Gobbledygook, jargon, bureaucratese and legalese – people rail against them all. Can anything be said objectively about these ‘symptoms’ of a ‘diseased’ and ‘degenerate’ English? Is there, indeed a case for surgery?

Today it is difficult to find a truly atrocious British government form being issued to the public. OUT are the acres of grey small print, the 60-word sentences, the endless use of that bureaucratic knee jerk, the passive verb. IN are forms that look good, read well, and even save money through their greater efficiency.

Barry Tomalin, presenter of BBC English by Radio's weekly magazine Speaking of English, recently raised some grammatical issues with DR ROBERT BURCHFIELD, Editor of the Supplement of the Oxford English Dictionary.

The cliché is not loved, and usage books do not have much to say in its favour. Is it possible, however, that the 20th century is being unfair to a venerable cultural device?

Together, English and Spanish head the list of multinational languages. Inevitably they meet – in Puerto Rico, California, Florida and elsewhere – and the results are kinds of ‘Spanglish’ and englañol. Here we take a look at what has happened in South Texas.

All published works in English are planned, but some are more planned than others – right down to the last word. TOM McARTHUR takes a look at the tradition of shaping words to fit an educational need.

Like Russian and Arabic but unlike French and Japanese, spoken English is a flow of stronger and weaker syllables. Usually the stronger syllables are ‘obvious’, but sometimes they are not – and foreign learners always have problems. The stress patterns of English are complex – they shift with the passing of the years and are by no means the same everywhere.

English draws heavily from other languages for its vocabulary. A recent book that gives plenty of room to this propensity for borrowing is ROBERT CLAIBORNE's Our Marvelous Native Tongue: The Life and Times of the English Language (Times Books, New York, 1983, $17.25; available in the UK from Abner Stein, Roland Gardens, London SW7 3PH). Excerpted from it here are Claiborne's observations on words of Native American origin, in the chapter entitled ‘English leaps the Atlantic’.

In the fifth in our series on the literature(s) of English around the world, a teacher and examiner takes us back to basics with the most fundamental question of them all.