A tale from the streets of New York. In the main story I focus on two people in particular as an example of the ways in which a writer's workshop helped awaken me to the lives outside the workshop of the participants.

Not everyone interested in English needs to give much thought to Chinese. This statement is so true that it borders on the banal, and a similarly true and banal statement might be: Many people involved with Chinese don't need to give much thought to English.

The Japanese linguistic landscape is a dynamically vibrant area with words and phrases appearing in a vast array of locations written in a wide range of scripts, fonts, sizes and colours, and all serving a complex and interconnected array of functions. This visual landscape of shop signs, street signs, advertising posters, information boards and vending machines is complemented by a similar vibrancy and dynamism in more private domains such as restaurant menus, product packaging, clothing, newspaper articles, magazine stories and TV advertising. Immediately striking an observer of these contexts is the fact that, although the Japanese language has a highly complex writing system incorporating an admixture of logographic, syllabic and alphabetic characters, a great many of the words and phrases in Japanese social contexts are transcribed in Latin alphabet characters. Because the vast majority of these lexical items are either direct imports of words from the English language (often termed ‘loanwords' or ‘borrowings') or domestic creations based on English vocabulary (often termed ‘wasei eigo'/‘Japan-created English'), those who are familiar with the English language are assisted in their orientation around Japan by this pervasive use of English-based vocabulary.

Some aspects of a corpus of personal correspondence.

English as used in business letters, job applications and different types of bureaucratic communication in India has become more or less standardized and is not much different from the language of similar letters written elsewhere in the English-speaking world. But this is not the case with private letters, which are intimate, informal and often lax. Since a personal letter is written to a friend, spouse or relative, the writer comes out with his/her ‘real self’ in the use of language. It may therefore be taken as an authentic indication of the extent to which one is proficient in English and also the extent to which nativised features of English in this specific genre are attributable to native socio-cultural factors.

Why do some foreign users of English make certain, almost predictable ‘mistakes’?

While there is a multitude of studies on the influence English has exerted on German, the converse language contact scenario has been comparatively neglected. German borrowings which have recently been assumed into English have as yet received little attention in current research. The present paper intends to shed light on the impact of German on the English vocabulary in the 20th century. The various German words and meanings taken over into English in the last few decades will be divided into manifold subject areas in order to give a rounded picture of the different domains and spheres of life enriched by German in the recent past.

Starts with excerpt from Geoffrey Hughes, Words of War (ET17, 1989). The lexicon of war in the twenty-first century. The major development since this article was published (1989, the year that the Berlin Wall came down) was the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001, now styled ‘9/11’. This used a stupefyingly original strategy of attacking the heart of America's capitalist and military establishment with the unconventional weapons of civilian aircraft and kamikazi pilots. Indeed, the bombing was a more ruthless variation of Pearl Harbour, being a hijack, less damaging in terms of hardware, but far more devastating in its effect on national morale and its propaganda impact. On a smaller scale, suicide bombings have now become relatively common.

Grammar books are written for many purposes and with different users in mind. What are the particular problems of the scholarly reference grammar towards the end of the 20th century?

PATRICK HONEYBONE replies to Michael Bulley's article ‘A wild gene chase’(ET51)

An examination of how the language is used in the literature of Black Africa

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are big news in higher education at the moment, with hundreds of the world's leading universities offering free access to lectures and other resources. Many MOOC providers operate through platforms such as edX, a not-for-profit consortium formed by MIT, Harvard and Berkeley, or commercially oriented platforms such as Udacity and Coursera. The last two provide the courses free, but aim to make money by charging for certification, or by making data on MOOC graduates available to recruiters. And the numbers involved are huge: MOOCs can attract tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of enrolments.

Comment: Euro-evolution?, Tom McArthur; Usage 1: Klamp Santouits – buttered or battered?, Michael Bulley; Usage 2: Following Langscape..., Grahame T. Bilbow and Li Lan; Usage 3: Its time for a sound change, Mary Blockley; Review: The dictionary and the disk, Paul Pauwels; Post

In the last issue of English Today I argued that while the differences between American and British English may be small, they are innumerable, varied and interesting. But that article (and many of the things I write) invited the question of whether it even makes sense to talk of American English and British English. These labels are extremely problematic on geographic, linguistic and political grounds. Are we justified in using such sloppy terminology? Shouldn't linguists like me know better? Let's look the problems of nomenclature, starting with the eastern side of the Atlantic.

Translation techniques favoured by Tolkien in rendering Beowulf and other medieval poetry into modern English. J. R. R. Tolkien was a prolific translator, although most of his translation work was not actually published during his lifetime, as occurred with the greater part of his fiction. He never did any serious translation from modern foreign languages into English, but rather devoted himself to the task of turning Old English and Middle English poetry into something that could be readily understood by speakers of the modern idiom. His largest and best-known published translation is of the anonymous 14th Century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which was published posthumously with two other translations from Middle English in the volume Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl and Sir Orfeo (Allen & Unwin 1975). The translation of Middle English texts constitutes the bulk of his output in this field, both in the above volume and in the fragments that appear in his lectures and essays. However, his heart really lay in the older, pre-Norman form of the language, and particularly in the greatest piece of literature to come down to us from the Old English period, the epic poem Beowulf.

Aspects of variation in the Papua-New Guinea newspaper ‘Wantok’

The difference over twenty years, in the making of ET since 1985, includes the vanishing away of paper files. In a cabinet beside my desk I have A–Z files for the many people who literally ‘wrote’ – that is, typed – to me on paper. I almost never consult any of those files now, and don’t remember when I last added a sheet to them. Instead, of course, I check my email, which piles up electronically in non-real space somewhere inside this machine in front of me. And, though I strive to keep my records straight, I seldom check back very far or go into e-files of old e-mails. And, most days, whether in Cambridge or in Hong Kong, I read daily e-abstracts from my much-prized Edinburgh newspaper, The Scotsman, and don't recall when I last saw, leave alone bought and read, a conventional paper edition of it.

A discussion of the centrality of imagery in the promotion and use of English worldwide. Metaphor is traditionally considered a “figure of speech”, describing one thing by stating another with which it can be compared, as discussed by rhetoricians and grammarians, from Aristotle in his Poetics and Rhetoric to I. A. Richards in The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936) and Kenneth Burke in A Grammar of Motives (1945), a growing number of recent linguists have been trying to establish metaphor at a cognitive, conceptual level (such as Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Gibbs, 1994).

Changing trends in colloquial American English from the viewpoint of a visitor and their implications for teaching of English in China. Knowing that language changes and an appreciation of current changes is of great importance for foreign-language learners as it helps enable them to have a good command of the current language so as to strengthen their ability to communicate with native speakers with facility. The reality Chinese learners of English face is, however, that they hardly have opportunities to be exposed to natural spoken forms of the target language around them, let alone access to its current changing trends. This paper aims to present such information. Based on the investigation I made among native English-speaking Americans, it tries, from a descriptive pragmatic point of view, to give an account of some salient trends of American English in daily communication. It takes everyday spoken American English as the object of study, for it is the kernel part of the language for social interaction. It is this part of the language that first undergoes changes in response to various social events, and that, having much to do with the study of language use, deserves our special attention.