A response to the prescriptivist/descriptivist skirmishes between Bryan Garner on the one side and Tom McArthur and Richard Bailey on the other.

Whenever describers and prescribers of the English language meet, they don't exchange views in balanced and civil discussion. They fight.

A quantitative analysis of usage in Computer-Mediated Conversation (CMC).

While commentators as ‘early’ as 1984 were predicting that the “organizational, social, and personal effects of computers will be deeply felt”, they could only speculate on the strength of its impact. As this account was being written, at the end of 2001, the effects of Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) were fast overtaking our poor ability to measure them. There are many ways to communicate through computers: Usenet newsgroups, mailing lists, and message boards, which allow users to discuss specific topics with each other. (The term CMC allows for the possibility that some methods of communication, e.g., “chat rooms”, will not meet the definition of ‘mail’. The most popular method of CMC is e-mail. For those who have internet access, CMC is often their preferred choice of indirect (i.e., non face-to-face) communication, thanks to its speed, efficiency, and flexibility. Perhaps for these reasons, e-mail has already overtaken the telephone as the primary means of business communication.

Excerpts from the cultural identity narratives and follow-up interviews of a group of ethnic Chinese majors in English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, identifying recurrent issues and metaphors.

IN HONG KONG, how have recent political events such as the Handover (change of sovereignty from Britain to China) in 1997 impacted on young people's sense of self? What cultural groups do they now identify with and why? What self-labels do they prefer? This article reports on a qualitative, sociocultural investigation that took place at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, a bilingual English/Chinese institution. Hong Kong have had a significant impact on shaping and sometimes changing students' cultural identities. The Handover, in particular, caused them to reflect on and even question their place in the world. Just before the change of sovereignty, many applied for passports whose nature sometimes brought them into conflict with their parents and grandparents.

Some aspects of a corpus of personal correspondence.

English as used in business letters, job applications and different types of bureaucratic communication in India has become more or less standardized and is not much different from the language of similar letters written elsewhere in the English-speaking world. But this is not the case with private letters, which are intimate, informal and often lax. Since a personal letter is written to a friend, spouse or relative, the writer comes out with his/her ‘real self’ in the use of language. It may therefore be taken as an authentic indication of the extent to which one is proficient in English and also the extent to which nativised features of English in this specific genre are attributable to native socio-cultural factors.

A review of David Crystal's book, Language and the Internet, Cambridge University Press, 2001, hardback, ISBN 0 521 802121, pp.272, £13.95

A survey of attitudes to other people's English among students at a university in the United States. Attitudes toward varieties of English as used in European contexts reflect changing viewpoints among their speakers (see Westergren Axelsson; Söderlund & Modiano; and Mobärg; see also Mobärg 1998). In this paper, I focus on the multifaceted attitudes toward varieties of English held by American undergraduate students in one department of English in the United States. I focus on perceptions of varieties of English, particularly on viewpoints of standard and acceptable spoken varieties of English. The wider aim of this project – described here in its early pilot stages – is to identify to what extent American undergraduates accept regional, national, and international varieties of English. A guiding question is whether American undergraduate students expand their view of which varieties of English are standard as the students gain more exposure to varieties that are not their own.

Review of Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable; Brewer's Dictionary of Modern Phrase and Fable; The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable

A survey of English as the universalizing language of chemistry.

In recent decades the use of English has extended greatly in various fields, including both science and engineering, where it is now more widely used than in any other scientific fields. However, only a few papers have been published (cf. Sano, 1986) to demonstrate the trend in a quantitative manner. In order to discuss this trend here, a bibliometric approach has been adopted in order to retrieve the relevant information from a large scientific database.

Regular Features. Comment: ‘September 11, ET, and ETe’; Usage 1: English and ‘the war on terror’: Tom McArthur; Follow-up; From Our Files; Verbal fallout; Usage 2: The position of the adverb: Solveig Granath; Varieties: Englishes, attitudes, education: Shondel J. Nero; Post & (E)Mail

A discussion of the impact of parental demand on the terms of employment of imported native-speaking and local non-native-speaking teachers in private language schools.

As more and more parents realize the importance of learning the language at an early stage, the teaching of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) to young learners has become a lucrative adventure for Taiwanese entrepreneurs. Taiwanese students and parents alike represent a stable and growing market, at least for now. The demand for both Native Speaking (NS) and Non-Native Speaking (NNS) teachers is also on the rise and can certainly be attributed to the flourishing EFL industry in Taiwan. However, there is a distinctively huge difference in the pay and reward policies and practices for the two kinds of teacher. This article touches on relatively sensitive issues concerning NS/NNS as EFL teachers and as members of staff.

Mixed local feelings about the use of local words in the English of Ghana. A Ghanaianism is a vocabulary item peculiar to Ghana. It may be an English item that has undergone a local semantic shift, an item of local origin used consistently in English, or a hybrid of the two. In addition, the term Ghanaian English as used here refers, not to a variety whose features have been more or less fully recognised and described, but broadly to the English used by Ghanaians who have had at least some formal education and are able to use English in some registers. Drawing on a collection of Ghanaianisms compiled over the last 10 years, this paper looks first at some of the prevailing problems in attempting to define the transference phenomena widely identified as code-switching (CS) on the one hand and lexical borrowing (LB) on the other, then at how Ghanaians deal with the phenomenon of borrowing into English at the text level.

Amid all the publicity surrounding the release of the film of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring, it has occasionally been mentioned that Tolkien was an English professor. What is rather less well known is that in 1919 and 1920, at the very start of his career, Tolkien worked on the staff of the Oxford English Dictionary; he later said of this time that he ‘learned more in those two years than in any other equal period of my life’.

A discussion of the centrality of imagery in the promotion and use of English worldwide. Metaphor is traditionally considered a “figure of speech”, describing one thing by stating another with which it can be compared, as discussed by rhetoricians and grammarians, from Aristotle in his Poetics and Rhetoric to I. A. Richards in The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936) and Kenneth Burke in A Grammar of Motives (1945), a growing number of recent linguists have been trying to establish metaphor at a cognitive, conceptual level (such as Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Gibbs, 1994).

How rapidly our vocabulary can change, and how yesterday's expressions can vanish without trace. Even words which were used by people the age of the author's children just a few years ago have vanished without trace: untold had a brief flourishing in Wellington as a term of approval, but has vanished completely; grouse, a rather older term, still survives but again not among the young. If old words go, new words come. In a recent survey of the language of primary school children in New Zealand, a word was discovered that all the children knew and virtually none of the teachers knew. To understand the expression, one has to understand something about the games played by children in English-speaking countries.

A review of Appropriating English: Innovation in the Global Business of English Language Teaching, by Michael Singh, Peter Kell, and Ambigapathy Pandian.