Terms of address are universally seen as a tool used to build social relations between speakers and hearers. Terms of address ‘help establish or maintain social bonds, strengthen solidarity and control social distance’ (Gu, 1990: 249), although ways of addressing vary from culture to culture. Therefore, the proper choice of address terms is a prerequisite for a successful interaction. Inappropriate use of address terms may lead to misunderstandings and hinder communication.

This study examines Taiwanese English teachers’ perceptions of English as a lingua franca (ELF) in relation to English teaching in classrooms. The definition of ELF is: English used as a lingual medium of communication among people of different linguacultural backgrounds (Jenkins, 2009: 200). Concerning the use of English, Taiwan is regarded as a country of ‘the expanding circle’ (Kachru, 1985, 1992), where English is not an official language, but is learned as a foreign language (EFL) at school and is considered essential for international communication. In Taiwan, English has been traditionally taught as a school subject and learners rarely have opportunities to use English outside the classroom, whereas the design of English pedagogy and curricula in Taiwan, following an EFL approach, is based on native-speaker (NS) norms with the aim of helping learners achieve native-like competence (cf. Suzuki, 2011). Due to the global spread of English, the majority of users of English for international communication are non-native speakers (non-NSs) (Crystal, 1997; Graddol, 1997, 2006); non-NSs of English now outnumber their native-speaker counterparts. In the global context, second language (L2) learners of English will mostly encounter non-NSs, whose ‘Englishes’ might deviate from NS English usage. Traditional EFL approaches to English teaching, which favor NS norms, may not ‘adequately prepare’ L2 learners of English to effectively interact and communicate with speakers ‘from other English-speaking contexts’ (Matsuda & Friedrich, 2011: 332). It has become important that English curricula and instruction are designed to prepare English learners to cope with international communication in which English variations are evident.

The ‘English’ have an ambiguous relationship with the language of their nearest neighbour, France. There is a history, ‘1066 and all that’. Christmas Day 2016 saw the 950th anniversary of the crowning at Westminster Abbey of the French Duke William of Normandy as King of England (not, please note, of ‘Britain’); William having defeated King Harold – and so the very last ‘English’ monarch – at the battle of Hastings. (The other ‘nations’ of these European off-shore islands have different trajectories.) Sooner or later the English at least would have to come to terms with French.

The last three decades have witnessed an increase in the number of middle-class people in China. Some of them spend money like water, have garish tastes and lack ‘good’ cultural traits and sophistication; they are called tuhao in Chinese (Cai, 2014). Others, in particular most of the middle-aged women, who are called dama, ‘live a happy life with plenty of free time and money’, investing in gold, bitcoins and overseas property markets and enjoying noisy square dances. (dama is a term coined by The Wall Street Journal) (Zhou & He, 2015). It was rumored around the end of 2013 that Chinese words, such as tuhao, dama and hukou ‘household registration’ would enter into the Oxford English Dictionary (Gui, 2013), which was still not the case when we searched the online Oxford Dictionaries for these words in 2015 (oxforddictionaries.com, 2015).

Characterized by a politically censorious and highly regulated society, Singapore is widely considered to be one of the most sophisticated authoritarian systems in history (Lee, 2005). As in many other public and private domains, the government, well known for its paternalistic attitude (Schiffman, 2003), usually practices an active interventional policy on linguistic life, which is extensively explored in language planning and policy study. However, in a few areas where less official intervention is exercised, the linguistic reality has received relatively scant attention. This study sets out to examine to what extent grassroots individuals can use shop signs to express their personal inclinations regarding language use, which may partly demonstrate the virtual vitality of various languages in the multilingual society.

