Nothing in the world is absolute. Everything is relative, cultural difference being no exception. Culture, as the total pattern of human behavior and its products, oversteps geographical limits and historical conditions in many ways, and it is characterized by its strong penetrativeness and fusibility. The advancement of the globalized economy and the rapidity and ease of modern communication, transportation and mass media have resulted in an ever-increasing exchange between cultures, unprecedented in scale, scope and speed. Consequently, an increase in universality and reduction in difference between cultures is an inevitable trend. It is no surprise to see phenomena characteristic of one culture existing considerably in another. As a result, some people even fear that the world will become a dull place when all the different nationalities behave exactly alike. The exploration of cultural difference conducted under the condition of tremendous exchange between cultures might be misled into the pitfall of generalization or absolutization. Nevertheless, the “cultural sediment” formed through long-range accumulation is not to be easily removed and the cultural tradition handed down from generation to generation shows great consistency and continuity.

With the popularisation of the Internet, the use of e-mails and computer-based chats (CBCs) has increased dramatically among university students. An interesting feature of such communication, however, is that a written medium is treated like speech (cf. Maynor, 1994). Conversations turn into notes where grammatical accuracy and conventional formalities take a backseat to instant communication. In the case of on-campus CBCs, informality and a certain disregard of the conventions of standard English are all the more manifest.

It is commonly believed in Hong Kong that this general freedom to write ‘bad English’ has encouraged the habit of randomly incorporating Cantonese words into English e-mails. Yet an examination of students' e-mails and icq (‘I Seek You’) communications reveals that far from ‘polluting’ their English by substituting Cantonese words haphazardly for English ones, or by applying Cantonese structures to their English writing, students tend to incorporate certain kinds of Cantonese words systematically into their texts for specific identifiable purposes.

A response to the articles on e-mail by Li Lan and Li Yongyan in ET64 (Oct 00). This article discusses what has been happening to e-mail English and what might yet happen as a consequence to off-line English. The paper first examines the effect on the use of English in the electronic medium. It then talks about the influence of e-mail English on the off-line use of English, and closes with a description of the interface between English and Chinese in e-mails.

Li Yongyan focuses on the discursive aspect of e-mail messages in her article. She mainly talks about styles and coherence in e-mail writing. In contrast, Li Lan primarily describes the linguistic aspect of e-mail English. Her article discusses both the conversational style of, and innovations and distinctive usages in, e-mail English. Both also describe English-Chinese code-mixing in their articles, as well as the emergence of novel linguistic features in e-mail English, such as the omission of the sentence subject.

The rapid spread of Information Technology (IT) in recent years and the role it plays in many aspects of our lives has not left language use untouched. A manifestation of this role is the degree of linguistic creativity that has accompanied technological innovation. In English, this creativity is seen in the semantic relabeling of established terms such as web, bug, virus, firewall, etc. Another strategy favored by IT lexifiers is the use of lexical items clustered in heavy premodifying groups, as in random access memory, disk operating system, central processing unit, and countless others (White, 1999). In brief, IT technology – and in particular, the World Wide Web – has made it possible for users to break free of many linguistic codes and conventions (Lemke, 1999).

For the linguist, the happy outcome of the spread of IT is that it has created an opportunity to analyze the simultaneous development of technology and the language that encodes it and the influence of one on the other (Stubbs, 1997). To linguists of a broadly functional disposition, this is a chance to confirm the observation that scientific language differs substantially from everyday language. More importantly, it is also a chance to verify the claim made chiefly by Halliday & Martin (1993) that this difference in the characteristics of each of these discourses stems from a radical difference between scientific and common sense construals of the world around us.

The vowel phonemes of English conventionally subdivide into ‘pure’ vowels and diphthongs, and diphthongs are a well recognised component of the system. Triphthongs are a different story. The very word ‘triphthong’ sounds faintly preposterous, as if somebody has dared a coinage with ‘diphthong’ and wants to have some further fun. Without wishing to prejudge the question of the actual existence of triphthongs, I shall use the word to refer to a sequence of three vocalic elements that may be interpreted as a single unit and, as a phoneme, has a contrastive function.

This paper discusses pidgin English, and far from calling it a corrupt and decayed form of the English language (as has been the case in many well-meaning literary circles), shows that pidgin has poetic resources capable of expressing a wide range of mentalities, tastes, customs, and even fashion itself. Because of this flexibility, pidgin reveals a high degree of closeness to the original speech patterns, notably in an attempt to preserve syntactical equivalents. Thus, if pidgin is adopted as a lingua franca throughout the sub-Saharan African region, it will enable Africans to take new pride in their artistic traditions and non-Africans to share in the joy and excitement of Africa's art.

Comment: ‘-(g)lish names’ and other matters, Tom McArthur; Usage: English in bereavement advertising in India, Raja Ram Mehrotra; Lexicon: OED update; Usage: Pidgin English in anglophone Cameroon, Paul Mbufong; Education 1: Technology helps dyslexic and dyspraxic children, Sheila Burke; Education 2: World English: A blessing or a curse? (European Year of Languages, 2001), Tom McArthur; Post