The difference over twenty years, in the making of ET since 1985, includes the vanishing away of paper files. In a cabinet beside my desk I have A–Z files for the many people who literally ‘wrote’ – that is, typed – to me on paper. I almost never consult any of those files now, and don’t remember when I last added a sheet to them. Instead, of course, I check my email, which piles up electronically in non-real space somewhere inside this machine in front of me. And, though I strive to keep my records straight, I seldom check back very far or go into e-files of old e-mails. And, most days, whether in Cambridge or in Hong Kong, I read daily e-abstracts from my much-prized Edinburgh newspaper, The Scotsman, and don't recall when I last saw, leave alone bought and read, a conventional paper edition of it.

IN RECENT years an increasing amount of literature has become available regarding the learning and use of English in a wide range of contexts, notably including continental Europe: cf. Berns 1995; Cenoz & Jessner 2000; Dushku 1998; Fonzari 1999; McCallen 1991; O'Reilly 1998; Petzold & Berns 2000; Phillipson & Skutnab-Kangas 1997; Schleppegrell 1991; and Van Essen 1997. However, little recent published work has explored the role of the language in Spain. The information provided here is based on on-site investigation, interviews with English teachers and other language specialists in Spain, and an examination of relevant curricular documents and other published sources. The aim of the article is to cover three areas in particular: the history of English in Spain; its current status in the nation's multilingual context; and the learning and teaching of the language nationwide of proficiency.

Are the other varieties of English under threat from the United States? This paper reviews the place of the United States of America (her English and culture) in the contemporary world, especially with regard to the spread and use of the English language. World War II and its aftermath raised America to the height of political, economic, commercial, technological strength which saw the transformation of English from being a reserve of the British Isles and their queen, to a code of international linguistic transaction. English today is no longer just spreading world-wide, but is overwhelmingly adopting a predominant American touch, given the pride and prestige of the American lifestyle and pop culture. This paper therefore observes that in a quite foreseeable future the world Englishes will gradually subsume their heterogeneous identities into the sweeping current of the American variety of English.

Just how many millions are there? China’s huge English-knowing population of 200–350 million is often cited as evidence of the language being nativized in the world’s most populous country. We may note, however, that the words user and learner are used interchangeably in reference to its speakers of English. When however the focus is on the nativization of English in China, a country in Kachru’s ‘Expanding Circle’ of Englishes, it is imperative to distinguish between users and learners of the language. Kachru points out that institutionalized varieties of English in Outer Circle countries have four functions: the instrumental, the regulative, the interpersonal, and the imaginative/innovative. For English to perform any such functions, there needs to be a large number of proficient bilingual users of the language – which seems not to be the case in China, where English is primarily learned in the classroom as a foreign language. This means that college graduates should have learned the most English, but some constraining factors have prevented the majority of them from obtaining an advanced level of proficiency.

THIS PAPER recounts the challenges faced by young Nigerian writers in a climate that is hostile to new authors. The experience presented and discussed here epitomises both the dilemma and the experiences of the new generation of creative writers. The problem of language choice – English or a mother tongue – is re-examined, while exploring the various reasons, noble and not so noble, behind such matters as: choice of genre, the new writer’s response to democracy and globalization, the problem of audience recognition, and the failure of do-it-yourself publishing and marketing.

WE ARGUE here that a ‘paradigm gap’ has prevented recent research into world Englishes (WEs) and contrastive rhetoric (CR) from being mutually useful, and suggest particular areas in which insights from CR may benefit in particular the study of WEs. English in its standard ‘native’ form(s) is fast becoming the world’s lingua franca of science, commerce, the mass media, and entertainment. As a result, its non-native uses and users have become significant in at least the following eleven fields: applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, critical linguistics, contrastive rhetoric, second language acquisition, traditional English studies, lexicography, mass communication studies, cultural studies, pragmatics, and text linguistics (cf. Bolton, 2003a). We hope that the present study will contribute to the debate.

The Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech (SCOTS for short) has been available online since November 2004. It currently contains over 2.3 million words of texts in varieties of Broad Scots and Scottish English. Regular additions are made to the textual content of the corpus and the integrated search and analysis software is continually undergoing improvement. Over the next year, the corpus will grow to around 4 million words, 20% of which will comprise spoken language in the form of conversations and interviews.

