On a recent visit to his homeland, the author had an opportunity to analyse the style and language of the ‘Northland Age.’

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

The development and use of the Italian cousin of franglais.

Some insights into the Victorian author's brief career as a language teacher.

An American teacher of English in Japan describes how the Japanese see the aliens in their midst.

In the description of such usages as argue away, measure up and zonk out, a venerable orphan comes in from the linguistic cold

Some things appear to be harder to announce than others.

TO JUDGE by the evidence on the right, names can mean a great deal to some people!

I must confess to never having been really happy with my name, one of the commonest in England and Wales. For this reason I began, at a very early age, somewhat secretively, to read telephone directories. I was in search of “the name”. There always seemed to be something limp-wristed and anaemic about mine. After all, even Tommy Atkins received his apotheosis in Kipling's Barrack Room Ballads:

“God Bless You, Tommy Atkins, we're all the world to you.”

A reply to the replies of the grammarians in April, continuing the debate on description, prescription, and the standard language.

As the mother of a 10-year-old boy as well as the language teacher of adult migrants, I am often in a position to wonder at the glib, confident, oral fluency of my child in contrast to the hesitant, halting, broken, jerking, unassured, more-miss-than-hit staccato of my language students. Many a time have I, on their behalf, envied my boy his brash, native fluency, wishing some of it would blow their way, onto their fractured lives which could be so transformed but for the barrier that is language. There must be many a language teacher yearning to facilitate this kind of verbal flow and confidence in their students.

Dorothy Sayers would surely have turned in her grave if she could have heard, as I did a few months ago, a BBC announcer introducing a dramatization of her story Gaudy Night by a few remarks about the heroine, Harriet Vane, and her ‘cohort’, Lord Peter Wimsey. Or perhaps she would have been convulsed with laughter at the absurd contrast between Lord Peter in his sober Savile Row suit and the cohorts in Byron's well-known lines:

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold, And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold.