Over the last decade, a new term – insubordination – has entered into the grammar of English. This term designates constructions such as (1), which can be considered linguistic innovations that appear to derive from syntactically more complex sentences, in this particular case, from a conditional construction.

Medium of instruction (‘MOI’) issues have long been identified as the most important decisions in the internationalization of higher education (HE) (Hamid, Nguyen & Baldauf, 2013). The adoption of internationally influential languages as MOIs may attract international students who aspire to undertake higher education in these languages, which in turn helps to sustain the status of these languages as internationally influential. Among all these languages, English is certainly the most powerful academic lingua franca and boosted by its use as MOI in globally leading universities worldwide. However, the elevated position of English in international higher education seems not without competition, as many governments in non-English-speaking countries have made efforts to internationalize their higher education by providing parallel higher learning programs both with English and with their native language (usually the official language) for international students. For instance, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), in which it first promoted higher education in the medium of German and later expanded to the medium of English in the 2000s, plays a critical role in attracting and recruiting international students to study in German universities (e.g. Erling & Hilgendorf, 2006).

Sociolinguistic research has established that glottal realisations of the voiceless alveolar stop /t/ have become increasingly common in accents of British English. The phenomenon, known as T-glottalling, encompasses the production of word-final and word-medial /t/ using glottal articulations, including creaky voice, pre-glottalisation [ʔt] and glottal replacement [ʔ] (Straw & Patrick, 2007), so that words such as but [bʌt] and butter [bʌtə] may become [bʌʔ] and [bʌʔə] respectively. The change has been documented for some time in Scotland (Macafee, 1997) and Norfolk (Trudgill, 1999) but has since been reported in numerous locations across the UK (see Smith & Holmes–Elliott, 2018 for a recent review). Studies of regional dialect levelling (Kerswill, 2003) have argued that T-glottalling has spread from working-class London speech into neighbouring varieties of South East England and beyond as a form of geographical diffusion (Altendorf & Watt, 2004). Together with other variables showing similar sociolinguistic patterns, such as TH-fronting and L vocalisation, it has been identified as part of a set of ‘youth norms’ used by young people in many urban centres to index a trendy, youthful identity (Williams & Kerswill, 1999; Milroy, 2007; though see Watson, 2006 for an exception in Liverpool), which have elsewhere been referred to as ‘Estuary English’ (Rosewarne, 1984; Altendorf, 2017). In terms of perception, T-glottalling is described as highly salient and stigmatised, frequently attracting comments from lay speakers to the effect that it should be avoided (Wells, 1982; Bennett, 2012), to the extent that mainstream journalistic publications can identify and criticise its use by ‘educated’ speakers such as politicians (e.g. Littlejohn, 2011).

On 22 May 2013, programmer Steve Wilhite was honoured with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 17th Annual Webby Awards in New York. Wilhite received this award chiefly in recognition of the Graphics Interchange Format, popularly known as GIF, which was developed by him and his team at CompuServe in the 1980s. This format is best known for the short animations that it enables, which have become a staple of the Internet, especially since platforms such as Facebook and WhatsApp started providing support for the format in their messaging services.

The area of East Anglia in which its traditional dialects are spoken has shrunk significantly over the past few decades and seen a marked decline in the use of traditional features. These include lack of -s marking on third-person singular forms (Kingston, 2000; Potter, 2018), as well as the long-standing distinction between those words descended from Middle English /ɔ:/ and /ɔu/, as in ‘moan’ vs ‘mown’, which failed to become homophonous as part of the Long Mid Mergers (Wells, 1982a). Like other relics, this distinction now only remains in East Anglia's more northern locales (Trudgill & Foxcroft, 1978; Trudgill, 2004; Butcher, 2019). This apparent ‘dialect death’ situation (Trudgill, 1986: 68) is the outcome of continued supralocalisation, a situation in which locally specific linguistic forms lose out to linguistic variants with greater socio-spatial currency, usually as a result of mobility and dialect contact (Britain, 2010). In East Anglia's case, Trudgill (2001) argues that dialect levelling has largely been driven by the impact of London and Home Counties varieties of English. This process is predicted to continue (Trudgill, 1986; Kingston, 2000), though is unlikely to be straightforward. Britain (2011) reports that substantial intra-regional differences are found in relation to route and rate of sound change in East Anglia. This calls for more comprehensive analyses of East Anglian English to better understand the workings of this ‘heterogenous homogenisation’ (Britain, 2011: 57), and how individual case studies relate to the overall shrinkage of the area in which traditional East Anglian dialects are spoken. This paper presents data in this vein from two studies undertaken in Suffolk, southern East Anglia. The first presents data on unstressed vowel tensing, which refers to the alternation between [ə] and [ɪ] in those unstressed syllables where /ɪ/ occurs in other varieties of Southern British English (SBE) e.g. ‘carpet’ [kɑ:pɪt] / [ka:pəʔ]. The second reports data on yod dropping, i.e. the absence of /j/ from sequences of C+/ju/ e.g. ‘huge’ [hju:dʒ] / [hu:dʒ]. Both variables are well known from descriptions of East Anglian dialects but, as we will see later, they appear to behave differently in this study of contemporary East Anglian English.

