SLANG IS characterized by its capacity to shock, startle and amuse: often achieved by manipulating existing lexical material in a playful way. Indeed, this play instinct is at the core of language use at large: cf. Nilsen & Nilsen (1978:28–44), Redfern (1984:6), and especially Crystal (1998). It is however in the realm of informal discourse that all types of ludic word-forming – from malapropisms to homonymic puns – thrive most richly. One such way of manipulating existing lexical items is to expand them implicitly into longer forms so that the original does double (and often facetious) duty. This process is at work not only in such acronyms as S.F.A. – impeccably, Scottish Football Association, but facetiously both sweet fuck-all and its euphemistic variant Sweet Fanny Adams – but also in such elaborations as do-re-mi for ‘dough’ (US slang money), Oswald for ‘an ounce’ of a drug (expanding oz, the abbreviation of ‘ounce’), and Georgie (after the late renowned footballer George or Georgie Best), for ‘best’ itself. The following article seeks to explore the curious realm of curtailed puns formed on the same principle as Georgie.

Translation has long featured as a convenient metaphor for the Irish condition. However, its use as metaphor should not disguise the insights translation provides into the status and formation of Irish English. When Richard II arrived in Ireland in 1394 his problems were not only political and military. They were also linguistic. On the occasion of the visit of the Irish kings to Richard in Dublin that same year, James Butler, the second Earl of Ormond, had to interpret the king's speech into Irish. Loyalty to Richard's kingship did not extend to loyalty to his chosen tongue. The translation skills of another Earl of Ormond would be further called upon in 1541 when the Irish parliament made Henry VIII King of Ireland. The Earl on this occasion interpreted the Speaker's address into Irish for the benefit of the Lords and Commons, although they were predominantly of Anglo-Norman or Old English origin. The act of translation, in this instance, was not without its ironies. James Butler was interpreting into a language that had been outlawed four years previously under the Act for the English Order, Habit and Language.

Dialects in the South East of England are very often perceived as one homogenous mass, without much regional variation. Rosewarne introduced the notion of Estuary English and defined it as ‘variety of modified regional speech [ . . . ] a mixture of non-regional and local south-eastern English pronunciation and intonation’ (Rosewarne, 1984). However, studies such as Przedlacka (2001) and Torgersen & Kerswill (2004) have shown that, at least on the phonetic level, distinct varieties exist. Nevertheless, very few studies have investigated language use in the South East and even fewer in the county of Sussex. It is often claimed that there is no distinct Sussex dialect (Coates, 2010: 29). Even in the earliest works describing the dialect of the area (Wright, 1903) there are suggestions that it cannot be distinguished from Hampshire in the west and Kent in the east.

Hong Kong Englishes attract the interest of scholars in a number of disciplines, including creative writing, education, political science, and anthropology. The efforts made by sociolinguists, in particular, contribute much to an understanding of what the Englishes of Hong Kong look like, how it is used, and the ways in which speakers position their linguistic identities in relation to English. Such work builds on the foundation of historical and cultural descriptions of the region offered in Bolton's earlier seminal research (e.g., Bolton, 2000), which continues today to provide a lens through which to describe how Englishes are used in Hong Kong (e.g., Evans, 2017) and the extent to which the language shapes the ideologies of its community members (e.g., Jenks & Lee, 2016). Yet despite past and ongoing efforts to better understand the social and ideological complexities of using English in the region, there continues to be a generalizing perception within and beyond scholarship that Hongkongers wish to mimic the speech patterns of monolingual speakers of English from the United States, United Kingdom, and other ‘Inner Circle’ regions. While this characterization may capture some, or perhaps even a large portion of (cf. Qin, 2018), speakers in the region, recent scholarship suggests that the language ideologies of Hongkongers are not monolithic, and that care should be taken in describing the different speech communities that use English (cf. Jenks & Lee, 2016). In a recent study on ‘Kongish’, for example, Sewell and Chan (2016) argue that notions of English are connected to the multiple, and sometimes contradictory, linguistic identities expressed by speakers in Hong Kong.

The late 1990s saw a rapid growth in green marketing and organic food markets in the United States (Ottman, 2011). Widespread environmental awareness could explain the rise in the popularity of eco-friendly household products. More people than ever are discovering that going green is not only good for the body but also for the planet, as ‘consumers are concerned about the environmental and social impacts of the products they buy’ (Bonini & Oppenheim, 2008: 56). Concurrently, marketing researchers have sought to understand different retail strategies concerning the branding of organic products (cf. Hall, 2008; Ottman, 2011; Smith & Brower, 2012).

