I had never given much consideration to the influence of the Microsoft Word grammar and style checker on the average Microsoft Word user. Perhaps that is because I never felt quite bothered by it; as someone who has studied English for almost twenty years now, I always felt I could make my own decisions when it comes to grammar and style matters in English. This feeling, however, changed recently when, in a matter of days, the Microsoft Word grammar and style checker on my recently purchased laptop started disliking all my passive constructions, and suggested that I should replace them with active clauses. I was not impressed. (And even as I am writing this, a lot of the passive constructions in this text are underlined as ‘errors’.)

English spelling has a reputation for being notoriously difficult to learn, whether for native speakers of English or for those who learn it as an additional language. An additional problem for EFL learners is that there are two somewhat different systems to choose between: the British system and the American one. As Bondesen (2004: 4) points out, ‘although the two spelling systems are much more similar than they are different, there is variation between them.’ (For surveys of some of the main differences see Trudgill & Hannah, 1994; Carney, 1997.) The spelling discrepancies between the two varieties are systematic, and originate in large part from American spelling reform as a symbol of ‘linguistic independence’ (Knowles, 1997), and from the work of early American linguists such as Benjamin Franklin and Noah Webster. The aim of this article is to investigate the spelling preferences of English users in a few regions outside Britain and the United States, and to establish whether any clear patterns of regional variation are discernible.

The German term Handy is a neat and singular creation, referring to the ‘mobile phone’ (British English) or ‘cell phone’ (American English), in itself a unique and most useful invention – handy, indeed! What is even more remarkable is the pronunciation of this term: /hεndi:/. While the second vowel mirrors the pronunciation of word-final ‘i’ sounds in German (cf. Gabi, Salami, Müsli), the ‘a’ does not. Instead, it appears to reflect a socially generalized view of what a short ‘a’ in English is supposed to sound like. And this is not the front, near-open ‘ash’ vowel [æ], the ‘standard lexical set TRAP’, as defined by Wells (1982: 129), but rather a cardinal [ε], the ‘standard lexical set DRESS’ (128), as found in German in other English borrowings: Jetlag or Jet-Lag /jεtlεg/, Gag /gεg/, relaxen /relεksn/, scannen /skεnǝn/, etc.

Spoken Nigerian English (hereafter NigE) is said to differ significantly from Received Pronunciation (hereafter RP). Several studies (e.g. Adetugbo, 1977; 2004; Atoye, 1991; Udofot, 2004) conducted particularly from segmental and suprasegmental perspectives have established this. However, not so much has been done to verify this at the level of connected speech. Yet the features of connected speech contribute significantly to the marked difference between the native and non-native English accents and are capable of impairing intelligibility between speakers of both varieties (Allen, 1961: xiv; Laver, 1968: 156). Therefore, this study investigates two connected speech features (assimilation and elision) at morpheme and word boundaries, in order to provide explanations for how spoken educated NigE approximates to and deviates from RP.

Foreign words which have been borrowed into the Japanese language, especially in the last few centuries, are commonly labelled as 外来語, gairaigo, meaning words (語, go) coming in (来, rai) from outside (外, gai). This umbrella term encompasses lexical items from numerous foreign languages, including Russian, French, Spanish, Italian, Korean, German, and English. As they undergo the borrowing process into the Japanese linguistic system, the words are likely to undergo modification, particularly in terms of their phonology, orthography, semantics, and syntax. The overwhelming majority of gairaigo have their roots in the English language; estimates put their number at around 10% of the Japanese lexicon (Daulton, 2008; Stanlaw, 2004). They include borrowings in the daily Japanese vocabulary (ニュース, nyūsu, news); ones used primarily in specialist fields, (コーパス, kōpasu, corpus), and others recorded in dictionaries but that play very little part in actual language usage (インディビデュアル, indibijyuaru, individual).

The Liverpool football manager, Brendan Rodgers, was clearly upset. He had just seen the title chances of his vibrant attacking team, scorers of more league goals than any other team in England, suffer a major setback, with defeat against Chelsea: ‘They parked two buses, rather than one’, he lamented of the Chelsea tactics in a post-match interview: ‘from the first minute, they had 10 men behind the ball. We were the team trying to win, but we just couldn't make the breakthrough’ (Bevan, 2014). A few days later, after Chelsea had lost to Atlético Madrid in the second leg of a European Champions League semi-final, after playing very defensively in the first leg, this defeat was celebrated by vengeful rival fans on twitter, drawing on the same ‘park the bus’ metaphor, e.g. ‘when you park the bus, make sure it's not near any red lines’ (the humour of which derives from Atlético playing in red and white stripes, while yellow lines in the UK forbid parking, so the bus is penalized for being in the wrong place) or ‘Atlético parked 4 Ferraris and 2 Veyrons. TOO DAMN FAST. Chelsea bus cannot catch up with the speed bro!’, where the Chelsea bus is ridiculed for simply being too slow (Footballburp, 2014).