Due to a growing concern with the English language competence of international airline pilots, a growing body of research has been conducted on issues related to the International Aviation English Test, which pilots need to pass in order to fly on international routes (e.g. Jones, 2003; Ragan, 1997; Seiler, 2009). This paper contributes to this research by reporting on a mixed method inquiry into Chinese pilots’ engagement with learning English for aviation. The study involved a survey of 165 pilots working for a major Chinese cargo airline, and follow-up interviews with two of the surveyed participants (one senior and one junior) to explore their International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) test preparation and learning engagement. The findings of the study indicate that policy-makers and relevant English language education specialists need to develop tailor made courses that will better help these pilots to improve their command of English and thus ensure aviation safety.

While there is a multitude of studies on the influence English has exerted on German, the converse language contact scenario has been comparatively neglected. German borrowings which have recently been assumed into English have as yet received little attention in current research. The present paper intends to shed light on the impact of German on the English vocabulary in the 20th century. The various German words and meanings taken over into English in the last few decades will be divided into manifold subject areas in order to give a rounded picture of the different domains and spheres of life enriched by German in the recent past.

Tanzania is, like most countries in East Africa, extremely culturally and linguistically diverse. Language counts range from 125 (Lewis, Simons & Fennig, 2016) to 164 living languages mentioned by the ‘Languages of Tanzania project’ (2009). Given this extreme multilingualism, institutional languages had to be chosen on a national level after independence. Kiswahili is the proclaimed national language and lingua franca of the East African region, also spoken in Kenya, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, for instance, and is used as medium of instruction (MoI) in primary education. English, the former colonial language, is the de facto national working language and medium of instruction in secondary and higher education. However, English remains a minority language, spoken by approximately 5% of the population, most of whom are members of a higher social class (Tibategeza, 2010). This leads to English being an international rather than a second language as in other former British colonies (Schmied, 1990, 1991). Rubanza (2002: 45) goes so far as to argue that ‘the society Tanzanians work and live in does not demand the use of English’. That is why it has been claimed that English will never replace the African languages in Tanzania but remain an additional language in certain spheres (Schmied, 1991).

Usage guidance on what Biber et al. (1999) call ‘species nouns’ in English (kind/sort/type + of) has a long history, and has tended to concentrate on number concord between a determiner (e.g. this or these) and kind/sort/type in the singular or plural. Thus we have, from four different centuries.

This paper stems from the ongoing debate on the changing role and status of English in different parts of the world, with a special interest in the socio-historical background of a post-Soviet country. The international status of English has given rise to different reactions among speakers, ranging from attraction to resentment (cf. Onysko, 2009: 34). These reactions are expressed in public online discourse, which provides a rich resource of empirical evidence to study public attitudes and language ideologies. Digital media offers an especially important strategic site to disseminate ideologies and shape public opinions. This paper analyses the spectrum of discourses operating within Lithuanian digital media to perpetuate attitudes towards English and the values associated with it.

As the English language spreads and functions as an international language, scholars have been investigating some of the ideological issues behind the function and use of English in various contexts, and have pondered the future status of this global language. From early research of World Englishes (WE) the legitimacy of post-colonial Englishes, or ‘New Englishes’, as they have been termed, has emerged in scholars’ discussions (Platt, Weber & Ho, 1984; Kachru, 1985, 1992). Some have argued that the research on WE envisages the varieties of English in the outer circle contexts, such as the varieties of English spoken in Singapore, Nigeria, and India, and that people have used those varieties of English to exhibit their own identities (Kachru, 1992; Kachru & Nelson, 2006). Therefore, WE has created ‘new paradigms and perspectives for linguistic and pedagogical research and for understanding the linguistic creativity in multilingual situations across cultures’ (Kachru, 1985: 30).