In a well-known and much discussed article, the philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote as follows (Russell, 1952):

This study investigated whether and how pre-adolescent girls style-shift in Multicultural London English (MLE), a variety of English that is relatively new and potentially still changing. We looked at the extent to which five 11-year-old girls in a homework club in East London, where MLE is spoken, changed their pronunciations in different speech contexts. The results showed that the girls did indeed change their pronunciations in the different contexts (i.e. they style-shifted), and that the patterns of style-shifting varied between both the individual participants and the three vowels which were examined.

Any news on English education in China today is now no news, but this most recent one may offer us some fresh food for thought.

The English major programme and related academic disciplines in Chinese universities are apparently experiencing growing pains as documented in the article entitled ‘The English Major Crisis in China’ published in this journal (Chen, 2019). In the article, Chen analysed the controversies surrounding the English major programme in Chinese universities and presented a somewhat gloomy prospect for the English major programme as an undergraduate subject in Chinese universities. Yet we found that the disheartening picture of the English major programme as portrayed by the article is open to question. We are also concerned that the article may misguide readers and negate the efforts that educators have undertaken to refine the English major programme in Chinese universities. For this reason, we would like to respond to the article with a different view, which has been made possible by our concerted efforts to bring the English major programme back to its basics over the last few years. We argue that the English major programme will play a critical role in promoting humanistic education in Chinese universities.

The Forest of Dean (henceforth Forest) is one of the lesser known English Royal Forests. The area is considered locally to be a special place with a distinctive dialect. The Forest lies at the intersection of three regions: South East Wales, West Country, also known as the South West, and the West Midlands. The Forest is situated between two rivers: the River Severn to the East separates it from the rest of Gloucestershire; the River Wye to the West separates it from Wales. National borders and physical boundaries seem to play an important role in identity construction. ‘Identities matter most’ (Llamas & Watt, 2010: 17) to those communities ‘at the physical margins of the nation state’ (Llamas, 2010: 225). Such communities may engage in practices that differentiate their dialect and situate it at the centre of their own region.

Situated at the extreme south west periphery of the British Isles, Cornwall's territorial isolation bred cultural isolation which has been construed and reconstrued over time, giving Cornwall a distinctive cultural flavour. Initially borne out by facts of geography, Cornwall, or ‘Kernow’, experiences a dynamic yet enduring peripheral existence (see Payton, 1992). This article explores how Anglo-Cornish dialect words can be used as a means of identity construction, that is, how a Cornish way of speaking is used to construct identities associated with a Cornish way of being. I hypothesise that those who desire greater Cornish autonomy are more likely to use Anglo-Cornish dialect lexis than those who favour further socio-cultural assimilation with England.

In their article, ‘Back to basics’, Zhou and Zha critique a ‘disheartening picture’ they found in my paper ‘The English major crisis in China’ (2019) and proposes an alternative view based on a model reform project. I will take the opportunity of this invitation to respond to reflect further on my study and the issue under debate.

Semantic shifts have been explored via a range of methods (Allan & Robinson 2012). Typically, semantic shifts were usually noted or described with methods such as a literature review or dictionary checking (e.g. Blank & Koch, 1999; Stockwell & Minkova, 2001; Williams, 1976), which are very labour-intensive and time-consuming methods. Other more recently developed methods involve sociolinguistic interviews (Robinson, 2012; Sandow & Robinson, 2018). However, with the development of large-sized corpora and computational semantics, diachronic semantic shifts have started to be captured in a data-driven way (Kutuzov et al., 2018). Recently, the word embeddings technique (Mikolov et al., 2013) has been proven to be a promising tool for the tracking of semantic shifts (e.g. Hamilton, Leskovec & Jurafsky, 2016a, 2016b; Kulkarni et al., 2015; Kutuzov et al., 2017). For example, Hamilton et al. (2016b) exemplified how to use the technique to capture the subjectification process of the word ‘actually’ during the 20th century.