The rupture between China and the former Soviet Union in the 1960s saw English replace Russian to become the most important foreign language in mainland China, and with the implementation of opening-up in the late 1970s, English was used more and more widely, especially in foreign-related public service areas. The use of English in China was accelerated by the 2008 Beijing Olympics and 2010 Shanghai Expo. However, there were various problems with the use of English, notably in bilingual public signs (BISU-CSRC, 2007; Wang & Zhang, 2016) (see Figure 1). As a result, the derogatory word ‘Chinglish’ was invented by Pinkham (2000) as an umbrella term for all kinds of problematic English used by Chinese people. Since 2006, in response to this situation, the provincial and central governments in the country have made great efforts to offer guidelines for the use of English in public signs. For example, on June 20, 2017, the Ministry of Education (MOE), the State Language Commission (SLC) and the Standardization Administration of China (SAC) jointly issued the Guidelines for the Use of English in Public Service Areas (GUEPSA) which came into effect on December 1, 2017.

Will World English go the way of Latin? The phrase ‘Latin analogy’ was, it seems, coined by McArthur (1987), who distinguished a pessimistic or what he called ‘Babelesque’, perspective from an optimistic and a neutral (or pragmatic) perspectives to the comparison. The comparison continues to be made even today and generally it comes with a dire warning: the days of English as an international language, or a lingua franca for peoples from different parts of the world, are numbered. It will, sooner or later, break up into a number of different, mutually incomprehensible languages just the way good old Latin did. What is worse, in some cases this apprehension seems only to grow with the passage of time.

The last three decades have witnessed an increase in the number of middle-class people in China. Some of them spend money like water, have garish tastes and lack ‘good’ cultural traits and sophistication; they are called tuhao in Chinese (Cai, 2014). Others, in particular most of the middle-aged women, who are called dama, ‘live a happy life with plenty of free time and money’, investing in gold, bitcoins and overseas property markets and enjoying noisy square dances. (dama is a term coined by The Wall Street Journal) (Zhou & He, 2015). It was rumored around the end of 2013 that Chinese words, such as tuhao, dama and hukou ‘household registration’ would enter into the Oxford English Dictionary (Gui, 2013), which was still not the case when we searched the online Oxford Dictionaries for these words in 2015 (oxforddictionaries.com, 2015).

Nigerian English (NigE) is a second language (L2) variety of English which has been domesticated, acculturated, and indigenised (Taiwo, 2009: 7; Jowitt, 2019: 26), due to its co-existence with about five hundred indigenous Nigerian languages (see Eberhard, Simons & Fennig, 2019). It is the language of education, governance, law, the media, and formal financial transactions in Nigeria. Based on Schneider's (2003: 271) Dynamic Model of the evolution of the New Englishes, NigE can be located at the late stage of nativisation, while recent studies show that it is on the verge of entering endonormative stabilisation (Gut, 2012: 3; Unuabonah & Gut, 2018: 210). Although NigE is an L2, there is a growing number of young people who speak it as a first language (L1; see Jowitt, 2019: 16; Onabamiro & Oladipupo, 2019). NigE includes sub-varieties which are classified based on different factors such as region/ethnicity, and educational attainment (Banjo, 1971; Jibril, 1986; Udofot, 2003). Although Udofot (2003: 204) suggests that the sub-variety used by Nigerians who have been educated in tertiary institutions should be taken as the standard variety, Jowitt (1991: 47) opines ‘that the usage of every Nigerian user is a mixture of Standard forms’ and non-standard forms. The data used in this paper are a mix of both standard and non-standard forms.

A consideration of whether EE could conceivably be an alternative to RP as a teaching model.

Since David Rosewarne first coined the term in 1984, much has been written about Estuary English (EE). The definition usually given of Estuary English is that if we can imagine a continuum with Received Pronunciation (RP) at one end and Cockney (an urban accent of London) at the other, then Estuary English is in the middle. This definition is restated by Wells (1998-9) as ‘Standard English spoken with the accent of the southeast of England. This highlights two chief points: that it is standard (unlike Cockney) and that it is localized in the southeast (unlike RP)’. The book English Language for Beginners (Lowe & Graham 1998) contains on p. 156 a diagram giving the actress Joanna Lumley as an example of RP, the boxer Frank Bruno for Cockney, and the comedian and writer Ben Elton for EE. This is ironic, in that Ben Elton himself denies that he is a speaker of EE (John Wells, personal communication).

The English creole now known as ‘Pitkern-Norfolk’ is spoken as a community language only on the widely separated Pitcairn and Norfolk Islands in the Pacific Ocean. Scholars divide the pidgins and creoles of English into two broad types: Atlantic and Pacific. Logically, the creole that arose as a consequence of the mutiny on the Royal Navy's H.M.S Bounty in 1789 should straightforwardly belong in the Pacific group, but internal evidence indicates, paradoxically, that it is an Atlantic rather than a Pacific Creole.

A description and discussion of the vast linguistic diversity in the capital of the United Kingdom.

LONDON today is an enormous Tower of Babel, where in addition to the common language, English, many other languages are spoken. On Tuesday 13 March 2001, as part of the Lunch Hour Lecture Series at University College London, Professor Reinier Salverda discussed the linguistic diversity of contemporary London, presenting recent data on the other languages spoken there, as well as focussing on the social aspects of this linguistic diversity, in particular issues of language policy and language management. The following is a slightly adapted version of that presentation.

