For most of us languages aren't all that easy to use, or learn – whether we have been born into one or several languages, or have to learn one or more ‘alien’ languages, with alien writing systems. This may just be part of the general hurly-burly of life, and is certainly the usual way of things in, say, India, Nigeria and the Philippines, or it may happen in the comparative calm of classroom and library (nowadays widely regarded as the ‘proper’ way to learn languages, even if it is not always the most effective). The first of these is, as it were, the ‘marketplace’ tradition (learning as you go), the second the ‘monastery’ tradition (classrooms, timetables, exams, and accreditation).

Not only do copies of ET go round the world, but our contributors are based in a multitude of places. In recent editions, we have been using map motifs on the front cover to demonstrate the worldwideness (internationality? globality?) of the journal and its topics, and it seems appropriate, at least this once, to pinpoint the kind of places from which contributions come or to which they relate (or both). On this cover we see at a glance that ET78 has four source-cum-topic areas in Europe, three in East Asia, two in North America, and two in Australasia/Oceania.

Responses to articles in ET typically reach me three months after the relevant issue comes out. Each issue contains around ten contributions, and presents a wide and shifting range of topics, backgrounds, styles, perspectives, lengths, and densities of expression. In addition, we know from experience that, while some contributors approach ET because for them it is a comfortable and suitable vehicle, others do so because they see it as the only outlet available for what they have to say.

In 1995, Ballantine Books published in New York a book by Benjamin R. Barber. Its title was Jihad vs. McWorld, a phrase that would not have made much (any?) sense in 1895, or been easily unpacked even in 1975. It is often in word capsules like these that we see how much a language can change in a century, so as to put Arabic jihad alongside Latin versus while attaching Gaelic Mc (courtesy US fast food) to world, the only bit of original Anglo-Saxon. Barber also provided the subtitle ‘How globalism and tribalism are reshaping the world’, and it is the use of globalism that particularly interests me here. 1995 was a key year for globalization as a label for the worldwide spread of Western and especially US notions and practices relating to trade and technology. On page 23 of his book, Barber says:

1. [bull ] ‘Welcome to McWorld. There is no activity more intrinsically globalizing than trade, no ideology less interested in nations than capitalism, no challenge to frontiers more audacious than the market.’

ENGLISH is a juggernaut whose sweep across the globe is marked not only by the ever-swelling ranks of those who speak it as a second language, but also by its intrusion into other languages and cultures. While far from omnipresent, English is seen and heard in enough contexts in non-English-speaking countries that social scientists must carefully explore its role alongside indigenous languages. This study, which focused on the city of Rome, examines one dimension of English as an invader – its presence on street signs, on store fronts, in shop windows, outside commercial and public buildings, in billboards and other street advertisements, and in graffiti. It takes a more expansive and comprehensive approach than previous studies in examining the use of English in a foreign locale, in order to get a better sense of how widespread it is on the streets of a non-English-speaking country and in what contexts it appears.

Can we learn from what happened to Latin, in terms of its native speakers and foreign users? Comparisons are often made between the role of Latin during and after the Roman Empire and the role of English in the present. These can often be illuminating, particularly for the student of the sociolinguistics of the Late Latin-speaking world, where a generous application of the uniformitarian principle allows us to avoid now some of the misunderstandings that were common in the past: for example, the realization that linguistic change is inevitable and in itself neither good nor bad, and that language-internal variation is not pathological, and need not necessarily in itself lead to fragmentation, has been salutary. As a result, the modern view of the development of Latin into Romance, and of Romance into the separate Romance languages, is almost certainly more plausible now than it used to be. We have a more nuanced account to present, even though there is a great deal we do not and perhaps cannot know, including in particular an inability to be sure about the dating of developments which we can be sure occurred at some point.

This review explores the histories and meanings of, and similarities and contrasts among, three labels for English at large: world English, international English, and global English, first as phrases containing the words world, international, and global, then in terms of their history and use, and how a range of dictionaries has dealt (or failed to deal) with them. The first has been used to mean both standard English and all English; the second refers to the multinational use of English (notably in language teaching); and the third both implies vast use and links the language (often negatively) with socio-economic globalization. Since all three are likely to go on being used, they may need to be handled with care.

FOR SOME time, a growing chorus of voices has been expressing concern over the way in which English is promoted by English-speaking countries, primarily the UK, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand (cf. Phillipson 1992, Pennycook 1994 & 1998, Canagarajah 1999, Skutnabb-Kangas 2000). Identified by Kachru (1985) as the ‘inner circle’ countries, these make vast profits from linguistic sales to ‘outer circle’ countries such as Singapore and India – despite the fact that the latter have largely developed their own Englishes – and even more so to the ‘expanding circle’ of countries which require access to the default international lingua franca.

In the United States today, two developments – concern for national security and the concerns of private citizens – have catapulted languages onto the national policy agenda. The first requires more Americans to learn foreign languages while the second seeks to ban bilingual education. ‘Uncle Sam wants you to learn a foreign language!’

A consideration of the place of, and options for, explicitly teaching grammar to learners of English as an international language. A development of the opening address given at a conference on the teaching of grammar at the Regional Language Centre (RELC) in Singapore in November 2003. The key issue of the conference was whether the English-language skills of Singaporean school leavers would be improved through a revival of explicit and formal grammar teaching in the Lion City's 21st-century classrooms. The paper addresses this issue in both current and historical terms, going back indeed, at the end, to the beginnings of Western-style grammar teaching among the Greeks. While doing this, however, it also considers the nature and role of what the Singaporean government takes to be the proper target for its future citizens: speaking and writing an internationally acceptable English.

