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 contemporary visibility and importance of English throughout the Asian region coupled with the emergence and development of distinct varieties of Asian Englishes have played an important part in the global story of English in recent years. Across Asia, the numbers of people having at least a functional command of the language have grown exponentially over the last four decades, and current changes in the sociolinguistic realities of the region are often so rapid that it is difficult for academic commentators to keep pace. One basic issue in the telling of this story is the question of what it is we mean by the term ‘Asia’, itself a word of contested etymology, whose geographical reference has ranged in application from the Middle East to Central Asia, and from the Indian sub-continent to Japan and Korea. In this article, my discussion will focus on the countries of South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia, as it is in these regions that we find not only the greatest concentration of ‘outer-circle’ English-using societies but also a number of the most populous English-learning and English-knowing nations in the world.

This article reflects on the spread of English in South Africa, especially in the wake of the large-scale changes following the collapse of apartheid in the early 1990s. These changes allowed freer mixing of young South Africans of all backgrounds than had been hitherto possible in a segregated society. In particular, schools formerly reserved for Whites, opened their doors to initially small, then increasing numbers of pupils from other race groups: viz. Black, Coloured and Indian (this group is sometimes described as black in the general sense, in lower case, or non-whites in former apartheid-speak). The term Coloured in South Africa denotes communities of multiple ancestry, whose background encompasses the now obsolescent indigenous Khoe-San languages of the country as well as Bantu, European and Asian languages.

In this paper I wish to discuss some aspects of the current debates about the concept of English as a lingua franca. In doing so, I will use a recount of the pre-publication stages of the volume English in the World: Global Rules, Global Roles, co-edited by Rani Rubdy and myself (2006) as a starting point, to set the scene, and will move to more theoretical considerations in the second part of the paper.

English as a lingua franca: a specific example.

This article discusses the use of English as a lingua franca (ELF) by engineering students and its effectiveness in content courses at a technical university, reporting the preliminary results of part of a study that investigates authentic and high-stakes speech events at a Swedish technical university. The main aim of my research is to find out what kind of divergence from standard morphosyntactic forms of English if any leads to disturbance, i.e. breakdown, in ELF speech.

An analysis of home page spellings in relation to the accents they evoke. One of the most obvious developments connected with modern electronic communication is the opening up of an area of publicly visible language from what Sebba (2003a) calls the partially regulated zone of spelling. This zone appears in such synchronous media as instant messaging, chatrooms and ICQ (‘I seek you’) and asynchronous ones including SMS text messages, blogs, email and homepages.

An exploration of how technology is making English – and the human race – evolve. In The Dead Emcee Scrolls, poet and rap artist Saul Williams describes how his writing was transformed by a dance club experience in which the club's beats reset his biorhythms. He writes, Hail Mary. Mother of God. / Got the whole host of angels in my iPod (Williams, 2006:16). Then, later, Neck back jump kiss BREAK. / Uprock freeze pop lock BREAK. / Don't stop don't stop snap BREAK (30). These lines illustrate a growing use of urban hip-hop vernacular that has been distributed with alarming efficiency by the global music trend, through downloadable music and ipods. Music and its beats have created a rhythm to which this iGeneration dialogues, both internally and externally. Technology has given way to a continuum for emotional highs that can be sustained at any place and time. The technological revolution influences the way we socialize, collaborate and exchange acoustic information. Our changing and globalized subjectivities, as well as increasingly powerful acoustic technology, have exerted changes on the English language, making visible a significant revolution in the shaping of language within an increasingly mobile and technological world.

In this article, I look at two concepts from functional linguistic that are often confused: genre and register. I look at what the concepts mean, how they differ, and how they can be used for the analysis of texts.

Etymology and the winds of change. There's a lot of weather about these days, isn't there? Until relatively recently the weather was just what we saw when we drew back the curtains and looked out of the bedroom window in the morning, but now things have changed dramatically. These days every time we turn on the TV or open a newspaper it is quite ‘usual’ for some part of the world to be experiencing ‘unusual’ weather. The Arctic is not yet a tropical paradise but it is starting to move in that direction and England, parts of which a mere year or so ago were drying up like so many dead leaves, has in recent months seen some of the worst floods in its history. And who among us had heard of the word tsunami (Japanese for ‘harbour wave’) before the terrible events of December 2004 in Thailand and Indonesia?