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).

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.

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.

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.

What is English like in Malaysia and is it in decline?

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

There is a pervasive view, held by academics and educated laypeople alike, that the Oxford English Dictionary is a descriptive work. When plans for this great dictionary were first taking shape, the originators made their intentions very clear. Archbishop Trench, delivering the two lectures to the London Philological Society in 1857 which initiated the project, famously stated the axiom that the lexicographer ‘is a historian of [the language], not a critic’, while the Philological Society's Dictionary Committee announced to its members in a document of 1860 that their job was to list and describe words accurately and disinterestedly.

In the introduction to the book he co-edited, Social Justice through Multilingual Education, Mohanty (2009: 3) mentions how, while conducting research in a remote underdeveloped area of the Indian state of Orissa, he came across a schoolboy who asked him about the purpose of his research. The schoolboy told him that indigenous tribal people in ‘this part of the world’ were the subject of too much research, but ‘nothing has changed, nothing will’ (ibid.). Mohanty (ibid.) notes that the encounter had a lasting impact on his thinking and academic work. This is reflected in the ideas underpinning the above-named book that focuses on the question of designing education in a manner that brings social justice to learners. One of its central points concerns the role of English in the Indian education system. It focuses especially on the debate of whether an English-medium education for speakers of minority languages further endangers their language. There are two seemingly intransigent approaches to the role of English in the Indian education system that shape the instrumentality vs. identity debate in language policy research. The instrumentality approach promotes English as a means of socioeconomic mobility for disadvantaged communities (Vaish, 2005; Weber, 2014). The identity approach argues that English-medium instruction leads to cultural alienation of schoolchildren and proposes mother-tongue-based multilingual education as the alternative (Skutnabb–Kangas et al., 2009; Mohanty, 2010). In this paper, I take a closer look at this debate by examining its four key aspects, namely the ‘decolonising’ role of English, language hierarchies, the linguistic double divide, and the problem of defining the term mother tongue. On the basis of this investigation, I describe the challenges this debate poses for policymakers, and explain why the instrumentality approach is a better way of addressing these challenges.

THE ALLIANCE between US President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair during the recent Second Gulf War has appeared anomalous to many, because they belong to ideologically very different political parties. Blair, in particular, has been accused of having betrayed some of the left-wing ideas that, historically, have characterised the Labour Party. This article seeks to understand the extent to which, at least in linguistic terms, the ideas of Blair and Bush may not be as alike as one might be tempted to believe. Two small corpora of interviews and speeches were collected over a period of some six weeks, all relating to the war in Iraq. Analysis of the corpora reveals some notable differences between Blair and Bush and also shows that certain important – and more hidden – elements of discourse escape this type of investigation and need closer scrutiny.

IN 2003, a health crisis took place that severely tested Hong Kong, among a number of other parts of the world, with at 15 June a death toll in the city of 295 (out of 1,755 cases). Schools were closed, an apartment block was quarantined, and businesses suffered as people stayed home. Because no one at that time knew much about what came to be called ‘severe acute respiratory syndrome’ (shortened to both SARS and Sars), the disease offered a ‘blank screen’ onto which various fears could be projected. It seemed to spread directly to close contacts – but airborne contagion could not be ruled out. The death rate was under five percent, but there was a possibility that it could become more virulent. It might turn out like any other flu-like illness, or like the 1918 flu pandemic that killed millions. In addition, it was the perfect mechanism for Hong Kong to project its current uncertainties over its image and place in the world. Thus, the ‘pragmatic handling’ of this event in the major English language newspaper of the city, the South China Morning Post, holds much linguistic interest. The SCMP is a major English-language newspaper in East Asia.

A reply to Braj Kachru in terms of models for the use of foreign learners of the language

A response in detail to comments on the article ‘International English in the global village’ (ET58: Apr 99), further developing the idea of EIL (English as an International Languge) in ET60 (Oct 99)

In July 2016, the British media covered the events in Whitehall from the viewpoint of cats. Larry, the Number 10 Downing Street cat, along with his feline colleagues Palmerston, Gladstone and Evie, made the news when the coverage of British politics was transferred to the street fights of competing tomcats Larry, Palmerston, and Gladstone. Headlines included: ‘The feline fight for Downing Street: Larry and Palmerston face-off to be the top cat of No 10’ (Burrows, 2016) in The Daily Mail; ‘Gladstone the cat lands Treasury job’ (‘Gladstone the Cat Lands Treasury Job’, 2016) on the BBC; ‘Gladstone the cat gives Treasury some paws for thought’ (Walker, 2016) in The Guardian; and ‘Cat & Mouser. Foreign Office moggie in stand off with Larry at No10 as bid for power continues’ (Foxton & Pettitt, 2016) in The Sun.

