Four expatriate perspectives on the uses and prospects of the language at the time of the changeover in Britain's last Asian colony.

Intensifying adverbs are devices which scale a quality up, down, or somewhere between the two (Bolinger 1972: 17). To intensify the adjective cool, speakers of British English have a variety of functionally equivalent intensifiers at their disposal. They can use very, really, so, dead, bloody, right and well, among many others. A seemingly recent arrival to the British intensifier system is proper, as in that was proper cool. Believed to have entered English from the Latin proprius via Norman French (OED, proper), proper now has a variety of denotations in Present Day English. As an adjective, it can denote suitability (e.g., wear the proper equipment), etiquette (e.g., it wouldn't be proper to do that) and worthiness/authenticity (e.g., it's proper street food). As an adverb, proper can function as an adverb of manner (e.g., we like to do things proper in our house), and a marker of degree (e.g., he is proper tall); the degree function applying exclusively to British English. Some examples of proper intensifying adjectives from the present dataset are reported in (1).

A report on two prominent dialectal variables in England. Using rather informally collected data, The author looks here at two well-known variables in the English of England: first, whether there is a short or long vowel in words such as grass and bath; second, what regional words people know for streams. The treatment of these variables is consistent over time, and seems to have little to do with social status or carefulness of speech.

The study of lesser-known varieties of English is opening up new research. Over the last twenty years or so, the role(s) and function(s) of English around the world have received a great deal of interest from linguists concerned with research on topics as diverse as sociolinguistics, variation and change, contact linguistics, language typology, genetic linguistics, etc. Kachru's work (The Inner Circle, the Outer Circle, and the Expanding Circle) inspired others and alternative models were put forward by McArthur (1987) and Görlach (1990). Though they differ on how the varieties should be classified (varying in criteria such as geographic distribution, usage and function, development history, etc.), they share the idea that varieties of English can be grouped in first- (or native-), second- and foreign-speaker groups.

THE TEACHING of traditional grammar has been on the wane in education for the last 25 to 50 years, in the face of more interactive classrooms, more exotic developments in transformational grammar, and research suggesting that it may not play an effective role in improving student's writing. Recently, however, there has been a resurgence of interest in teaching at least some of its fundamental concepts. This new interest has taken on a more imperative bent as secondary schools and to some extent primary schools have been feeling pressure to teach basic grammatical concepts in order to prepare students for the 45 multiple-choice questions on grammar and usage in the new SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test). Teachers and schools that have not done well enough in this area will be held to account by parents and politicians, both of whom tend to believe that instruction in traditional formal grammar is the best means to this end. Teachers who send students off, without this training, to undergo the new SAT will have some serious questions to answer if those students scores are too low.

This study focuses on the residential neighbourhoods of Johor Bahru city, the administrative and business centre of the Johor Bahru region and the Malaysian state of Johor. Johor Bahru is a border town, located in the very south of peninsular Malaysia, less than one mile away from Singapore. According to City Population (2018), the Johor Bahru region has a multi-ethnic population of almost 1.4 million, comprised of native ‘Bumiputera’ (52%), Chinese (37.4%), Indian (9.9%) and ‘other’ (0.6%) citizens. Hutchinson and Bhattacharya (2019: 1) describe economic links with Singapore as ‘long standing, far-reaching, spanning trade in goods and services, as well as foreign direct investment (FDI) and movement of people’; both countries are one another's ‘second most important trading partner, in both cases surpassed only by China and outranking traditional commercial allies such as the United States and Japan’.

If you met me and listened to me speaking English, you might ask yourself why I talk so funny; why I can't find the right words; and why I make so many grammatical errors. I am, after all, the Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, and I have degrees in English language and linguistics from Cambridge University and the University of Pennsylvania.

English as a lingua franca (ELF) first emerged in the academic literature at the end of the 20th century. Since then, there has been an ever-increasing amount of research devoted to this topic. This line of research has identified new challenges that educators will likely face as their previous training and current practice might not match the changing landscape of English language use. ELF research has yielded new information related to how individuals communicate in an ELF context; therefore, most researchers have emphasized the need to fully explore the pedagogical impact of the findings from ELF research (Jenkins, 2006; Jenkins, Cogo & Dewey, 2011; Mauranen, 2012).

Semantic shifts have been explored via a range of methods (Allan & Robinson 2012). Typically, semantic shifts were usually noted or described with methods such as a literature review or dictionary checking (e.g. Blank & Koch, 1999; Stockwell & Minkova, 2001; Williams, 1976), which are very labour-intensive and time-consuming methods. Other more recently developed methods involve sociolinguistic interviews (Robinson, 2012; Sandow & Robinson, 2018). However, with the development of large-sized corpora and computational semantics, diachronic semantic shifts have started to be captured in a data-driven way (Kutuzov et al., 2018). Recently, the word embeddings technique (Mikolov et al., 2013) has been proven to be a promising tool for the tracking of semantic shifts (e.g. Hamilton, Leskovec & Jurafsky, 2016a, 2016b; Kulkarni et al., 2015; Kutuzov et al., 2017). For example, Hamilton et al. (2016b) exemplified how to use the technique to capture the subjectification process of the word ‘actually’ during the 20th century.