‘Botti vietati agli under 14,’ La Repubblica, 29 Dec 03. The aim of this work is to examine the use of English loan words in a specific genre of language: parts of an Italian newspaper. In essence, it looks at how English is encroaching on one among many languages – and occurring in their texts. The key question is: ‘In a specific context, what are loanwords?’, in terms of which we will consider genre as it is exemplified in newspapers, following which there is an analysis of loan words used in the different sections of an Italian newspaper

THIS STUDY investigates how speakers of Educated Yoruba English (EYE) produce the vowels in typically unstressed syllables of English words whose suffixes require a shift of stress and a consequent reduction of vowels, as in atómic from átom and dramátic from dráma. Twenty suffixed English words were read by one hundred Yoruba subjects, with a Briton who studied at the University of London serving as the control. The focus is on Yoruba English because of both its many speakers and the need for a ‘geo-tribal’ approach to defining the concept Nigerian English. The data was analysed by converting tokens of occurrence to percentages, the higher percentages being taken as the norm. The acoustic analysis was done in a computerized speech laboratory. The study establishes that vowels occurring in typically unstressed syllables in traditional Standard English remain strong and full in educated Yoruba English.

Some reflections of a practising non-native speaking English teacher. Ten years ago, in a job interview for a teaching post in a government school, The writer was asked: ‘Do you think the government should recruit more native English-speaking teachers so as to boost the English standard of Hong Kong students?’ My answer took the interviewers by surprise: ‘No, I think the money should be spent on training local teachers who are more able to understand the needs of students learning English as a second or foreign language. I believe good English doesn’t necessarily mean British or American English. If we see English as an international language, anyone capable of using it as an effective communication tool can potentially be a good English teacher.’ I got the job, but there are still a few questions in my mind.

AS ELECTRONIC engineers create virtual reality in and through computer software, they are also creating new English words to describe their ongoing technical achievements. While following existing rules of word formation, they are also changing these rules: for example, by making new nouns from prepositions. Their neologisms seem to be driven by humorous responses to electronic requirements of speed, multi-functionality and reversibility. This paper examines the current but on-going impact of their usage on the grammatical structure of the language. In a rapidly-evolving electronic future, their usage is likely to have a major impact on how ‘ordinary’ Internet users communicate online.

Distinctive developments in an Arab sultanate. Relatively few people around the world react with instant recognition when the Sultanate of Oman is mentioned. This may however be changing as international news media focus ever more strongly on events in the Arab world and on the strategic significance of the Persian Gulf. There are many who misunderstand the spoken word ‘Oman’ as ‘Amman’ and therefore think erroneously of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Oman, however, is a beautiful and hospitable country possessing white sand beaches, rugged mountain ranges, breathtaking cave systems, a long and somewhat surprising history, and an English of its own.

WHILE recent articles and research studies on Singapore Colloquial English (SCE, or simply ‘Singlish’) have so far tended to focus on the structure, grammar and the functional roles of Singlish in Singapore, this paper presents an insider's viewpoint of this local variety from a perspective that incorporates both linguistic ideology and cultural politics. Focusing on the spoken version at the basilectal end of the English speech continuum, the article attempts to explore Singlish from a cultural-political viewpoint and challenges popular belief that Singlish encapsulates an established Singapore identity. In the process, it throws up some insights about language, identity and culture. Based on two significant contributing factors to the unmarked use of Singlish in Singapore, the paper argues that – more than just a language used for wider intra-communication in this tiny republic and city state – this variety, with its odd mix of English and local ethnic languages, mirrors a people who find themselves struggling with a myriad conflicting and contrasting cultures, a people in cultural and linguistic flux, who are still searching – desperately – for an identity, and a language they can call their own.

BY GENERAL consensus English has become, if not a global language, then at the very least a lingua franca. Some commentators on English in the world, like Robert Phillipson (Linguistic Imperialism (Oxford University Press, 1992), use the term that serves him as a title to imply that English is itself part of the problem of having just such a global language. The argument here however is that English – like Latin, Sanskrit, Classical Arabic and Examination Chinese – through its political ascendancy (as a result of various waves of colonial activity alongside its use for religious purposes), may have taken on the character of a ‘semi-sacred’ rather than simply an imperial and imperialist language.

Poem in memoriam: Maningning Miclat : an established Pilipino woman painter and poet, born in Beijing in 1972, committed suicide in Manila in 2000.

This paper attempts to show the important role that ideology (‘meaning in the service of power’) plays in the nurturing and proliferation of metaphors and metaphoric themes, a psychological and linguistic role that is just as important as bodily experience. It discusses such themes as power is high, sex is violence, disease is invasion, and race is colour, attempting to show how they drive social practices. It also explores how the themes activity is game and quality is quantity (along with such subthemes as time is money and human quality is wealth) have been implicated in the emergence of both capitalist economic philosophy and the Darwinism and neo-Darwinism which developed from it (as represented successively in Hobbes, Smith, Hume, Malthus and Darwin himself).

Japan not only borrows words from English; it often changes them radically. The present study reviews both the historical background to contact between English and Japanese and the periods in which English loans entered the Japanese language. Such loans are particularly significant sociolinguistically because they shed light on the exposure of the Japanese to English since they opened up to the world. Discussing the inflow of such borrowings both provides a background to the many English-derived words currently in daily use in Japanese and makes a broader point about the adoption of loanwords as a cultural process involving both acculturation and deculturation.