The English language has been part of Malaysia for a long time, going back to the beginning of British colonial rule in the 18th century. The present attitudes towards English can be said to vary from conservative (e.g. referring to it as bahasa penjajah, literally ‘language of the coloniser’) to general acceptance (e.g. English is part of Malaysian history) and to a liberal/modern/Western outlook (e.g. calling for the return of English-medium schools). The conservative view stems from the history, or, for some, the memory, of the role English played in the colonial education system as the language of the elite which served to separate the urban and rural populations into the haves and the have-nots. Inevitably, the abolition of English-medium education became one of the key matters for debate during the campaign for independence from British rule in the 1950s. Malay nationalists considered English-medium education to be part of a British agenda to maintain control of the country after Independence. Replacing English with Malay as the medium of instruction as well as the national language in Malaya was, therefore, vital. In 1967, through the National Language Act, Malay became the sole official language in Malaysia a decade after Independence. Thus, from 1970 onwards, the phasing out of English as a medium of instruction from the Malaysian education system was carried out fervently, while at the same time Malay was zealously promoted, not only in education but in all spheres of public life.

In the previous issue of English Today, Lukač (2016) discusses the increasingly important role of online language authorities for users of the internet who are looking for usage advice. However, prescriptivism also reaches these users when they are not actively looking for it. They encounter advice in newsfeeds in different social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, and some of them join online groups to discuss usage problems. The standard language ideology seems to have established itself firmly on these new platforms, adapting itself in the process. Articles on usage shared on social media are almost without exception in the form of lists with eye-catching ‘clickbaity’ titles (e.g. ‘7 Grammar Mistakes That Make You Look Dumb’), and their most important topics differ strongly from those of traditional prescriptivism.

It is often said that the English language is particularly rich in vocabulary, but to make such a statement we need to know what words to count and what counts as a word.

The improper use of the possessive apostrophe has for a long time been a subject of concern among the authors of usage guides in English. Apostrophes do not represent any sounds, and since nouns in the genitive, and plural nominative and accusative nouns with few exceptions sound the same, their spelling distinctions are purely grammatical (Bryant et al., 1997: 93). Because the sign exists only in the written language, its usage has been rather unstable ever since it was first introduced to the English language in the sixteenth century to mark dropped letters (Little, 1986: 15−16), and it was not until the eighteenth century when the possessive apostrophe was first introduced (Crystal, 2003: 68). The usage guide database HUGE (Hyper Usage Guide of English), which is built by Robin Straaijer as part of the ‘Bridging the Unbridgeable’ project that Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade wrote about in an earlier issue of English Today, proves that apostrophe ‘misuse’ is the most popular topic in the field of language advice when it comes to punctuation. The apostrophe holds its own among numerous disputed items, such as ending sentences with prepositions, using me for I, who for whom or splitting infinitives. The first historical reference to the apostrophe in the HUGE database appears in Reflections on Language Use by Robert Baker in 1770 and it continues to be discussed to the present day. The discussion of the mark's ‘misuse’ has been widely popularized by the publication of Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation in 2003.

A discussion of the role of print in defining and sustaining International Standard English

A report on the past and present of the major variety in West Africa

Spoken Nigerian English (hereafter NigE) is said to differ significantly from Received Pronunciation (hereafter RP). Several studies (e.g. Adetugbo, 1977; 2004; Atoye, 1991; Udofot, 2004) conducted particularly from segmental and suprasegmental perspectives have established this. However, not so much has been done to verify this at the level of connected speech. Yet the features of connected speech contribute significantly to the marked difference between the native and non-native English accents and are capable of impairing intelligibility between speakers of both varieties (Allen, 1961: xiv; Laver, 1968: 156). Therefore, this study investigates two connected speech features (assimilation and elision) at morpheme and word boundaries, in order to provide explanations for how spoken educated NigE approximates to and deviates from RP.

The English language and the Internet, both separately and taken together, are nowadays well-acknowledged as powerful forces which influence and affect the lexico-grammatical characteristics of other languages world-wide. In fact, many authors like Crystal (2004) have pointed out the emergence of the so-called Netspeak, that is, the language used in the Net or World Wide Web; as Crystal himself (2004: 19) puts it, ‘a type of language displaying features that are unique to the Internet […] arising out of its character as a medium which is electronic, global and interactive’. This ‘language’, however, may be differently understood: either as an adaptation of the English language proper to internet requirements and purposes, or as a new and rapidly-changing and developing language as a result of a rapid evolution or adaptation to Internet requirements of almost all world languages, for whom English is a trendsetter. If the second and probably most plausible interpretation is adopted, there are three salient features of ‘Netspeak’: (a) the rapid expansion of all its new linguistic developments thanks to the Internet itself, which may lead to the generalization and widespread acceptance of new words, coinages, or meanings, hundreds of times faster than was the case with the printed media. As said above, (b) the visible influence of English, the most prevalent language on the Internet. Consequently, (c) this new language tends to reduce the ‘distance’ between English and other languages as well as the ignorance of the former by speakers of other languages, since the ‘Netspeak’ version of the latter adopts grammatical, syntactic and lexical features of English. Thus, linguistic differences may even disappear when code-switching and/or borrowing occurs, as whole fragments of English appear in other language contexts. As a consequence of the new situation, an ideal context appears for interlanguage or multilingual word formation to thrive: puns, blends, compounds and word creativity in general find in the web the ideal place to gain rapid acceptance world-wide, as a result of fashion, coincidence, or sheer merit of the new linguistic proposals.

How English-language broadcasting has evolved throughout the century, especially in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia

An examination of the nature, history and roles of classicisms in English and other European languages

ET is a forum for the discussion of ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘correct’, ‘incorrect’, ‘standard’, ‘non-standard’, ‘substandard’ and other kinds of usage. In this issue, DAVID CRYSTAL considers a bone of contention that has been with us for a long time.

In ET12 (Oct 87), John Dougill described kinds of decorative but usually meaningless bits of English on Japanese commercial products. Now, MARK N. BROCK, in Hong Kong, indicates that ‘ornamental English’ has become widespread in East Asia.