Not only do copies of ET go round the world, but our contributors are based in a multitude of places. In recent editions, we have been using map motifs on the front cover to demonstrate the worldwideness (internationality? globality?) of the journal and its topics, and it seems appropriate, at least this once, to pinpoint the kind of places from which contributions come or to which they relate (or both). On this cover we see at a glance that ET78 has four source-cum-topic areas in Europe, three in East Asia, two in North America, and two in Australasia/Oceania.

ENGLISH is a juggernaut whose sweep across the globe is marked not only by the ever-swelling ranks of those who speak it as a second language, but also by its intrusion into other languages and cultures. While far from omnipresent, English is seen and heard in enough contexts in non-English-speaking countries that social scientists must carefully explore its role alongside indigenous languages. This study, which focused on the city of Rome, examines one dimension of English as an invader – its presence on street signs, on store fronts, in shop windows, outside commercial and public buildings, in billboards and other street advertisements, and in graffiti. It takes a more expansive and comprehensive approach than previous studies in examining the use of English in a foreign locale, in order to get a better sense of how widespread it is on the streets of a non-English-speaking country and in what contexts it appears.

THE LIFE of a language involves relationships between linguistic elements and extra-linguistic contexts. The linguistic elements are varied and multiple, involving both written and spoken symbols and grammars, while the extra-linguistic contexts are the innumerable societies, cultures, and sub-cultures of humankind, including its worlds of reality, imagination, and ideology. This article discusses invented languages, partly in order to explore the motivations and schemes of their inventors and partly to compare languages created for international use (often called international auxiliary languages or IALs) with English, which itself functions as an IAL but is very much an uninvented language.

IN BEIJING, on 4 November 2003, L. G. Alexander – for many years the world's foremost author of English language teaching materials – was formally commemorated. A bronze statue was raised in his honour in the grounds of the Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press (FLTRP), the publishing house of the Beijing Foreign Studies University and one of China's largest schoolbook publishers. The statue was jointly sponsored by FLTRP and Pearson Education Asia.

ENGLISH as the world's lingua franca has become a focus of attention for many scholars. Since China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO), the motivation to learn English has dramatically increased. This paper questions the need for English in China to conform to any of the existing standard varieties, arguing that this objective is both undesirable and virtually unattainable, especially in respect to pronunciation, and that Chinese learners should therefore be learning ‘China English’. In an investigation with over 1,200 Chinese students at her university, the writer discovered that the vast majority had never heard of either World English or China English, believing instead that proficiency in standard American or British English should be their goal. She proposes both a reorientation of English language learning in China and a radical revision of the materials used there for both practical and cultural reasons.

WHY IS English a global language? Although the reasons are manifold – historical, geographical, economic, political, social, cultural – the key reason, it seems to me, is linguistic: its morphology is simple, many of its words are short and pithy, and among the key world languages it has the largest vocabulary. These features have helped it become the most widely used language in the world: a situation that makes Uncle French and Grandpa German envious. English has been open-minded since childhood. In the long process of exchange, English words lost most of their inflections and words of different origins were mixed together (Burchfield 1984:13). Unlike traditional German and French, English has been open to foreign penetration and never drives new words out. It is this openness that continually enriches the language. Chinese also likes to borrow from other languages. Old Chinese borrowed 35,000 words from Buddhism, and Modern Chinese has absorbed countless words from Western civilizations. This paper inquires into the mutual borrowing between English and Chinese, summarizes the techniques of borrowing words from English into Chinese, and asserts that semantic transliteration is the best approach to adopting foreign words.

THIS ACCOUNT of the growth of English language teaching in South Korea moves from the grammar-fixated traditions of the late 19th and earlier 20th centuries through more recent politically and educationally lively times to an English – and especially American English – ‘fever’. This urge towards English involves much of the nation and many kinds of schools and universities. In particular it constrasts school English with a massive parallel realm of private tuition, and, more recently, the widespread individual use of audio-materials. More recently still it has led to the emergence of a novel private university, the International Graduate School of English, founded and financed by a publisher who has himself been closely involved with the issue of how young Koreans can most effectively learn a language which much of the nation considers vital to the nation's future.

PERFORMING what is often considered one of the world's most dangerous jobs, bicycle couriers are proud to be considered ‘other’ – or simply suicidal – by the rest of the world. The job lacks prestige and security, and the wages of bike couriers, which were already low relative to the risks, have been steadily decreasing in the last decade. Yet there is a kind of solidarity. This study seeks not only to discuss the kind of language couriers use but also to show how that language reflects both the work and the solidarity in the ‘messengering’ world.

THIS STUDY compares responses to indirect speech acts in a chat room with responses in a telephone conversation. In this instance, the chat room serves as a meeting place for members of a recent undergraduate university course and the telephone conversations are taken from a study done by Clark in 1979. Indirect speech acts are those that have a literal meaning (e.g., ‘Do you have a dollar?’ – the surface question is a request for information) as well as an indirect meaning (in this case, a request for money). Responses can consist of (1) just the answer to the surface question, (2) that answer plus the information indirectly requested, (3) only the information indirectly requested, or (4) some other form of response. The percentage of each type of response was compared in the two forms of communication. Clark found that the majority of responses consisted of only the information requested, and as predicted, the typed environment of the chat room yielded an even greater majority of this simplified form of response.

In British English texts, the frequency profiles of the collocation of right and wrong with preceding adverbs show patterns which are almost symmetrically opposed. This general truth obtains despite the fact that there are adverbs – such as completely or absolutely – which logic, or the intuitions of a learner of English as a second or foreign language, might suggest should combine equally happily or frequently with either.

THIS ARTICLE is about the pronunciation of intervocalic x in English. I started thinking about it when I realized that in French (a language I am having to improve in, as I now live in France) the x in exercice is pronounced ‘gz’, whereas in the English equivalent it is ‘ks’. In fact, in all French words beginning ‘ex + vowel’ the x is voiced (‘gz’). There are other similar contrasts with English – exécuter, exigence, exosphère. While it might be instructive to compare the pronunciation of intervocalic x among several, or many, connected, or unconnected, languages, that sounds like a long work and I think it is possible to make some sense sticking only to English, with just an occasional glance elsewhere.