There have been growing concerns in recent years about the status of English in China, the most populous country that boasts the largest number of English speakers and learners (Bolton & Graddol, 2012; Wang, 2015). Such concerns are closely associated with the rising importance of the Chinese language worldwide, which seems to signal that ‘English is no longer so important’ (Wei & Feng, 2015: 59). The Chinese government has become much more active in promoting Chinese as an international language through the establishment of Confucius Institutes worldwide. The concerns about the status of English have also been related to the growing assertiveness of China's nationalism. In September 2013, a former spokesman of the Ministry of Education appealed to the public to emancipate children from English and save the Chinese language (Zheng, 2014). In October 2013, the Beijing Municipal Commission of Education announced that the weighting of the English section in the Beijing version of Gaokao, the national university matriculation examination, would be reduced to 100 from 150, starting from 2016. In the meantime, the weighting of Chinese will be increased to 180 (Wei & Feng, 2015). In March 2016, the Beijing Education Examination Authority finalized the decision and set the weighting of Chinese and English in Gaokao to 150 in 2016 (Beijing Education Examination Authority, 2016). In addition to Gaokao, critics have openly challenged whether satisfactory College English Test (CET®) results should be used as a prerequisite for degree conferment in many Chinese universities (Xie, 2014).

Arabic has a long history of contact with languages outside the Middle East (Lapidus, 2015; Beg, 1979). In Asia, the spread of Arabic began with the trade network that connected the Middle East with South Asia, South-East, East Asia and East Africa from the fifth century. It intensified with the rise of Islam from the seventh century onwards (Morgan & Reid, 2010; Azirah & Leitner, 2016). In this paper we investigate the impact of Arabic on today's English in the context of Asian Englishes. More specifically we ask if the contact of Arabic with English in Asia has led to the creation of an Arabic-Islamic layer of English in countries that have a majority or a significant minority of Muslims. Would such a layer add a new dimension to the texture of English and be integrative across national Englishes? Or would it be divisive inside individual countries? In order to explore such issues we created a corpus of Arabic loanwords in Asian Englishes. Such a database will contribute to a better coverage of the impact of Arabic in dictionaries and to the study of English as a (multiple) national, regional and global language.

Drawing on the linguistic practices of Facebook (FB) users in Mongolia, this article illustrates how multiple local meanings are produced in the local context of Mongolia, while English oriented linguistic resources are assimilated and injected into the local language – Mongolian. The research is timely in the context of contemporary Mongolia, as English continues to spread over and is used in more diverse ways than ever. Before 1990, Mongolia was a socialist nation, the satellite of the Soviet Union, with Russian language being the most important foreign language. English and other Western languages were uncommon, and Western cultural elements were largely resisted (Marsh, 2010). Following the collapse of Soviet Union, Mongolia embraced a new democratic society in 1990, transforming itself from a socialist to a democratic country with free market economy. Mongolia embraced the linguistic and cultural diversity, and English and other foreign languages have replaced the once popular Russian language. English has now immense role in both institutional and non-institutional contexts (Dovchin, 2016a, 2016b).

Many Chinese university students are bilingual or multilingual, increasingly switching between various Chinese language varieties and the English language (Bolton, 2013; Botha, 2014, Bolton & Botha, 2015). Bolton and Botha (2015) reported that undergraduate students at a national university in China used English for a range of social activities including ‘reading’, ‘Internet searches’, ‘online socialising’ and ‘socializing with friends’, among others. There is a need to investigate the extent to which these students actually use English in these contexts, especially in the productive use of the English language in their social lives. In examining such practices, the following questions are addressed in this article: (i) How is the English language used in the personal life of a student in Southern China; (ii) What are some of the functions of spoken and written English-Chinese code-mixing and switching between members of this student's social network; and (iii) What kind of social information is conveyed through the use of English in this student's social network? In order to examine the sociolinguistic reality of language use by these students, this article explores some of the social dynamics underlying the emerging use of English-Chinese code-switching and mixing within a particular social network: that of ‘Natalie’, a Chinese university student who speaks Putonghua (Mandarin, as a first language) and members within her social network, conversing within a range of modalities. This case study focuses in particular on the use of English-Chinese code-switching and mixing practices, and the extent to which these communicative practices are shaped by various social factors, ranging from the status of English as a perceived ‘international’ language, to aspects of stance and the affective quality of the relationships between members in this social network, to the intertextual nature of many of the linguistic instances to these practices.