This article discusses the use of English as a lingua franca (ELF) by engineering students and its effectiveness in content courses at a technical university, reporting the preliminary results of part of a study that investigates authentic and high-stakes speech events at a Swedish technical university. The main aim of my research is to find out what kind of divergence from standard morphosyntactic forms of English if any leads to disturbance, i.e. breakdown, in ELF speech.

The cachet of English in the Swiss press. Plurlingual Switzerland has three ‘official’ languages, standard forms of German, French, Italian, and a further ‘national’ language, the ancient Latin dialects of Romansh spoken in the eastern Alpine valleys by less than one per cent of the population. But there are problems for the Swiss in learning each other's languages. And, as in other as in other European countries, there is an increasing range of other mother tongues. Little wonder, then, that the Swiss readily resort to English in talking to each other, and little wonder at a marked role for English in the Swiss media.

Starts with an excerpt from Michael Rundell and Penny Stock, The Corpus revolution (ET30, 1992). An update on the rise and rise of electronic language corpora and their impact on dictionaries. How dramatically the world has changed since Penny Stock and I wrote about the ‘Corpus Revolution’ in 1992.

At the time, it was not hard to predict that computer processing power and storage capacity would carry on doubling each year. It was already clear, too, that the arrival of the corpus would revolutionize the work of dictionary-makers – hence the title of our articles. These changes were well under way in 1992 and, sixteen years on, their effects are still being felt. In the process, dictionaries have got dramatically better – if by ‘better’ we mean that the description of language they provide corresponds more closely to the way people actually use words when they communicate with one another.

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.

Starts with an excerpt from Braj B. Kachru, The sacred cows of English (ET16, 1988). The ‘Sacred Cows’ article has been a seminal piece for many reasons. It introduced the world to Braj's famous ‘Three Circles of English’ model. At roughly the same time, in the late 1980s, three pioneers in the field which was then known as ‘English as a World Language’ or ‘New Englishes’ came up independently with the idea of representing the spread of English in terms of concentric circles. Tom McArthur's ‘wheel model’ appeared in ET July 1987. Manfred Görlach, then editor of the journal English World Wide came up with a similar model, with some minor changes in a conference paper of 1988. It was only fitting that the co-editor of the third journal in the field, World Englishes, should have his own say. And it is in fact Braj's model that has come be the most widely accepted as the model with the best ‘fit’ for English as she has been spreading.

An examination of the give and take between local varieties and the expectations of classroom English. Like a microcosm of World Englishes, English in Malaysia is spoken in a multitude of accents characterizing different ethnic groups, socio-economic, education, language and geographical backgrounds. It is also not unusual for Malaysians to accent-switch according to context. Amidst the cacophony of local accents arise issues about whether such accents are correct or good or acceptable. This paper discusses the tension between speaking English with a Malaysian accent and the need for a pronunciation model from another variety, typically British English, in the teaching of English in Malaysia. Based on ongoing research on the pronunciation of Malaysian English, this paper suggests how this tension can be alleviated.

A foray into an oddity of word-making. Outside the province of jokelore, this type of abbreviation appears to have escaped notice in the literature on word-formation, perhaps because its productivity, besides being quite low, can best be seen in the most informal – and therefore supposedly ‘abnormal’ and ‘disreputable’ – levels of discourse. Of course, one does not have to be a genius to be aware that most knock-knock words (KKWs) stand as much chance of surviving as a snowball in hell. However, they are to be cherished for the unique insight they provide into language play and linguistic creativity at large. In what follows, I will describe the structural and semantic features of these words and present a glossary with a sprinkling of specimens gathered from a variety of sources.

An analysis of home page spellings in relation to the accents they evoke. One of the most obvious developments connected with modern electronic communication is the opening up of an area of publicly visible language from what Sebba (2003a) calls the partially regulated zone of spelling. This zone appears in such synchronous media as instant messaging, chatrooms and ICQ (‘I seek you’) and asynchronous ones including SMS text messages, blogs, email and homepages.

In this paper I wish to respond to the article published in ET94 by Saraceni while at the same time providing some clarifications concerning the concept of English as a Lingua Franca (henceforth ELF). In his article Saraceni raises three main questions (and a number of related debatable comments which I will quickly deal with in my final remarks) regarding: 1) the nature of ELF and its speakers, 2) the relationship between ELF and the World Englishes (henceforth WE) paradigm, and 3) the distinction between form and function. I will address each of these questions, and in so doing consider a number of notions concerning the ELF research field.

An analysis of dialect variability in the use of BE in the island of Bequia. Bequia (pronounced /bekwei/) is the northernmost of the Grenadine islands in St Vincent and the Grenadines. Like most of the Caribbean, Bequia has a long history of language contact, but most of the evidence for this must be inferred. It appears that the Carib population living on the island before European colonization settled Bequia in successive waves of migration ultimately originating from the coast of South America indeed the name ‘Bequia’ is said to derive from a Carib word becouya, meaning ‘Island of the clouds’, but as yet I have been unable to trace this etymon reliably to a particular Carib language. Based on what we know about St Vincent, and the limited mentions of Bequia in the eighteenth century, we can infer that, at times, there may have been contact between some combination of speakers of a Carib language or languages, French, English, African languages and/or possibly a relatively new creole-like or contact variety of English.