THE LIFE of a language involves relationships between linguistic elements and extra-linguistic contexts. The linguistic elements are varied and multiple, involving both written and spoken symbols and grammars, while the extra-linguistic contexts are the innumerable societies, cultures, and sub-cultures of humankind, including its worlds of reality, imagination, and ideology. This article discusses invented languages, partly in order to explore the motivations and schemes of their inventors and partly to compare languages created for international use (often called international auxiliary languages or IALs) with English, which itself functions as an IAL but is very much an uninvented language.

This article will give an overview of the compilation process of a Caribbean Multilingual Dictionary by describing the work of the Caribbean Multilingual Lexicography Project at the University of the West Indies at Cave Hill. The work involved, namely, the compilation of the first volume of the Caribbean Multilingual Dictionary (CMD) of Flora, Fauna and Foods (in English, French, French Creole and Spanish) is deemed to be pertinent to the development of research skills in the field of dictionary-making and provides insights into some of the problems faced by the Caribbean multilingual dictionary-maker in the chronicling of the Caribbean environment. In addition, the article also lists the wide range of users at which the CMD is aimed and illustrates its value to Caribbean systems, such as the regional education system, sectors such as the private enterprise, trade and tourism sectors and individual researchers as well as the general Caribbean public, the Caribbean diaspora in North America and Britain, and the French- and Spanish-speaking countries of the European Union.

A survey of terms inherited from Persian, often through intermediate languages. ENGLISH may be considered a typical case of a European language indebted to Persian, often through the intermediary of another language, a point with which this survey seeks to deal. A comprehensive list of such loanwords, direct and indirect, can be found in Cannon and Kaye (2001), to which the reader is referred for the full list of the 811 items, including their etyma. One hundred and thirty three of these are distant loans, as with the word azure (‘a light purplish blue’), which comes into English through Old French, probably through Old Spanish azur ∼ azul, which comes in turn from Arabic lazaward ∼ lazuward, and ultimately from Persian lajuvard (‘azure; cobalt blue’). This thematically-organized article provides a general review of the field.

THIS paper examines English language policy in Africa from colonial times to the present day. Colonial policy was marked by a linguistic apartheid which consisted in driving Africans away from the language, first by limiting access to formal education, then by not showing much enthusiasm for teaching them the language, then at times preferring to encourage Pidgin English, and finally by encouraging deviant features. Linguistic apartheid continues today through such institutions as the BBC, whose African Network Service openly promotes deviant African features through their jingles, the employment of African correspondents with deeply local English features, and the reading of unedited letters from listeners that contain substandard features. More subtle ways of promoting such apartheid include the negligible weight of the English language in school curricula.

The lack of an official (British or American) language academy is regularly compared to the situation in France with its time-honoured Académie Française. All too often, however, a passing imprecise reference is made to the French Academy; all too often it is lumped together with other academies; and all too often the true nature of the work of such academies is ignored. This paper takes a closer look at some of the foreign academies, considers why there is no academy in Britain or America, discusses the only existing official academy of English (based in South Africa), and considers foreign academies' attitudes to English.

IN BEIJING, on 4 November 2003, L. G. Alexander – for many years the world's foremost author of English language teaching materials – was formally commemorated. A bronze statue was raised in his honour in the grounds of the Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press (FLTRP), the publishing house of the Beijing Foreign Studies University and one of China's largest schoolbook publishers. The statue was jointly sponsored by FLTRP and Pearson Education Asia.

ENGLISH as the world's lingua franca has become a focus of attention for many scholars. Since China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO), the motivation to learn English has dramatically increased. This paper questions the need for English in China to conform to any of the existing standard varieties, arguing that this objective is both undesirable and virtually unattainable, especially in respect to pronunciation, and that Chinese learners should therefore be learning ‘China English’. In an investigation with over 1,200 Chinese students at her university, the writer discovered that the vast majority had never heard of either World English or China English, believing instead that proficiency in standard American or British English should be their goal. She proposes both a reorientation of English language learning in China and a radical revision of the materials used there for both practical and cultural reasons.

ACCORDING to Schmied (1991a:52), ‘there is some evidence that language learners in general use simplification strategies at an early stage and try to reproduce memorized phrases from the target language later, irrespective of the linguistic and pragmatic context.’ The English prepositional system is well known for its complexity and language learners might well be inclined to simplify in order to reduce such complexities. Indeed, there is evidence from the East African component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-EA) of such a process of simplification in the use of prepositions in the English of Kenya. As a result, some prepositions might well disappear from use in this second-language variety of English.

The present paper discusses the use of the prepositions after different in present-day spoken American English, using the Corpus of Spoken Professional American-English [sic] (CSPAE), which includes transcriptions of conversations recorded between 1994 and 1998. As the corpus consists of four different professional settings (i.e. press conferences held at the White House and other locations, faculty meetings of the University of North Carolina, national meetings on mathematics tests, and national meetings on reading tests), it provides useful data for stylistic analyses. It is also useful for gender analyses of English, since it provides some personal data for most speakers and indicates whether they are male or female.

Three linguistical tales from New York.