IN 2003, a health crisis took place that severely tested Hong Kong, among a number of other parts of the world, with at 15 June a death toll in the city of 295 (out of 1,755 cases). Schools were closed, an apartment block was quarantined, and businesses suffered as people stayed home. Because no one at that time knew much about what came to be called ‘severe acute respiratory syndrome’ (shortened to both SARS and Sars), the disease offered a ‘blank screen’ onto which various fears could be projected. It seemed to spread directly to close contacts – but airborne contagion could not be ruled out. The death rate was under five percent, but there was a possibility that it could become more virulent. It might turn out like any other flu-like illness, or like the 1918 flu pandemic that killed millions. In addition, it was the perfect mechanism for Hong Kong to project its current uncertainties over its image and place in the world. Thus, the ‘pragmatic handling’ of this event in the major English language newspaper of the city, the South China Morning Post, holds much linguistic interest. The SCMP is a major English-language newspaper in East Asia.

In recent years, the sociolinguistic theory of code-switching and code-mixing has been a source of great interest among scholars worldwide. The phenomenon is common in such multilingual societies as India. Most known cases of code-switching are, however, restricted to the spoken form, in which English is liberally interspersed with such regional languages as Hindi, Marathi, and Telugu. What has not yet significantly caught the attention of scholars is the notion of such switching and mixing in print. This practice is however particularly prevalent among writers in popular magazines, who resort to written code-switching for a variety of reasons. The present paper endeavours to examine the causes of the popularity of this style of writing in the light of some accepted theories of multilingualism.

A interview conducted by William P. Ancker. The interview took place at the Intercultural Center at Georgetown University in Washington DC, 9 October 2003, and appeared in the April 2004 issue of the journal English Teaching Forum (edited by Max Koller and published by the U.S. Department of State, for teachers of English world-wide). We reproduce it here with thanks.

WHY IS English a global language? Although the reasons are manifold – historical, geographical, economic, political, social, cultural – the key reason, it seems to me, is linguistic: its morphology is simple, many of its words are short and pithy, and among the key world languages it has the largest vocabulary. These features have helped it become the most widely used language in the world: a situation that makes Uncle French and Grandpa German envious. English has been open-minded since childhood. In the long process of exchange, English words lost most of their inflections and words of different origins were mixed together (Burchfield 1984:13). Unlike traditional German and French, English has been open to foreign penetration and never drives new words out. It is this openness that continually enriches the language. Chinese also likes to borrow from other languages. Old Chinese borrowed 35,000 words from Buddhism, and Modern Chinese has absorbed countless words from Western civilizations. This paper inquires into the mutual borrowing between English and Chinese, summarizes the techniques of borrowing words from English into Chinese, and asserts that semantic transliteration is the best approach to adopting foreign words.

A review of the needs and opportunities of Chinese university students learning English, with a particular focus on the work of a ‘Foreign Expert’ in a Henan college.

Alliteration, assonance, and other literary tics.

THIS ACCOUNT of the growth of English language teaching in South Korea moves from the grammar-fixated traditions of the late 19th and earlier 20th centuries through more recent politically and educationally lively times to an English – and especially American English – ‘fever’. This urge towards English involves much of the nation and many kinds of schools and universities. In particular it constrasts school English with a massive parallel realm of private tuition, and, more recently, the widespread individual use of audio-materials. More recently still it has led to the emergence of a novel private university, the International Graduate School of English, founded and financed by a publisher who has himself been closely involved with the issue of how young Koreans can most effectively learn a language which much of the nation considers vital to the nation's future.

RECENTLY I went over the back numbers of English Today and re-read the article Kāi Fàng: Loan words to the Middle Kingdom, in the issue of October 1987, in which Elizabeth-Anne Malischewski describes how, through transliteration and adaptation, English words have been adopted into Chinese. This article attracted and kept my attention, for I have a great interest in English borrowings in Chinese.

We read with interest Hongyuan Wang's article ‘Loans to the Middle Kingdom revisited’ (ET77 Jan 04). This is a response to, and continuation of, Elizabeth Malischewski's 1987 article ‘Loan words to the Middle Kingdom’ in ET12, the author expresses the hope that this description ‘might serve as a useful addition to’ it (Wang 2004:47). We are as delighted to see the topic revisited after sixteen years as the editor, who states that Wang's article is ‘a valued addition to our series on English, China, China English, and Chinglish, and to Malischewski's original piece’ (McArthur 2004:2). However, we found that quite a number of words listed in the article are not loanwords, because of misunderstandings regarding loan word and loan translation in English and wailaici and wailaiyu, equivalents of loanword in a broader sense in Chinese, as a result of which his classification of the borrowings is confusing. The article has also tended to over-simplify the complex situation of such borrowings in Chinese and as such is misleading. We would like in this paper to clarify some of the misunderstandings and offer a brief introduction to the study of English borrowings in Chinese, a field which began c.1913 with the publication of Evan Morgan's Chinese New Terms & Expressions in Shanghai.