An exploration of how technology is making English – and the human race – evolve. In The Dead Emcee Scrolls, poet and rap artist Saul Williams describes how his writing was transformed by a dance club experience in which the club's beats reset his biorhythms. He writes, Hail Mary. Mother of God. / Got the whole host of angels in my iPod (Williams, 2006:16). Then, later, Neck back jump kiss BREAK. / Uprock freeze pop lock BREAK. / Don't stop don't stop snap BREAK (30). These lines illustrate a growing use of urban hip-hop vernacular that has been distributed with alarming efficiency by the global music trend, through downloadable music and ipods. Music and its beats have created a rhythm to which this iGeneration dialogues, both internally and externally. Technology has given way to a continuum for emotional highs that can be sustained at any place and time. The technological revolution influences the way we socialize, collaborate and exchange acoustic information. Our changing and globalized subjectivities, as well as increasingly powerful acoustic technology, have exerted changes on the English language, making visible a significant revolution in the shaping of language within an increasingly mobile and technological world.

The English language has developed and spread around the world as a global language. As a variety of English in China, it has also formed some distinct features. This paper first introduces the status quo of the English language in China, and then by analysing the use of four Chinglish idioms on the Internet, argues that the use of Chinglish idioms can be more expressive in some settings. The Internet use of Chinglish idioms shows the actual state of language diversity and creativity, and more significantly, it reflects Chinese identity.

In this article, I look at two concepts from functional linguistic that are often confused: genre and register. I look at what the concepts mean, how they differ, and how they can be used for the analysis of texts.

The Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore, India organized a symposium/dialogue on English in India and Indian English held during January 4–6, 2007 at the The Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL), Mysore, India. It was devoted to a discussion of the issues addressed in the keynote paper by Rajendra Singh, which some 23 scholars from throughout the world had been invited to respond to. Although a few of the invited scholars were not able to attend, they were kind enough to send their papers and we had a very productive and lively discussion in which the academic staff of CIIL and local journalists, students, and educationists also participated. This report is organized as follows: in section 1, we summarize the keynote address and all the full-length responses to it; in section 2, we summarize the brief comments and observations that were presented or tabled by the invited respondents; in section 3, we offer concluding remarks and a brief summary of Singh's responses to the interventions summarized in sections 1 and 2.

It is such a simple word for so versatile and important a liquid. We drink it, cook with it, wash in it, sail across it, swim in it, sprinkle it on our flowers and, when the need arises, we put fires out with it. In some parts of the world there is too much of it and in other parts it is so scarce that it is more precious than gold. It is older than life itself, it predates human existence and it flowed over the land aeons before man learned to speak. So it should not come as a surprise, then, that when we start looking at the etymology of the word ‘water’ we soon find ourselves travelling back to prehistoric times and making contact with very ancient civilizations. Nor is it very long before we find ourselves going round and round in circles as the twists and turns of the word's evolution reveal connections which the vast majority of us have probably never suspected.

An in-depth account of how English speakers think about thinking, using perspectives from etymology, metaphor and cognitive linguistics. Cognitive linguistics addresses how we conceptually structure and linguistically categorize experience in order to render our world coherent and accessible. One of the ways we do so is through the creation of spatial metaphors. In cognitive theory, language is not regarded as a representation of objective reality, but rather, as the product of our interaction with the world as entities in three-dimensional space. The metaphors we use to structure experience conceptually are grounded in this interaction. Our ability to generate metaphors makes it possible for us to get a mental and linguistic grip on abstract concepts by representing them as tangible, concrete entities situated in space. Hence, from a cognitive perspective, metaphors are much more than occasional ornamental figures of speech occurring primarily in literary contexts; rather, they are all-pervasive components of everyday language and reflections of how we cognitively structure our world. It should come as no surprise then that, as we shall see, metaphorical expressions are particularly prevalent in the lexis of that most abstract of realms, the realm of thinking.

To what extent does the distinctiveness of Nigerian English come through in text messages? In the history of the English language certain developments have left significant linguistic marks on the language. As new developments and cultural forms occur, new words and styles of expression evolve with them and spread. This is true of the new linguistic style that is associated with the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) revolution in Nigeria since 2001. GSM has brought with it a variety of English that is situationally distinctive and context. GSM came to Nigeria with the licensing of MTN and Econet (now Celtel) in 2001 during the Obasanjo administration, after many years of decaying telecommunication infrastructure. Within a short time after the introduction of mobile telecommunication, almost a million subscribers mainly in the cities made a rush at possessing mobile phones and were willing to pay any tariff. N50 (50 naira) were paid per minute per call as against N15 per text message. This was said to be the highest rate in Africa, causing many subscribers to opt for text-messaging as a cheaper alternative.

Etymology and the winds of change. There's a lot of weather about these days, isn't there? Until relatively recently the weather was just what we saw when we drew back the curtains and looked out of the bedroom window in the morning, but now things have changed dramatically. These days every time we turn on the TV or open a newspaper it is quite ‘usual’ for some part of the world to be experiencing ‘unusual’ weather. The Arctic is not yet a tropical paradise but it is starting to move in that direction and England, parts of which a mere year or so ago were drying up like so many dead leaves, has in recent months seen some of the worst floods in its history. And who among us had heard of the word tsunami (Japanese for ‘harbour wave’) before the terrible events of December 2004 in Thailand and Indonesia?

Some religious etymologies in English.

Whatever religious beliefs we hold or do not hold, there is no denying the fact that all cultures are affected to a greater or lesser degree by religion. Whether or not we attend church on a Sunday, the mosque on a Friday or the synagogue on the Sabbath the language we use during the rest of the week will be peppered with words and phrases which can be traced back to religious rites and practices of one sort or another. In the case of English, which has absorbed some of the vocabulary of most of the main religions in the world, the dominant influence has to be Christianity. And because the early church texts and documents were frequently written in, and heavily dependant upon, Latin and ancient Greek their influence is still detected in many of the religious and cultural references we make in everyday speech.