I first heard of the term ‘Chinglish’ when I was at Baiduizi (白堆子) Beijing Foreign Languages School in the 1970s, through Janet Adams’ book, From Chinglish to English. The book contained 60 short dialogues in simple American English. It was meant to be teaching us colloquial English, compared to, I suppose, the textbook English written by Chinese teachers. I found the term Chinglish rather odd, and it was an odd thing for us pupils at that particular school to be made aware of, because the school was, quite literally, the only school in China at the time where foreigners were directly teaching Chinese children foreign languages and cultures. Few of these foreign teachers had formal teaching qualifications, and they were not using any textbooks written by Chinese teachers, but in their own ways using material the school compiled specially for the pupils. It was a form of audio-lingual and direct method. The language we were taught was pretty colloquial and we did not, as far as I could tell, speak Chinglish that the examples in Adams’ book illustrated.

A plain-language campaigner takes on the traditional linguistic apparatus of government and legislation in Britain

Changing emphases in the use of English and Chinese in the recruitment of business managers in a British colony soon to be reintegrated into China

Following Elizabeth Anne Malischewski's report on the English of Newfoundland (ET24, Oct 90), a review of the many kinds of English in mainland Canada

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

Mesthrie & Bhatt (2008: 125) note that ‘all New Englishes varieties treat [θ] or [ð] as something other than an interdental fricative’. Malaysian English, as a variety of New English, constitutes an interesting case study. In Malaysian English, what Mesthrie & Bhatt (2008: 125) call ‘something other than an interdental fricative’ is realized as the dental stop [t] (e.g. thought), which in this paper is dubbed ‘a new [t]’ or presented orthographically as [th > t], whose acoustic quality is strikingly different from the ordinary alveolar stop [t] (e.g. taught).

It is now ten years since I suffered a stroke. I continue to improve, albeit much more slowly than in the first one or two years. Readers of English Today may remember (Schwyter, 2011) that I was head of the English Department at the University of Lausanne, and a graduate of both the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Cambridge. My stroke came really out of the blue; I did not have any of the early warning signs. And the only possible risk factors I was aware of were very long working hours and stress in all its forms – though ‘stress’ is not very well defined medically, being not one symptom but rather a cluster of symptoms (Kivimäki et al., 2015).

In 1977 two French men, Simon Nora, a high-level civil servant, and Alain Minc, an economist, co-authored a report entitled L'informatisation de la société to French president Valery Giscard d'Estaing, which was later translated into English and published as The Computerization of Society (Nora & Minc, 1980). However, in a paper of the same title written in English and published in 1987, Minc simply transplanted the French word informatisation directly into English rather than sticking to the old translation computerization. However that was not the first time the word informatisation was used in the English language. One year before, the word informatization had appeared in an article published in the American magazine Dædalus:

1. (1) This is what the information society is offering as a by-product of a new stage in the mechanization of the economy and the informatization of culture. […] It is no accident that the phrase “artificial intelligence” has become such an important term within the culture of those responsible for the informatization of society, because, if intelligence can be artificial, then the randomness of history will disappear (Smith, 1986: 165–6).

We are into the second decade of the twenty-first century, but grammarians still fail to distinguish properly between some and any (and their compounds – something/anything, etc.). This may in itself seem a small matter. But it is symptomatic of flaws in the academic study of language.

An analysis of the need for attention to the spoken word and phonetics in the teaching of English world-wide. It is a truism that English is increasingly becoming a world language. Even in China a ‘craze for English’ has been, in view of the fact that over 200 million children (about 20% of all children in the world) now1 learn English in Chinese schools. McArthur has estimated that c.250 million Indians use English every day. All these speakers of English use it their own way. This localisation of English has been variously detected, for example in Hong Kong. It is also well known from versions of African English and, in fact, from most English varieties that have been attributed to the ‘Outer’ or ‘Extended. However, as early as 1983 Kachru voiced a caveat: ‘A large majority of the non-native speakers of institutionalised varieties of English use a local variety of English, but when told so, they are hesitant to accept the fact’.

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.

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

An analysis of the style and content of the South China Morning Post and the Hongkong Standard.

IN 1989, English Today published an article by Sangsup Lee entitled “The subversion of Korean” (ET20 Oct 89). Dr. Lee was concerned with the importation from English into written Korean of hitherto unmarked grammatical distinctions like singular/plural, past/past perfect and active/passive. More recently, Korean scholars and commentators have become concerned over what they see as a different kind of subversion, this time lexical rather than grammatical, with the widespread adoption of English words into the Korean language.

The contents of this issue reflect the diversity of English today, as a world language, and as a language of diverse functions and possibilities, with contributions from Asia, South Africa and Europe. The first article by Kingsley Bolton looks at issues related to Asian Englishes, and attempts to survey major questions relating to the spread of English in the region. The second article by Rajend Mesthrie focuses on the role of English in contemporary South Africa and debates relating to the maintenance of African languages among young people in the post-apartheid era. One point that emerges from both articles is that English in both locations is seen as a middle-class language, or, at least, a language of middle-class aspiration.

The teaching of ‘grammar’ is a matter of controversy in educational circles. In recent decades the pendulum has swung away from traditional ‘parsing’ towards ‘language in use’ – accompanied by cheers and fears in roughly equal measure. Is compromise possible between the two extremes, or even something better than simple compromise?

English is used by more than one and a half billion people as a first, second or foreign language for communication purposes (Strevens, 1992). In this context, the purpose of teaching English has shifted from mastery of the grammatical rules to the ability to use the target language for successful communication. Consequently, the communication aspect of teaching and learning English has become the key issue in the domain of second language acquisition (Yashima, 2002: 54). Therefore, the issue of whether the learners will communicate in English when they have the chance to do so and to what extent they are willing to communicate gain importance. These questions have led to the emergence of an important construct in the field of L2 instruction, i.e. willingness to communicate (hereafter, WTC), which is defined as a learner's ‘readiness to enter into discourse at a particular time with a specific person or persons, using a L2’ (MacIntyre et al., 1998: 547). MacIntyre and his associates even proposed that WTC in L2 should be conceptualized as ‘the primary goal’ of language instruction (MacIntyre et al., 1998: 545). This paper explores the important concept of WTC by looking into Pakistani students' WTC in Canada.