A brief stroll about the cityscape of South Korea (henceforth ‘Korea’) testifies to Curtin's (2014) presumptive cosmopolitanism, whereby locals are expected to possess a high degree of competence in linguistically accommodating newcomers or world travellers by using English or other international languages in the linguistic landscape. One can easily spot English monolingual, Korean–English bilingual, and multilingual signs for ‘advertising billboards, street names, place names, commercial shop[s] and . . . government buildings’ (Landry & Bourhis, 1997: 25), helping visitors and new arrivals negotiate the environment without being literate in the local language, Korean. The current English-flooded linguistic landscape of urban areas is well described in J. S. Lee's (2016) study, in which an elderly interviewee confirms, ‘[E]verywhere you go, you see English – banks, markets, and things. When we go shopping these days, brand names and street signs are all in English’ (331).

Previous research on the grammar of English has led to the development of a number of useful reference books (e.g. Quirk et al., 1985; Biber et al., 1999; Huddleston & Pullum, 2002; Berry, 2012), which have substantially contributed to the teaching and learning of English language in EFL contexts. However, I found that from an (advanced) EFL learner's perspective, EFL learners are often left to our own choices when we want to express a specific meaning in spoken and/or written communication, such as acknowledgement-making for example (Hyland & Tse, 2004). One major reason for this is that these reference books have mainly focused on discussing issues such as word classes, types of clauses, tense and aspects, etc. They have not attempted to document systematically the lexicogrammatical means by which specific meanings can be expressed, though they do have selectively described some. This stimulated me to think whether it is possible to develop, what I tentatively call, a meaning-based grammar of English, i.e. a grammar which is primarily concerned with meanings and their typical lexicogrammatical realisations.

The term ‘structure in linguistics’ is mostly used to refer to a sequence of units that are in a certain linguistic relationship to one another. Thus no matter how minimal a sequence is, if it can be analysed in terms of a relationship within it, then that is a structural unit. For example, one of the structures of a noun phrase may be ‘article + adjective + noun’ as in the vicious circle (Richards & Schmidts, 2002). Structures entail relationships which may be syntagmatic or paradigmatic. According to Finnegan (2014) when we say language structure we are essentially talking about syntax, semantics and phonology of a language. When it comes to idioms the same principles apply. The structures of idioms are essentially their syntactic behaviour. This behaviour cannot be predicted solely on the basis of their form or figurative meaning alone, but it must be due to some relation between the form and meaning (Gibbs & Nayak, 1989). An idiom is an institutionalised and conventionalized sequence of at least two words or free morphemes that is semantically restricted so that it functions as a single lexical unit, whose meaning cannot or can only to a certain extent be deduced from the meanings of its constituents. (Skandera, 2003: 60). To Nurnberg, Sag and Wasow (1994), idioms are characterised as having conventional meaning, figuration, inflexibility of form, and proverbiality. Idioms have been called ‘multiword units’ (Grant & Bauer, 2004), metaphors (Gibbs, 1993; Toris, 2011), phrasemes (Howarth, 1998), fixed expressions (Moon, 1997; Carter, 1998) and formulaic expressions (Wray, 2002). Structurally, idioms do not form a unique class of linguistic items such that all idioms belong to it, but that they share many of the same properties normally associated with more literal expressions.

A ‘liberation linguist’ takes a long hard look at ‘the language on which the sun does not set, whose users never sleep’ (Randolph Quirk)

A survey of hybridization in proper names and commercial signs. CODE-SWITCHING is commonly seen as more typical of the spoken language. But there are some areas of language use, including business names (e.g. restaurants), where foreign proper names, common nouns and sometimes whole phrases are imported into the written language too. These constitute a more stable variety of code-switching than the spontaneous and more unpredictable code-switching in the spoken language.