The growing demand for English in parts of Cameroon that were once firmly under French influence.

In the last decade, multilingual Cameroon has awoken to a new linguistic reality characterised by reconstructing linguistic identities in order to fit in the global space. This is seen in more and more urban Francophones pursuing English medium education and the Anglophones consolidating their identity alignment to the English language. From a sociolinguistic perspective, this paper evaluates the prominence and implications and prospects of this rush for English education in contemporary urban Cameroon. The case study method and cost-benefit analysis confirm that there is a fast growing interest in English medium education and the beginnings of English as an L1 in urban Cameroon. The result is a paradoxical sociolinguistic outcome: first of all, there is a shift by the majority Francophone group, who are shifting from a predominantly French medium to an English medium education, principally for economic benefits. Secondly, the Anglophones are increasingly shifting to English as an L1, without losing French as they live in basically French-speaking urban zones. This state of language shift implies that there will subsequently be bilingualism without diglossia in Cameroon's two official languages, and loss of the long-standing French language hegemony in Cameroon. At the same time, this shift threatens Cameroon's ancestral languages, forcing them increasingly into attrition and possibly endangerment.

Some reflections of a practising non-native speaking English teacher. Ten years ago, in a job interview for a teaching post in a government school, The writer was asked: ‘Do you think the government should recruit more native English-speaking teachers so as to boost the English standard of Hong Kong students?’ My answer took the interviewers by surprise: ‘No, I think the money should be spent on training local teachers who are more able to understand the needs of students learning English as a second or foreign language. I believe good English doesn’t necessarily mean British or American English. If we see English as an international language, anyone capable of using it as an effective communication tool can potentially be a good English teacher.’ I got the job, but there are still a few questions in my mind.

An account of how lexical items once confined to one gender have begun to be used for both in American English

Attitudes to English Usage is the title of a book published in 1970 by W. H. Mittins, Mary Salu, Mary Edminson and Sheila Coyne from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne that reported on an enquiry held among some 450 informants concerning the acceptability of 55 usage items. These items had been selected because they were at the time ‘subject to variation in practice and dispute in theory’ (Mittins et al., 1970: 4), and they include sentences like He refused to even think about it, It looked like it will rain and Everyone has their off-days. In each case the offensive feature had been highlighted so that informants would know what they had to comment on: to even think (a split infinitive), the use of like for as if, and of their with a singular antecedent (everyone). For fifty sentences the informants had to indicate acceptability in informal speech, informal writing, formal speech and formal writing, and for the remaining five only for informal and formal writing, since usage of these items was believed to be restricted to writing (1970: 4). The sentences were subsequently ranged from highest general acceptability (did not do as well as) to lowest (veryunique), and correlations were calculated with the occupation of the informants (students, teachers, lecturers, examiners and non-educationists), while the items were also classified as colloquial (pretty reliable), etymological (data is), grammatical (did it quicker) and lexical/semantic (inferred/implied), or as language myths, ‘where the censorious tend to invoke a prescription of dubious authority’ (dangling participles) (1970: 15). The main part of the book dealt with the individual constructions, analysing the reasons for their status as debated usage items and providing further historical context in the process.

The world Englishes (WEs) paradigm describes the spread of English in three concentric circles (Kachru, 1985) – the Inner Circle (e.g., the USA, UK, and Australia), the Outer Circle (e.g. India, Philippines, and Singapore), and the Expanding Circle (e.g. China, Indonesia, and Thailand). With Englishization and nativization outside the Inner Circle and the changing demographics of English users (e.g. non-native speakers [NNSs] considerably outnumber the native speakers [NSs] in the Inner Circle [Crystal, 1995; Graddol, 1999], the WEs research strongly advocates to recognize the NNS varieties. Until today, the WEs paradigm has not only posed challenges to, but also encouraged changes in, the language testing (LT) profession that has been traditionally relying on the Inner Circle standard (e.g., Kachru, 1985; Lowenberg, 2002; Davies, Hamp–Lyons & Kemp, 2003; Hu, 2012; Brown, 2014).

A report on the intricate bilingual word-play taking place in the naming of commercial products in Japan

Korea has long been recognized as host to an English ‘fever’ (Kim, 2013; J. K. Park, 2009; Shim & Park, 2008), the intensity of which is such that ‘the entire nation, from the president to average citizens, is emotionally and discursively invested in globalization and English language education’ (Lee, 2011: 146). Many universities have minimum TOEIC/TOEFL scores as a graduation requirement (J. S. Y. Park, 2009: 42), and of Koreans who took the TOEIC exam in 2016, more than eight out of ten were re-taking the test (Educational Testing Services, 2017). It was estimated that by 2006, Koreans were spending up to $752 million a year on English proficiency tests alone (Song, 2011: 38). The question of who is able to speak English is clearly not a trivial one.