A consideration of how the everyday spelling system can be used more effectively than phonetic symbols in English pronunciation guides

Starts with excerpt from Jenny Cheshire, A question of masculine bias? (ET1, 1985). The author says; My 1985 article ended on an upbeat note, confidently predicting that as more people take care to remove masculine bias from their own English, so the language will gradually stop distorting our perceptions of women. The twenty-two years that have passed represent pretty much a generation of speakers, making this a good time to consider whether or not my confidence was misplaced. How successful have language reforms been?

A rebuttal of the article ‘Singlish’ by Duncan Forbes in a recent issue of ET

In most areas where English is spoken today, it is part of a multilingual context. English is one component of the sociolinguistic profile of many nations. In nations where English is a mother tongue or first language for the majority of the population, other speech communities contribute further languages to the linguistic environment. And in contexts where the majority speak a language other than English, it may serve as a language of administration or as a medium of instruction in the educational domain. Over the past few decades, speech communities have also increasingly been influenced by languages usually spoken outside the community. A particular case is the spread of English via music and films through the radio, television, and the internet. As a result, English is part of the linguistic repertoire of many nations and the individuals living in them. These multilingual contexts have in common the fact that individuals can draw on the various languages to meet their diverse communicative needs and to construct their identities. This article describes how this may result in changes to the English language and even in the emergence of new linguistic forms, with particular reference to the post-colonial nation of Kenya.

A growing number of countries internationalise their curriculum by switching to English-medium Instruction (EMI). This strategy is particularly popular in China, where more and more universities offer English-medium courses to raise their international profile (Macaro et al., 2018). Sociolinguistic accounts have been reported on how EMI is perceived and enacted in China as a whole (Hu & Lei, 2014; Fang, 2018), or in particular disciplines, such as the humanities, business (Botha, 2014), medicine and surgery (Botha, 2016). However, relatively little attention has been given to EMI in China's music education, where English is used differently from the educational settings previously studied. In music education, instructors invariably use both verbal and non-verbal communication to explain and demonstrate a musical technique (Long et al., 2012).

In recent years, there has been a heated discussion as to the quality of English education in mainland China. The central argument has been that, although children begin to learn English at the age of ten, and continue the study throughout their education, when they communicate with English native speakers they have difficulties both in understanding and in making themselves understood. English native speakers may also have difficulty understanding them, for reasons that include direct translation from Chinese into English, especially as regards everyday Chinese administrative and technical terms. This paper analyses this problem in terms of both vocabulary acquisition and translation.

We read with interest Hongyuan Wang's article ‘Loans to the Middle Kingdom revisited’ (ET77 Jan 04). This is a response to, and continuation of, Elizabeth Malischewski's 1987 article ‘Loan words to the Middle Kingdom’ in ET12, the author expresses the hope that this description ‘might serve as a useful addition to’ it (Wang 2004:47). We are as delighted to see the topic revisited after sixteen years as the editor, who states that Wang's article is ‘a valued addition to our series on English, China, China English, and Chinglish, and to Malischewski's original piece’ (McArthur 2004:2). However, we found that quite a number of words listed in the article are not loanwords, because of misunderstandings regarding loan word and loan translation in English and wailaici and wailaiyu, equivalents of loanword in a broader sense in Chinese, as a result of which his classification of the borrowings is confusing. The article has also tended to over-simplify the complex situation of such borrowings in Chinese and as such is misleading. We would like in this paper to clarify some of the misunderstandings and offer a brief introduction to the study of English borrowings in Chinese, a field which began c.1913 with the publication of Evan Morgan's Chinese New Terms & Expressions in Shanghai.

Italians' zeal for lacing their language with English words is well-known and on-going. Both everyday conversation and the mass media make widespread use of English terms and expressions, but their unphonetic spelling and pronunciation – full of insidious traps round every syllable – can create misunderstanding, confusion, and much humour, because Italians often tend to pronounce these international imports as they are written, much as they do in their mother tongue: either that, or they over-generalize the rules they they've learnt. A TV programme may be interrupted to announce a news flash that however comes out meatier, as ‘news flesh’. When giving business news, the phrase fiscal drag (whatever that may mean) becomes a truly obfuscating ‘fiscal drug’. And fashion news informs us of an exclusive ‘pullover’ by Missoni, whose stress shift unfortunately turns it into an order (from policeman to motorist): ‘pull over’.

Despite the recent publication of a Canadian style guide and The Oxford Canadian Dictionary, a claim that there is no such thing as a distinctively Canadian variety of English