What's in a name? Quite a lot, if the evidence of a legal battle that has recently taken place in the United Kingdom High Court is anything to go by. The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain (UOGB) has recently unsuccessfully sought an injunction to prevent The United Kingdom Ukulele Orchestra (UKUO) from using their somewhat similar name. The judge ruling on the case decided that the two groups were not in competition, his judgement apparently centring on the fact that the UKUO had been in existence for some years without the UOGB previously complaining about an infringement of their trademark.
The media, from whom this case came to our attention, do not refer to any linguistic arguments that might have been raised by either side. But it does seem that the UOGB saw the issue to be one concerning their trademark title, and, as linguists, readers might find it interesting to ponder what the objections might have been. The noun head is identical in both names, of course. The modifiers of the head can be pointed out as being quite distinct, though the transformation from post-modifying prepositional phrase to pre-modifying noun might be seen as of debateable significance. (After all, ‘The BBC World Service’, from where the case first came to our attention, is frequently referred to as ‘The World Service of the BBC’.) Much of the distinction in the two names, then, must depend on the use of ‘Great Britain’ in the one and ‘United Kingdom’ in the other.
Now might be thought a particularly good time briefly to consider these and associated labels, sensitivity to which has rarely been higher following the September 2014 referendum held in Scotland to decide whether that country should leave the union that makes up the United Kingdom. The two names are indeed significantly different in territorial scope, the UK being ‘the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’, so that by definition ‘Great Britain’ on its own excludes Northern Ireland, that part of the island of Ireland that is part of the United Kingdom rather than being the Republic of Ireland (which is, of course, a quite separate state). Then, within Great Britain (and so, of course, within the larger United Kingdom too), we must recognise the nations of Scotland, Wales, and England, not to mention other smaller territories such as the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands which, for historical reasons, have their own distinctive identities.
Confused? We're not surprised. But any reader concerned about their national and/or ethnic identity will surely sympathise with the sensitivities to naming of many people living on an archipelago at the western edge of Europe – not to mention those of the UOGB and UKUO.
Matters of identity are inextricably linked to the spread and varied use of English around the world, and this is reflected in several of the variously-focused articles in this issue of English Today. Arik and Arik investigate English used in university instruction in Turkey, Rüdiger argues the emergence of a Korean English, and Zheng discusses the uneasy interface between English and Chinese. The English language in China is also the preoccupation of Rao and Lei, here with an ELT focus, a focus also of the article by Erling, Seargeant and Solly for Bangladesh, while Pinner addresses the concept of authenticity for general ELT application. Bulley studies a native-speaker pronunciation phenomenon, and grammatical issues in particular occupy Yang, Horslund, and Ebner. This last is the latest in the series of invitations to correspond with the University of Leiden team studying prescriptivism. (We invite any other group to consider offering a regular or occasional item under our ‘English Language Initiatives’ series.) Books on spelling and morphology are reviewed by Yule and Rajagopalan respectively, while Saraceni completes the issue by reviewing a volume on the meaning of English for its worldwide users (this including a chapter by Seargeant, who is also published here).