An assessment of how an electronic network that originated in the United States using only American English has become a global resource

Arab Americans comprise one of the fastest growing immigrant groups in the United States. Like many of the other groups discussed in the articles in this issue, we know almost nothing about the linguistic practices of Arab Americans. This paper discusses one aspect of language use among U.S.-born and immigrant Arab American youth living in Dearborn, Michigan. I show how the participants in this study use a vowel that is part of the Northern Cities Shift (NCS), a widespread regional sound change in the United States. This study and others like it have repeatedly shown that fine-grained differences in the pronunciation of vowels are a rich resource for the expression of social identities and distinctions (Eckert, 2000; Hay and Drager, 2007; Dodsworth, 2008). Until recently, most studies investigating regional sound changes had not considered the social patterning of these variables among minority speakers. This lack of attention may stem from longstanding views that use of these variables is limited to white speakers (Labov, 2001). This study shows that Arab Americans in Dearborn are making use of NCS variables to express social differences that are not related to mainstream white majority speakers but based on local social information and categories. In the remainder of this paper I describe the community and research site, then present and discuss the results of my statistical analysis.

THE LIFE of a language involves relationships between linguistic elements and extra-linguistic contexts. The linguistic elements are varied and multiple, involving both written and spoken symbols and grammars, while the extra-linguistic contexts are the innumerable societies, cultures, and sub-cultures of humankind, including its worlds of reality, imagination, and ideology. This article discusses invented languages, partly in order to explore the motivations and schemes of their inventors and partly to compare languages created for international use (often called international auxiliary languages or IALs) with English, which itself functions as an IAL but is very much an uninvented language.

IN RECENT years, the ‘Information Age’ has often been compared to the period when printing first developed (cf. Dewar 1998). During both the printing revolution (15th century) and the electronic revolution (later 20th century on), technological developments have been at the forefront of a transformation in the spread and availability of information. The introduction then widespread use of print six centuries ago led to changes not only in society's management of information but also in language itself. Comparably, present-day information technology has made for easy and rapid access to enormous amounts of information, with hotly debated consequences regarding copyright, censorship, and the communication of information.

Konglish is a blend of Korean and English found throughout South Korea, and often suffers for lack of prestige amongst Koreans. The primary aim of this article is to determine the reasons behind Konglish's low social status in Korea. I begin my investigation by exploring Korean public space as linguistic space, and examining in what social and cultural capacities Koreans use English, Mandarin, Korean, and Konglish. I then shift in part II to discuss perceptions of Korean and English inside Korea. Having analysed Koreans’ attitudes towards Konglish's parent languages, I discuss in part III why Konglish struggles for social legitimacy, despite its ubiquity. In the course of this investigation it will become clear that Koreans often deride Konglish for its ease of use. Because one absorbs it organically through cultural exposure rather than hours of study and millions of won in tuition fees, Konglish accords none of the prestige that comes with Standard English; meanwhile, Konglish's mixed nature means not only that it cannot benefit from the national pride Koreans associate with ‘pure’ Korean, but also that this pride harms Konglish's reception throughout the country.

The UK is facing important changes in the near future, with Brexit, i.e. the UK leaving the European Union (EU), looming ever more closely on the horizon. These important political and economic changes will certainly have an influence on Europe as a whole, and have had linguistic consequences for the English language, such as Brexit-related neologisms (Lalić-Krstin & Silaški, 2018). As Modiano (2017a) suggests, Brexit might also have an influence on the status of the English language in the EU, in particular with regard to the dominance of native speaker varieties. In this article, we discuss the possibility of the use of a neutral European English variety in the EFL classrooms of two EU member states, i.e. Sweden and Germany. Based on a survey among 80 practitioners in secondary schools (first results were presented in Forsberg, Mohr & Jansen, 2019), the study investigates attitudes towards target varieties of English in general, and European English or ‘Euro-English’ (cf. Jenkins, Modiano & Seidlhofer, 2001; Modiano 2003) in particular, after the referendum in June 2016.

English language policy in Taiwan has undergone major changes at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The national policy of promoting English and the extension of English-language education at the elementary level has inevitably had a great impact on Taiwan's education system and the status of English in Taiwan (see Chern, 2003; Hung, 2003; Chen, 2006). While the global spread of English has been taking place via national policy and cultural institutions such as schools, a relevant question is how the spread of English is perceived and what responses are made by individuals in Taiwan.

Taking as our starting-point the results of an investigation conducted on data collected in the 1950s for the Survey of English Dialects (SED) (Glauser, 1985), in this paper we look at data collected between forty and fifty years after the SED to examine variation in the semantic fields BOYS/GIRLS; SONS/DAUGHTERS. Glauser's SED data consisted of single-word responses mainly from older male informants to questions such as: ‘Children may be of either sex: they're either….boys, or …. girls.’1 (Orton, 1962: 89), but we have examined data from two more recent sources – the Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (DECTE) and Burbano-Elizondo's (2008) study of linguistic variation in Sunderland – in order to ascertain which words occur in these semantic fields. Whilst Glauser's observation that lad is elicited more frequently than lass is borne out, we find that, in the sense of ‘sexual partner’, where these words do not appear in the SED data, lass is used more frequently than lad in the more recent data from Tyneside and Sunderland. We also find that, whilst there is no clear correlation between use of the words lad and lass and the social class of speakers, males use both these words more than females.

