Not long ago, I came across Tore Janson's A Natural History of Latin: The story of the world's most successful language (2004) – and I thought: ‘That's an odd claim.’ Then four things came to mind: the Roman Empire, which lasted for centuries; the Roman Catholic church, which has lasted longer; Latin as Europe's international language, and the Romance language family (‘Latin’ under other names). In the later twentieth century, the teaching of Latin itself fell on hard times, which for me – a teacher of the language some decades ago – is a matter of regret. It was a pleasure therefore to encounter Janson's book, which (mirabile dictu) came out first in Swedish then in English.

WE FACE the task of editing ET with a mixture of trepidation and excitement. Trepidation because our editorial efforts will follow those of Tom McArthur who has been editor of English Today since its inception, and who has made such an immense contribution to scholarship in this field. Indeed, it is no small measure of Tom's stature and capabilities that it has been decided at least three new editors are required to take his place. We have large shoes to fill.

It was over 30 degrees centigrade on the 16th of June 2006, but hundreds of people from various backgrounds embraced the heat and patiently queued to enter the S. H. Ho Sports Hall at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). Many had been waiting since early morning, because Professor Stephen Hawking – perhaps the best known and most influential living scientist – would be giving a lecture (‘The origin of the universe’) for the newly established Institute for Advanced Study. The IAS is dedicated to ‘the advancement of knowledge to meet the great challenges of the 21st century’, and will ‘bring together the world's most brilliant minds to drive cutting-edge discovery and scholarship for the betterment of mankind’ (IAS, 2006). The inaugural event was announced a month prior to the lecture and – despite its being broadcast live on both the TVB News Channel and Cable TV Live, as well as transmitted via an intranet relay to the seven other tertiary institutions in Hong Kong – the response for tickets was overwhelming.

THE ENGLISH curriculum in China – including the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) – has traditionally been dominated by native-speaker (NS) based pedagogical models. This is a source of many problems, ranging from learning outcome to teaching performance, and from cultural inappropriacy to speaker identity. Research in World Englishes (WE), in English as a lingua franca (ELF) and an international language (EIL), and to a lesser extent in second-language acquisition (SLA) has shown that a curriculum informed by a deficit model (by measuring learner performance using the yardstick of native-speaker-based standards) is by its very nature disempowering, and should be replaced with a model of difference, whereby learners' L1 identities and ownership of English are both respected.

THIS STUDY investigates the extent to which English is used in shop signs and windows as part of the names of businesses and other premises, and of notes, advertisements, and slogans in the city of Veles, in Macedonia: a country in south-eastern Europe established in 1991, after the disintegration of Communist Yugoslavia. It is situated in the southern part of the Balkan Peninsula, and borders on Serbia, Albania, Greece, and Bulgaria. Macedonian, a Slavonic language, is its official tongue: the native language of around 66.5% of the population, while Albanian is native to approximately 22.9%. Other languages used in Macedonia are Turkish, Serbian, Romani, and Rumanian.

Life among the language bugs. Further tales from New York City.

LANGUAGE changes all the time. Speakers produce innovations that are novel at first, but become conventionalized as they are used more and more. Some get a fair amount of press. The rise of ‘singular they’ (Has everyone got their handout?) has provoked a heated debate about proper usage (cf. Balhorn 2004). However, not all innovations have such a polarizing effect, as some enter the language below the radar of prescriptivism. As a case in point, the construction just because…doesn't mean… (as in the title of this article) is a fairly recent expression that has developed its own syntactic and semantic properties, but is not perceived as particularly deviant. This article discusses the idiosyncratic properties of this construction, draws a brief sketch of its history, and offers some thoughts on why it could establish itself without attracting much notice.

Some reflections on the nature of ELF. The focus in this article is what scholars of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) have referred to as ‘unilateral idiomaticity’ (UI): the use by speakers and writers of idiomatic language which is not understood by the other participants in the interaction. The writer will attempt to identify actual occurrences of UI, drawing on both corpus evidence and an email survey of fifty L1 and L2 ELF-users and will also draw some implications for what we mean by ‘competence’ in lingua franca contexts.

Advertising has come a long way, from pedlars in the market square extolling their goods to glossy mags full of innuendo and making extensive use of verbal and non-verbal devices to attract consumers. In India, copywriters make extensive use of English words and phrases in advertisements in a variety of ways. This paper examines the use of English in television and print advertising in the Tamil language. A cursory examination of Tamil advertising shows that the language of advertising does not follow rigid rules: it makes optimal use of possible resources from a wide variety of styles.

A CATCHWORD is a lexical item or phrase, whether created within a particular language or adopted from foreign languages through translation or transliteration or a combination of the two. In Chinese discourse, catchwords spread rapidly within a particular group of people at a particular time and in a particular context (cf. Gu Wei, 2004): a definition from work undertaken at the Institute of Applied Linguistics (founded in 2002 at the Beijing Language and Culture University). The topic is the subject of a treatise, ‘The longitudinal study of catchwords in newspapers’ and is one of the items on the agenda of the Tenth Five-Year Plan, for consideration by the Chinese Language and Characters Committee. Zhang Pu (2003), a professor of language information processing at Beijing Language and Culture University has argued that ‘[a] catchword is not only a lexical phenomenon, but also indicates people's values from a cultural psychology point of view, as well as reflecting social reality’.

Some thoughts on the new OED's view of British pronunciation.

A brief look at the debate between sociolinguists and linguists with some examples of euphemisms that have surfaced into common usage offers revealing insights reflecting contemporary social perceptions. Sociolinguists who investigate the role and function of language are not so much concerned with the way language utterances are generated and constructed as with the ways that language is used in society as a means to communicate. Traditionally, linguists steered clear of the murky waters of social relevance and social context in use, believing that it is a study that cannot yield predictions of future usage, be measured objectively, or tested for accuracy.

The chronological index is the first of three specialized indexes for ET1 to/through ET90. It is a sequence of contents lists identified by issue number and date, each list containing author's names, the titles of their articles and reviews, and subtitles and explanatory matter as appropriate. Individual entries may be more detailed than those in the thematic index (p.86) and the author index (p.109).

The thematic index consists of 18 themes, contains authors' names in chronological order by issue (and in the order of appearance in the issue in question), together with the titles of their articles and reviews, and subtitles and explanatory matter as appropriate. The entries may be checked against those in the chronological index (p. 61), by means of the shared issue numbers.

The author index is the third of three specialized indexes for ET1 to/through ET90. It lists the names of contributors in alphabetical order, together with issue numbers, titles of articles and reviews, and subtitles and explanatory matter as appropriate. The entries may not be as detailed, or exactly the same, as those in the chronological (contents) index (p. 62).