the user makes, and the factors that underlie those choices’.

With the global spread of English and the emergence of different varieties of English around the world, World Englishes (WE) researchers have argued for the recognition of ‘Englishes’ in the plural and called for the need to acknowledge the diversity of English (Kachru, 1985, 1997). Apart from WE researchers who are interested in investigating nation-bound varieties of English in different parts of the world, a growing number of researchers have begun to examine the phenomenon of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) communication, given the growth of intercultural exchanges worldwide (Jenkins, 2000, 2007; Seidlhofer, 2011). Whilst WE researchers are primarily concerned with how varieties of English differ from each other, ELF researchers are interested in exploring how speakers of different Englishes communicate with each other in contexts where English is the common language. For example, these ELF researchers have studied the communicative and pragmatic strategies which people from different lingua-cultural backgrounds use to communicate with one another through English as a common resource in order to achieve mutual intelligibility (Seidlhofer, 2011). Despite their different focuses, both WE and ELF researchers deal with the same global phenomenon of English use and the pluricentricity of English, and share similar ideas about the ownership of English, and language contact and change (Seidlhofer, 2011). A relatively new field, Global Englishes (GE) (Galloway & Rose, 2013, 2014; Jenkins, 2014), has thus emerged to bring together researchers from both WE and ELF. With an inclusive orientation, GE places less emphasis on native speaker English, emphasizes the diversity of English, and questions the relevance of native speaker norms for English Language Teaching (ELT) (see Galloway & Rose, 2015).

English as a lingua franca (ELF) has received a great deal of attention in the field of applied linguistics in the last decade or so (Jenkins, 2007, 2014; Mauranen, 2012; Seidlhofer, 2011). As is currently conceptualized, ELF refers to the common language of choice among speakers from different lingua-cultural backgrounds (Jenkins, 2007; Seidlhofer, 2011). ELF does not imply a single, unified variety of English but primarily refers to language in use in contexts where multilingual speakers are involved (Cogo, 2010). In other words, ELF can be understood as social practice, with an emphasis on meaning-making processes. Much of the earlier research focused on identifying linguistic features characteristic of ELF communication (see Jenkins, 2000; Seidlhofer, 2001). But with the increased recognition of the variability and fluidity associated with the use of ELF, researchers have recently turned their attention to investigating communicative strategies which multilingual speakers employ to achieve mutual understanding and negotiate meaning in ELF interactions (see Cogo & Dewey, 2012; Jenkins, Cogo & Dewey, 2011). Furthermore, there exists a growing body of research into attitudes and perceptions of ELF communication (see Cogo, 2010; Jenkins, 2007; Kaloscai, 2009), given the impact of ELF perceptions on ELF-related communicative practices, especially with respect to issues relating to (non-) conformity to native-speaker norms.

Structural simplicity/complexity is an important variable with which New Englishes and native varieties are identified and conceptualised, but predicting such variation in complexity has received little attention in the literature. New Englishes, especially the outer circle varieties such as Nigerian or Indian English, differ in form and function from the inner circle varieties, such as British or American English, but the extent of such variation varies greatly and merits further investigation. According to Gorlach (1998), we should expect New Englishes to demonstrate simplification at the levels of morphology, lexis, and syntax. This has indeed been shown to be the case in some varieties, but it has also been shown that this variation differs according to different linguistic and non-linguistic factors. Most recently, Schilk and Schaub (2016) have shown how noun phrase (NP) structure can reveal the underlying structural simpification predicted in the New Englishes varieties. Brunner (2014) examined NP complexity across three New Englishes (British, Singaporean, and Kenyan English), explicating how grammars of the indigeneous languages in Singapore and Kenya influence NP simplicity/complexity.

English-medium instruction (EMI) has been perceived as a key strategy through which universities, propelled by academic, political, social and economic motives, respond to the influence of globalisation (Altbach & Knight, 2007). This has been fuelled by the fact that English, defined as the global common language, is needed to create the knowledge base in global tertiary education (Fishman, 2000). In the process, English has become the universal second language of advanced education (Brumfit, 2004), due to the value attached to the language in present times and the advantage of using the language in the existing global language order (Zhang, 2017). These motivations have contributed to the global phenomenon of English being the medium of instruction (MOI), and higher education has been the venue where EMI could be implemented more consistently (Dearden, 2014). This has resulted in the generation of a growing body of work on how universities plan their language policies (Liddicoat, 2016).