With the global spread of English and the emergence of different varieties of English around the world, World Englishes (WE) researchers have argued for the recognition of ‘Englishes’ in the plural and called for the need to acknowledge the diversity of English (Kachru, 1985, 1997). Apart from WE researchers who are interested in investigating nation-bound varieties of English in different parts of the world, a growing number of researchers have begun to examine the phenomenon of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) communication, given the growth of intercultural exchanges worldwide (Jenkins, 2000, 2007; Seidlhofer, 2011). Whilst WE researchers are primarily concerned with how varieties of English differ from each other, ELF researchers are interested in exploring how speakers of different Englishes communicate with each other in contexts where English is the common language. For example, these ELF researchers have studied the communicative and pragmatic strategies which people from different lingua-cultural backgrounds use to communicate with one another through English as a common resource in order to achieve mutual intelligibility (Seidlhofer, 2011). Despite their different focuses, both WE and ELF researchers deal with the same global phenomenon of English use and the pluricentricity of English, and share similar ideas about the ownership of English, and language contact and change (Seidlhofer, 2011). A relatively new field, Global Englishes (GE) (Galloway & Rose, 2013, 2014; Jenkins, 2014), has thus emerged to bring together researchers from both WE and ELF. With an inclusive orientation, GE places less emphasis on native speaker English, emphasizes the diversity of English, and questions the relevance of native speaker norms for English Language Teaching (ELT) (see Galloway & Rose, 2015).

In August of 2012, Martin Wolff, an American English teacher and former lawyer who made a name for himself writing about issues related to English language education in China, passed away in Taizou, China at the age of 65 (see Lau, 2013, for a remembrance). Mr. Wolff's name will be familiar to readers of English Today and to any observers of EFL in China who follow English-language commentary on issues including Chinglish, native English speaking teachers in China, and the difficulty of creating an ideal environment for English learning in EFL contexts.

One of the most widely researched language varieties in the field of sociolinguistics is African American English (AAE), a term used to describe a range of English dialects, from standard to vernacular, spoken by many (but not all) African Americans as well as by certain members of other ethnic groups who have had extensive contact with AAE speakers. Most linguists agree that AAE developed from contact between enslaved Africans and predominantly English-speaking Europeans (who spoke a range of English vernaculars) during the early to middle period of colonization of what is now known as the United States of America. Consequently, research on the development of AAE is traditionally framed in terms of the degree of contact with white English vernaculars, both during and after AAE genesis, with white vernaculars playing a primary, if not exclusive, role (McDavid & McDavid, 1951; Mufwene, 1996; Poplack, 2000; Poplack & Tagliamonte, 2001). Though some analyses of AAE allow for substrate influence from creole and/or African languages in its development (cf. Winford, 1997, 1998; Rickford, 1998, 2006; Wolfram & Thomas, 2002; Holm, 2004), many studies place a particular focus on Earlier African American varieties or Diaspora varieties, such as the Ex-Slave Recordings, Samaná English, and Liberian Settler English rather than contemporary AAE varieties spoken within U.S. borders (cf. Rickford, 1977, 1997, 2006; DeBose, 1988; Schneider 1989; Bailey, Maynor, & Cukor-Avila, 1991; Hannah, 1997; Singler, 1998, 2007a, 2007b; Kautzsch 2002). This research has helped further linguists’ understanding of AAE yet does not reflect its full history in the United States.

Affix hopping: a new Olympic discipline or innovative brewing technique? Anglo Frisian brightening: a meteorological phenomenon occurring over the North Sea? Cranberry morph: a result of genetically-modified gardening? Well, no, as it turns out. This Dictionary ‘provides concise and clear definitions of all the terms any undergraduate or graduate student is likely to encounter in the study of linguistics and English language or in other degrees involving linguistics, such as modern languages, media studies and translation.’ It has approximately 3000 entries. In some cases, there is more than one definition of a term, e.g. three for ‘declarative’, five for ‘domain’ and three for ‘ergative’ (one of these ‘condemned by some linguists’). Many entries include examples from English and other languages; among the other languages, Russian (transliterated) and Turkish are particularly well represented - some might say over-represented. As well as terminology entries, there are entries for 246 languages, and for key figures in the history of linguistics such as Jespersen, Labov, Sapir etc.

Englicious is a new online library of resources for English language teachers that has been designed by the Survey of English Usage at UCL. It offers not only lesson plans and activities for use in the classroom, but a collection of Continuing Professional Development resources for teachers, all aimed at supporting the teaching of the new National Curriculum in England. There is a particular focus on spelling, punctuation and grammar (SPaG), and especially on preparing pupils for the Year 3 and Year 6 SPaG tests, but users will also find materials covering many other aspects of English Language at both a primary and a secondary level.