In 1995, Ballantine Books published in New York a book by Benjamin R. Barber. Its title was Jihad vs. McWorld, a phrase that would not have made much (any?) sense in 1895, or been easily unpacked even in 1975. It is often in word capsules like these that we see how much a language can change in a century, so as to put Arabic jihad alongside Latin versus while attaching Gaelic Mc (courtesy US fast food) to world, the only bit of original Anglo-Saxon. Barber also provided the subtitle ‘How globalism and tribalism are reshaping the world’, and it is the use of globalism that particularly interests me here. 1995 was a key year for globalization as a label for the worldwide spread of Western and especially US notions and practices relating to trade and technology. On page 23 of his book, Barber says:

1. [bull ] ‘Welcome to McWorld. There is no activity more intrinsically globalizing than trade, no ideology less interested in nations than capitalism, no challenge to frontiers more audacious than the market.’

This review explores the histories and meanings of, and similarities and contrasts among, three labels for English at large: world English, international English, and global English, first as phrases containing the words world, international, and global, then in terms of their history and use, and how a range of dictionaries has dealt (or failed to deal) with them. The first has been used to mean both standard English and all English; the second refers to the multinational use of English (notably in language teaching); and the third both implies vast use and links the language (often negatively) with socio-economic globalization. Since all three are likely to go on being used, they may need to be handled with care.

In the United States today, two developments – concern for national security and the concerns of private citizens – have catapulted languages onto the national policy agenda. The first requires more Americans to learn foreign languages while the second seeks to ban bilingual education. ‘Uncle Sam wants you to learn a foreign language!’

The lack of an official (British or American) language academy is regularly compared to the situation in France with its time-honoured Académie Française. All too often, however, a passing imprecise reference is made to the French Academy; all too often it is lumped together with other academies; and all too often the true nature of the work of such academies is ignored. This paper takes a closer look at some of the foreign academies, considers why there is no academy in Britain or America, discusses the only existing official academy of English (based in South Africa), and considers foreign academies' attitudes to English.

The present paper discusses the use of the prepositions after different in present-day spoken American English, using the Corpus of Spoken Professional American-English [sic] (CSPAE), which includes transcriptions of conversations recorded between 1994 and 1998. As the corpus consists of four different professional settings (i.e. press conferences held at the White House and other locations, faculty meetings of the University of North Carolina, national meetings on mathematics tests, and national meetings on reading tests), it provides useful data for stylistic analyses. It is also useful for gender analyses of English, since it provides some personal data for most speakers and indicates whether they are male or female.

In recent years, the sociolinguistic theory of code-switching and code-mixing has been a source of great interest among scholars worldwide. The phenomenon is common in such multilingual societies as India. Most known cases of code-switching are, however, restricted to the spoken form, in which English is liberally interspersed with such regional languages as Hindi, Marathi, and Telugu. What has not yet significantly caught the attention of scholars is the notion of such switching and mixing in print. This practice is however particularly prevalent among writers in popular magazines, who resort to written code-switching for a variety of reasons. The present paper endeavours to examine the causes of the popularity of this style of writing in the light of some accepted theories of multilingualism.

A review of the needs and opportunities of Chinese university students learning English, with a particular focus on the work of a ‘Foreign Expert’ in a Henan college.

We read with interest Hongyuan Wang's article ‘Loans to the Middle Kingdom revisited’ (ET77 Jan 04). This is a response to, and continuation of, Elizabeth Malischewski's 1987 article ‘Loan words to the Middle Kingdom’ in ET12, the author expresses the hope that this description ‘might serve as a useful addition to’ it (Wang 2004:47). We are as delighted to see the topic revisited after sixteen years as the editor, who states that Wang's article is ‘a valued addition to our series on English, China, China English, and Chinglish, and to Malischewski's original piece’ (McArthur 2004:2). However, we found that quite a number of words listed in the article are not loanwords, because of misunderstandings regarding loan word and loan translation in English and wailaici and wailaiyu, equivalents of loanword in a broader sense in Chinese, as a result of which his classification of the borrowings is confusing. The article has also tended to over-simplify the complex situation of such borrowings in Chinese and as such is misleading. We would like in this paper to clarify some of the misunderstandings and offer a brief introduction to the study of English borrowings in Chinese, a field which began c.1913 with the publication of Evan Morgan's Chinese New Terms & Expressions in Shanghai.

A representation of electronic press releases relating to electronic issues. It is reproduced without adaptation or further comment, but readers' comments would be welcomed.

The author focuses on the approach to word origins widely known as ‘folk etymology’, which he regards as ‘alive and kicking in America's leading daily newspapers, duping many a gullible reader’. To do this, he considers the etymology of the phrase ‘so long’ when used to mean ‘good-bye’.

A review of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (CGEL) by Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum.

The writer discusses possible pairings of consonants at the beginnings of English words.

The third in a series of true tales from a city university following on from ‘The jockey and his horse’ in ET75 (Jul 03) and ‘Shame’ in ET76 (Oct 03).