In the three years and seven months between the referendum on 23 June 2016 and 31 January 2020, when the UK officially left the European Union, there was much speculation over what status English would have in the EU after the withdrawal of the UK. It is now apparent that English has continued to flourish. This is supported by statistics for Member States which chart the extent to which English is a school subject. Well over 95% of the children in the EU are taught English as a mandatory subject. Official EU figures also show that 38% of the population is proficient in English as a second language, three times more than both French and German (Special Eurobarometer 386: Europeans and their Languages, 2012). Moreover, although some, such as Danuta Hübner, EMP, wanted to question whether or not English could maintain its status as an official language in the EU, it is now apparent that it will not be possible to remove English in this respect (with changes requiring a unanimous vote in the Council, which Ireland has said it will not support [European Commission, 2016]), (The Guardian 27 December 2019). English has also retained its position as one of the three ‘procedural’ or ‘working languages’ alongside French and German. This has taken place despite the fact that without the UK, no Member State has English as its official EU language, and only approximately one percent of EU citizens have English as a mother tongue.

An analysis of how Salman Rushdie destabilizes the Western bias in English

If lexical abbreviation is no more than a fringe to vocabulary proper, it is a most diverse and dynamic fringe

With the spread of English around the globe, academics increasingly seek to figure out what global English means to the world. Some accept English globalisation as a reality and take it as natural, neutral and beneficial for international and intercultural communication (Crystal, 2003). Some recognise English skills as important linguistic capital and must-have global literacy (Park & Wee, 2012; Tsui & Tollefson, 2007). However, others associate the global expansion of English with linguistic imperialism and the death of indigenous languages (Phillipson, 2009). Some regard globally spread English as native English varieties, particularly American and British English (Modiano, 2001; Trudgill, 1999), others argue for the rise of local varieties of World Englishes (WE) (Bolton, 2005; Kachru, 1986) and the international use of English as a lingua franca (ELF) (Jenkins, 2007; Seidlhofer, 2011). Although these generic interpretations of English have solid arguments from their own perspectives, none is sufficient to elucidate all the ‘complexity of ideological ramifications of the spread of English in [any] particular locality’ (Pan, 2011: 79).

A survey of the past, present and future of pidgin and creole Englishes, how they have been studied, and how attitudes towards them have changed

A report on the history and current condition of English in southern South America

A report from the Survey of English Usage at the Department of English Language and Literature, University College London

ANDREW PARKIN uses a Japanese poetic form in English to describe his response to historic change in China

The nature and significance of slips of the tongue, especially in multilingual Singapore

The popularity of the online social media in China promotes a dynamic digital drive for both global and glocalised communications, facilitating the emergence of more connected intercultural language practices unimaginable in the past. Social media also creates a vast community where pervasive translanguaging practices take place daily. Translanguaging hybrids coined by Chinese university students on WeChat are exactly a case in point. WeChat is a free platform launched in 2011 by Tencent. Well established in China and the world over, Tencent provides multimodal instant messaging services. Open to world cultures, these students show ingenuity in translanguaging linguistic play in their daily text messages; meanwhile, their creative coinage of translanguaging hybrids influences the entire WeChat community. Written language in the WeChat community, often amounting to a new form of speech, deserves serious scholarly inquiry.

An examination of lexical innovation in the everyday English of the largest anglophone country in West Africa

Following on from Robert J. Baumgardner's article on English in Pakistan in ET21, a consideration of the nature of Pakistani English vocabulary

Enlarging the reach of EFL teachers and students at the middle level in the People's Republic of China

French has long served as the donor language par excellence in the history of English. French has enriched the English vocabulary throughout the centuries since before the Norman Conquest (Serjeantson, 1935: 104–5). The French impact on the English lexicon has received much attention in studies of the language and its development. However, French borrowings which have recently been introduced into English have figured little if at all in research thus far.

Whereas the influence of English in form of Anglicisms has attracted considerable attention, little has been written on how English is interacting with autochthonous word-formation processes in modern languages. The present paper attempts to shed some light on a phenomenon that has been very recently attested in Spanish: the coinage of blend words involving overlap and combination of material from both English and the recipient language (in this case Spanish). I argue that these ad hoc words give us important insights into the state and status of English in what Kachru (1982) called the ‘Expanding Circle’.