LANGUAGE changes all the time. Speakers produce innovations that are novel at first, but become conventionalized as they are used more and more. Some get a fair amount of press. The rise of ‘singular they’ (Has everyone got their handout?) has provoked a heated debate about proper usage (cf. Balhorn 2004). However, not all innovations have such a polarizing effect, as some enter the language below the radar of prescriptivism. As a case in point, the construction just because…doesn't mean… (as in the title of this article) is a fairly recent expression that has developed its own syntactic and semantic properties, but is not perceived as particularly deviant. This article discusses the idiosyncratic properties of this construction, draws a brief sketch of its history, and offers some thoughts on why it could establish itself without attracting much notice.

The present form of the English language in Nigeria is the outcome of its contact with the indigenous languages of the region: a confirmation of the truism that languages in contact influence each other. When English was initially introduced through trade, then entrenched through colonialism, it was ‘derobed’ of its British flavour. Paradoxically, such a state of affairs brings to mind a statement by Enoch Powell, a professor of Classics and former Conservative member of the British Parliament, who noted, rather eccentrically: ‘Others may speak and read English – more or less – but it is our language, not theirs. It was made in England by the English and it remains our distinctive property, however widely it is learnt or used’ (as quoted in Kujore 1995:367).

Some reflections on the nature of ELF. The focus in this article is what scholars of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) have referred to as ‘unilateral idiomaticity’ (UI): the use by speakers and writers of idiomatic language which is not understood by the other participants in the interaction. The writer will attempt to identify actual occurrences of UI, drawing on both corpus evidence and an email survey of fifty L1 and L2 ELF-users and will also draw some implications for what we mean by ‘competence’ in lingua franca contexts.

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.

An analysis of African American English in South Korean hip hop. English is rarely used in face-to-face terms in South Korea, but the use of English in commerce and entertainment is not such a rarity. The presence of English expressions in advertising and pop lyrics is no longer considered extraordinary. Lee (2006) reports that 83.75% of 720 South Korean TV commercials use some type of English, and only 16.25% of advertisements rely exclusively on Korean. Pop music is another discourse space in which English is fairly frequently used, occurring in more than 50% of pop song titles. A detailed analysis of the frequency of English in South Korean pop music (SK-pop) is reproduced.

THE DEMOGRAPHICS of the English language are well known, and the following approximations are based on figures, always provisional, projected by Crystal, Graddol, and McArthur. Anglophones (to use a broader term than ‘native’ or ‘mother tongue’ speakers of English – terms which in any case pose problems) make up some 12% of the global population. Speakers of English in the UK constitute about 16% of the 380 or so million Anglophones worldwide. In the UK, some 2% of the population speaks English as a second language, and perhaps only 15% regularly speaks a southern British form of standard English. Only a small minority of these have a form of Received Pronunciation (RP) as their normal accent, even though RP is predicated as the basis of ‘phonics’ in initial literacy, and is assumed to be the default accent in the second-language teaching of British English, in the UK and elsewhere (with however the notable exception of North America).

Advertising has come a long way, from pedlars in the market square extolling their goods to glossy mags full of innuendo and making extensive use of verbal and non-verbal devices to attract consumers. In India, copywriters make extensive use of English words and phrases in advertisements in a variety of ways. This paper examines the use of English in television and print advertising in the Tamil language. A cursory examination of Tamil advertising shows that the language of advertising does not follow rigid rules: it makes optimal use of possible resources from a wide variety of styles.

A CATCHWORD is a lexical item or phrase, whether created within a particular language or adopted from foreign languages through translation or transliteration or a combination of the two. In Chinese discourse, catchwords spread rapidly within a particular group of people at a particular time and in a particular context (cf. Gu Wei, 2004): a definition from work undertaken at the Institute of Applied Linguistics (founded in 2002 at the Beijing Language and Culture University). The topic is the subject of a treatise, ‘The longitudinal study of catchwords in newspapers’ and is one of the items on the agenda of the Tenth Five-Year Plan, for consideration by the Chinese Language and Characters Committee. Zhang Pu (2003), a professor of language information processing at Beijing Language and Culture University has argued that ‘[a] catchword is not only a lexical phenomenon, but also indicates people's values from a cultural psychology point of view, as well as reflecting social reality’.