English today is a conglomerate of a vast array of different varieties of English. This linguistic diversity, captured most prominently in the World Englishes paradigm (Kachru, 1985), poses a challenge to English language teaching (ELT) in countries where English does not have an official status (i.e. there is no codified local norm) and is learned as a foreign language, such as Armenia or Germany. Learners of English in these countries are norm-dependent on ‘standard’ Englishes spoken as a native language (Kachru, 1985) as the models of teaching (Galloway & Rose, 2015: 196–198; Matsuda and Friedrich, 2012: 21–22). These ‘Standard Englishes’ are abstract and idealized concepts as they are never fully realized by speakers in their ‘clearly delimited, perfectly uniform, and perfectly stable’ (Milroy, 2001: 543) form. However, they are powerful ideas in the minds of speakers – and learners in particular – as the models of language teaching. Standard British (StBE) and Standard American English (StAmE) and their associated prestige accents Received Pronunciation and General American traditionally serve as the models of language teaching for learners (Kirkpatrick, 2007: 184–189; Phillipson, 1992: 136–172). StBE has long been considered the global prestige accent variety but Bayard et al. (2001: 41–43) hypothesize that it is gradually replaced by StAmE due to the global availability of the US media.

It is often observed that in modern English no political movement has created an internet jargon with the speed and range of the alt-right. Recently, however, we are seeing a specifically misogynist strand of this jargon shoot up, coming from the growing online anti-feminist network known as the Manosphere, and specifically its popularly best known outpost of ‘incels’. The neologisms being produced by incels have come to form a true cryptolect, developing at a rate that almost escapes linguistic description; at the same time, the elements of this cryptolect are quickly infiltrating broader popular culture and global vernacular contexts, from social media to Urban Dictionary (Ging, Lynn & Rosati, 2020).

Situated at the extreme south west periphery of the British Isles, Cornwall's territorial isolation bred cultural isolation which has been construed and reconstrued over time, giving Cornwall a distinctive cultural flavour. Initially borne out by facts of geography, Cornwall, or ‘Kernow’, experiences a dynamic yet enduring peripheral existence (see Payton, 1992). This article explores how Anglo-Cornish dialect words can be used as a means of identity construction, that is, how a Cornish way of speaking is used to construct identities associated with a Cornish way of being. I hypothesise that those who desire greater Cornish autonomy are more likely to use Anglo-Cornish dialect lexis than those who favour further socio-cultural assimilation with England.

It is well known that native speakers of English around the globe are by far outnumbered today by speakers of English as a second or as a foreign language (Crystal, 2008). English is thus regularly used as a lingua franca, i.e. an intermediary language used between speakers of various linguistic backgrounds, for transnational and intercultural communication in many domains of life (such as business, diplomacy, higher education, tourism, etc.). The study of conditions of using ‘English as a Lingua Franca’ (ELF), intrinsically connected to the fields of World Englishes and Second Language Acquisition (Schneider, 2012), has come to be a booming sub-field and topic of research in English linguistics over the past few years, as is indicated by the publication of a few textbooks, the establishment of a conference series, and the launch of a scholarly journal (JELF). The focus of these approaches has been on the functions, usage conditions, and practical applications of ELF (Seidlhofer, 2011), and also, though to a lesser extent, on any characteristic structural properties (Dewey, 2007; Jenkins, Cogo & Dewey, 2011; Cogo & Dewey, 2012). Clearly, ELF can be found in a wide range of possible applications and contexts, as Cogo & Dewey (2012: 31) have stated: ‘As a natural phenomenon of sociolinguistic variation, ELF includes all types of communicative events, from the transactional to the interactional, and various possible settings, such as the institutional and the casual.’ It is considered to be independent of the interactants' native-speaker status: prototypically ELF involves communication between non-native speakers of English, but sometimes native speakers participate in such encounters as well. It centrally involves accommodation, negotiation and adjustment of forms to achieve successful communication.

To what extent does the distinctiveness of Nigerian English come through in text messages? In the history of the English language certain developments have left significant linguistic marks on the language. As new developments and cultural forms occur, new words and styles of expression evolve with them and spread. This is true of the new linguistic style that is associated with the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) revolution in Nigeria since 2001. GSM has brought with it a variety of English that is situationally distinctive and context. GSM came to Nigeria with the licensing of MTN and Econet (now Celtel) in 2001 during the Obasanjo administration, after many years of decaying telecommunication infrastructure. Within a short time after the introduction of mobile telecommunication, almost a million subscribers mainly in the cities made a rush at possessing mobile phones and were willing to pay any tariff. N50 (50 naira) were paid per minute per call as against N15 per text message. This was said to be the highest rate in Africa, causing many subscribers to opt for text-messaging as a cheaper alternative.