PERFORMING what is often considered one of the world's most dangerous jobs, bicycle couriers are proud to be considered ‘other’ – or simply suicidal – by the rest of the world. The job lacks prestige and security, and the wages of bike couriers, which were already low relative to the risks, have been steadily decreasing in the last decade. Yet there is a kind of solidarity. This study seeks not only to discuss the kind of language couriers use but also to show how that language reflects both the work and the solidarity in the ‘messengering’ world.

THIS discussion of the condition of English teaching in Japan looks at some deeply rooted national educational and cultural attitudes, including in particular the impact of ‘the katakana effect’ on speaking and listening among teachers and students alike. A unique configuration of cultural, historical, sociological, and linguistic factors presents Japanese teachers with serious challenges. The Ministry of Education, faced with a rising dropout rate, cases of bullying, accusations against irresponsible teachers, and complaints from parents, agreed in 2000 to adopt reforms. The resulting curriculum and methodology changes necessarily address issues relating to English. Although the reforms aim to produce a generation able to thrive socially and professionally in the international community, entrenched beliefs and values threaten their implementation, particularly with regard to a more natural and creative way of teaching and learning Japan's international language of choice.

Some notes and comments on the English usage of Trinidad and Tobago. The paper argues that for Trinidadians to think in terms of speaking and owning ‘only’ their distinctive Creole, setting aside their long-established indigenous variety of Standard English as if not really their own, is a complex distortion of social and linguistic reality. The reality has emerged from social, cultural, and psychological factors present in the Anglophone Caribbean at large, includes both conventional English and the Creole with which it inter-operates on a daily basis, and is an issue that stands in need of a positive revision that acknowledges the islands' dual inheritance.

THIS STUDY compares responses to indirect speech acts in a chat room with responses in a telephone conversation. In this instance, the chat room serves as a meeting place for members of a recent undergraduate university course and the telephone conversations are taken from a study done by Clark in 1979. Indirect speech acts are those that have a literal meaning (e.g., ‘Do you have a dollar?’ – the surface question is a request for information) as well as an indirect meaning (in this case, a request for money). Responses can consist of (1) just the answer to the surface question, (2) that answer plus the information indirectly requested, (3) only the information indirectly requested, or (4) some other form of response. The percentage of each type of response was compared in the two forms of communication. Clark found that the majority of responses consisted of only the information requested, and as predicted, the typed environment of the chat room yielded an even greater majority of this simplified form of response.

A representation of electronic press releases relating to electronic issues. It is reproduced without adaptation or further comment, but readers' comments would be welcomed.

THIS paper describes the frequency of languages other than Portuguese in shop signs located in six towns, all in northwestern Portugal and close to the border with Spain, each ranging in size from a year-round population of 600 to one of 4,400. One of the towns, Fermentelos, lies slightly southeast of Aveiro. The other five – Afife, Arcos de Valdevez, Caminha, Ponte da Barca, and Vila Praia de Ancora – are north of Porto. The most frequently occurring non-Portuguese phrase in this six-town project was snack bar.

The fruits of the plant family Cucurbitaceae – variously called the gourd family, the pumpkin family, the melon family, or the cucumber family – offer rich pickings for charting the distribution of English dialectal variations and the curious ways in which they get fixed. The cucurbits are a medium-sized plant family, with representatives native to both the Old and New Worlds. They are what taxonomists call a monophyletic family, or a clade: all representatives of the family known today have a single ancestor, which presumably sprouted up somewhere on Pangaea. This paper explores this linguistic phenomenon.

In British English texts, the frequency profiles of the collocation of right and wrong with preceding adverbs show patterns which are almost symmetrically opposed. This general truth obtains despite the fact that there are adverbs – such as completely or absolutely – which logic, or the intuitions of a learner of English as a second or foreign language, might suggest should combine equally happily or frequently with either.

A discussion of both the selection and significance of sub-varieties of English in Malaysia. Malaysia is a multi-racial country, with a diversity of languages that includes Bahasa Malaysia (the national language), English (introduced during the colonial period from the late-eighteenth to mid-twentieth centuries), and a number of Chinese dialects, Indian languages, and other minority languages. Despite this complex linguistic tapestry, English continues to command considerable respect and prestige, and demonstrates an impressive range of intra- and international uses. It is a vehicle of communication within and across diverse linguistic and cultural groups at many levels of interaction, but clusters mainly around particular domains of use. It is important to the educational endeavours of the people and the technological, economic, and political aspirations of the nation.

The author focuses on the approach to word origins widely known as ‘folk etymology’, which he regards as ‘alive and kicking in America's leading daily newspapers, duping many a gullible reader’. To do this, he considers the etymology of the phrase ‘so long’ when used to mean ‘good-bye’.

THE GROWING international relevance of English has left its traces on the German language. Accordingly, research on the phenomenon of Anglicisms in German has intensified in the second half of the 20th century. The last decade, however, brought such a rapid development in mass communication, including the still wider spread of English, that some traditional views on Anglicisms have been challenged. This article discusses such issues as the problematic nature of classifying Anglicisms, the processes of integration of Anglicisms, and the multi-faceted motivations for their use in German.