THIS paper describes the frequency of languages other than Portuguese in shop signs located in six towns, all in northwestern Portugal and close to the border with Spain, each ranging in size from a year-round population of 600 to one of 4,400. One of the towns, Fermentelos, lies slightly southeast of Aveiro. The other five – Afife, Arcos de Valdevez, Caminha, Ponte da Barca, and Vila Praia de Ancora – are north of Porto. The most frequently occurring non-Portuguese phrase in this six-town project was snack bar.

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.

AILING ZHANG makes a distinction between two kinds of English in China ‘to emphasize the absolute necessity of Standard English to be taught, instead of other varieties claimed by some linguists to be equally good’.

An account of the curious impact of the study of English on the use of Korean.

The times and the language are a-changin'. But how much and in how many ways?

An expansion on some grammatical points raised by Alan S. Kaye in ‘Is English diglossic?’ (ET28, Oct91).

FOR SOME time, a growing chorus of voices has been expressing concern over the way in which English is promoted by English-speaking countries, primarily the UK, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand (cf. Phillipson 1992, Pennycook 1994 & 1998, Canagarajah 1999, Skutnabb-Kangas 2000). Identified by Kachru (1985) as the ‘inner circle’ countries, these make vast profits from linguistic sales to ‘outer circle’ countries such as Singapore and India – despite the fact that the latter have largely developed their own Englishes – and even more so to the ‘expanding circle’ of countries which require access to the default international lingua franca.

In the description of such usages as argue away, measure up and zonk out, a venerable orphan comes in from the linguistic cold

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.

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

While code-switching is quite a common phenomenon, this paper seeks to investigate a common but underreported use of code-switching. In this paper, I focus on the use of code-switching from Korean to English in South Korean TV dramas. The paper first briefly discusses the literature on the connotations of English language in the Korean media and then proceeds to focus on code-switching using data sampled from three Korean TV dramas. The previous literature (e.g. Lee, 2006; Park, 2006, 2009) which discusses the use of the English language in the Korean media, argues that English carries connotations of modernity and power and this subsequently helps to construct a modern identity for Koreans. However, while Korean music, advertisements and comedies have been discussed with regard to their switches to English, there is little, if any research that focuses on switching to English in Korean TV dramas. The argument put forth in this paper is that switching to English in this context is often a means to reflect an identity of power for the characters and this subsequently might be a reflection of the power and dominance that the English language has in Korean society. In turn, this contributes to conclusions that a modern Korean identity of power derives from being proficient in English.

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.

The present form of the English language in Nigeria is the outcome of its contact with the indigenous languages of the region: a confirmation of the truism that languages in contact influence each other. When English was initially introduced through trade, then entrenched through colonialism, it was ‘derobed’ of its British flavour. Paradoxically, such a state of affairs brings to mind a statement by Enoch Powell, a professor of Classics and former Conservative member of the British Parliament, who noted, rather eccentrically: ‘Others may speak and read English – more or less – but it is our language, not theirs. It was made in England by the English and it remains our distinctive property, however widely it is learnt or used’ (as quoted in Kujore 1995:367).

In the last 20 years, the term ‘China English’ has been advanced as the most appropriate name for the variety of English that better expresses Chinese sociocultural realities and distinguishes the variety from the pejoratively perceived ‘Chinese English’ or ‘Chinglish’ (Du & Jiang, 2003; Jiang & Du, 2003; Meilin & Xiaoqiong, 2006). The demarcation between ‘China’ and ‘Chinese’, it is argued (Wang, 1991; Li, 1993; He & Li, 2009), is necessary if English as used by Chinese speakers is to gain recognition as something other than ‘bad’ English. Although no consensus regarding the definition of China English has yet formed among those who argue for the adoption of ‘China English’, characteristics of the variety can be inferred and the characteristics are used to confirm that ‘China English’ as a legitimate variety does exist, that it exhibits features of linguistic creativity rather than interference, suggesting a nativized educated variety (Berns, 2011). However, in my view, arguments in favor of a new term, ‘China English’, have more to do with renaming and rebranding and less with providing new insights into the nature of this English.

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.

The article discusses seven months as a teacher at a university for women in the UAE. It describes difficulties encountered while teaching English, especially in relation to the kinds of cultural and social constraints experienced by most students in the Gulf nations and particularly women. Although young women are encouraged to pursue higher education and are enthusiastic about the opportunities that are now available, there is little familial or cultural support for their endeavors. In addition, role models of women who have succeeded professionally in a field requiring higher education are extremely rare. Women are expected to marry at a young age and to produce children as quickly as is physically possible. An employment situation that necessitates women working side by side with male colleagues is generally unacceptable. The segregation of men and women is deeply embedded in this Arabic culture and, despite the best efforts of educators and more progressive families, the majority of young women succumb to the cultural and social expectations of their families and their communities.

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.

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.

The number of Korean students studying abroad has dropped drastically in the last decade. In 2014, 10,907 students ranging from age six to 18 went abroad, just over one-third of the total in 2006 when the number hit its highest peak at 29,511 (Korea Herald, 2015). There are a number of reasons for this apparent trend. First, study abroad students have a hard time adjusting themselves to life in the host country, and it is also common for them to experience readjustment difficulties when returning to Korea. Second, parents believe that children can learn ‘authentic’ English in Korea: various English immersion programmes are now available for young learners. Third, studying abroad no longer guarantees children's future success. Returnees are not preferred in the job market due to their in-between identity.