Life in the classroom.

Number in English is a puzzling phenomenon – not least for foreign learners, and often also for those who have to teach them. Avowedly ‘Standard’ forms of English are in something of an in-between stage. The so-called ‘singular/plural’ distinction is only partly a question of distinguishing one as opposed to more than one, while number agreement in the verb is inconsistent and not always predictable from the apparent number of the subject – as in The team was[?]/were[?] unhappy about losing the game. While some Germanic languages, and some varieies of English, have altogether discarded verbal agreement in number, standard varieties of English redundantly retain traces of it: He was, and they were, happy to hear the news. As Jespersen has put it (1979:216), ‘No distinction is made in verbs between the two numbers except in the present tense and there it is found in the third person only…. [I]n the preterit we have the solitary example was, plural were….’

Is grammar real or it it just a concept? The following is the opening sentence of the abstract of an article in the Journal of Linguistics, of November 2005: ‘This article argues that of English adjective–noun constructions involving associative adjectives (‘associative AdjNs’), some originate in the lexicon and others in the syntax.’ There has been for many years a divide in what is meant by grammar. For the general public (and in most of the ET articles that deal with it), grammar is understood to refer to a set of abstract terms for defining the forms of words and how they are related in sentences. For some people, however, particularly some linguistics professionals in universities, it is something real to be discovered, and grammatical terms are the means of explaining it. The quotation above is an example of the latter use. If you were unfamiliar with this approach, you might initially take the word lexicon here to mean (as the entries in dictionaries indicate) a list of the words in a language, but then might wonder how a phrase can be said, as here, to ‘originate’ in the lexicon (and whether you can really use the phrase ‘the syntax’ like that).

Some thoughts on the new OED's view of British pronunciation.

Heart-felt opposition to the status and spread of English in the world at large and most particularly in China today. It can hardly be denied that England has given the world maritime law, contract law, and an international language. However, whether by accident or design, the effect of these ‘gifts’ over time has, we would argue, been the destruction of many ethnic customs, social structures, and other aspects of culture. There appears to be little or no dissent among linguists regarding the proposition that language and culture are inseparable: what affects one affects the other.

This paper discusses how the global spread of English has affected – deleteriously – many languages and cultures, and currently engages too much time and too many resources in China today. Maritime and contract law may have been less problematic.

A brief look at the debate between sociolinguists and linguists with some examples of euphemisms that have surfaced into common usage offers revealing insights reflecting contemporary social perceptions. Sociolinguists who investigate the role and function of language are not so much concerned with the way language utterances are generated and constructed as with the ways that language is used in society as a means to communicate. Traditionally, linguists steered clear of the murky waters of social relevance and social context in use, believing that it is a study that cannot yield predictions of future usage, be measured objectively, or tested for accuracy.

The chronological index is the first of three specialized indexes for ET1 to/through ET90. It is a sequence of contents lists identified by issue number and date, each list containing author's names, the titles of their articles and reviews, and subtitles and explanatory matter as appropriate. Individual entries may be more detailed than those in the thematic index (p.86) and the author index (p.109).

The thematic index consists of 18 themes, contains authors' names in chronological order by issue (and in the order of appearance in the issue in question), together with the titles of their articles and reviews, and subtitles and explanatory matter as appropriate. The entries may be checked against those in the chronological index (p. 61), by means of the shared issue numbers.

The author index is the third of three specialized indexes for ET1 to/through ET90. It lists the names of contributors in alphabetical order, together with issue numbers, titles of articles and reviews, and subtitles and explanatory matter as appropriate. The entries may not be as detailed, or exactly the same, as those in the chronological (contents) index (p. 62).