The area of East Anglia in which its traditional dialects are spoken has shrunk significantly over the past few decades and seen a marked decline in the use of traditional features. These include lack of -s marking on third-person singular forms (Kingston, 2000; Potter, 2018), as well as the long-standing distinction between those words descended from Middle English /ɔ:/ and /ɔu/, as in ‘moan’ vs ‘mown’, which failed to become homophonous as part of the Long Mid Mergers (Wells, 1982a). Like other relics, this distinction now only remains in East Anglia's more northern locales (Trudgill & Foxcroft, 1978; Trudgill, 2004; Butcher, 2019). This apparent ‘dialect death’ situation (Trudgill, 1986: 68) is the outcome of continued supralocalisation, a situation in which locally specific linguistic forms lose out to linguistic variants with greater socio-spatial currency, usually as a result of mobility and dialect contact (Britain, 2010). In East Anglia's case, Trudgill (2001) argues that dialect levelling has largely been driven by the impact of London and Home Counties varieties of English. This process is predicted to continue (Trudgill, 1986; Kingston, 2000), though is unlikely to be straightforward. Britain (2011) reports that substantial intra-regional differences are found in relation to route and rate of sound change in East Anglia. This calls for more comprehensive analyses of East Anglian English to better understand the workings of this ‘heterogenous homogenisation’ (Britain, 2011: 57), and how individual case studies relate to the overall shrinkage of the area in which traditional East Anglian dialects are spoken. This paper presents data in this vein from two studies undertaken in Suffolk, southern East Anglia. The first presents data on unstressed vowel tensing, which refers to the alternation between [ə] and [ɪ] in those unstressed syllables where /ɪ/ occurs in other varieties of Southern British English (SBE) e.g. ‘carpet’ [kɑ:pɪt] / [ka:pəʔ]. The second reports data on yod dropping, i.e. the absence of /j/ from sequences of C+/ju/ e.g. ‘huge’ [hju:dʒ] / [hu:dʒ]. Both variables are well known from descriptions of East Anglian dialects but, as we will see later, they appear to behave differently in this study of contemporary East Anglian English.

A discussion of code-switching and hybridization in the People's Republic

Do pronunciation keys in dictionaries, especially those designed for children, provide insights into problems of literacy and spelling reform?

A survey of the words the British use for everyday meals and a comparison with the usages of French and Spanish

The present paper discusses the use of the prepositions after different in present-day spoken American English, using the Corpus of Spoken Professional American-English [sic] (CSPAE), which includes transcriptions of conversations recorded between 1994 and 1998. As the corpus consists of four different professional settings (i.e. press conferences held at the White House and other locations, faculty meetings of the University of North Carolina, national meetings on mathematics tests, and national meetings on reading tests), it provides useful data for stylistic analyses. It is also useful for gender analyses of English, since it provides some personal data for most speakers and indicates whether they are male or female.

A consideration of the nature of English as an international medium

English as a foreign language education in East Asia has received repeated criticism for its lack of success in developing sufficient English oral proficiency among its students (Muller at al., 2014). In response to the criticism, the governments of China, Japan and South Korea attempted to include assessment of students’ speaking abilities as part of their high-stakes college entrance exams, hoping for positive washback effects in both primary- and secondary-school English education as well as on shadow education (i.e., non-formal private-sector education). These attempts often failed. In South Korea, a new test called the National English Ability Test (NEAT), which included direct assessment of students’ speaking skill among other skills, was developed in 2012. However, the government's plan to use NEAT to replace the current exam – the Korean College Scholastic Aptitude Test (KCSAT) – was quickly dropped before its implementation. In China, the government has tried to promote more communicative methods of English education through incorporating English speaking test in high-stakes tests such as the Gaokao – college admission tests – in addition to reducing the weight of English in the traditional paper-based exams. However, the policies have received heavy resistance at the regional level and have not been implemented at the national level. In Japan, the government asked universities to accept designated external proficiency tests as part of the Common Test, the existing college entrance exam, in order to make up for the exam's missing speaking component. After a mountain of criticism from test users, implementation of the plan is still pending. In this light, the aim of this paper is to discuss why these policy attempts failed. While these policy attempts occurred in three different contexts, we could see striking underlying commonalities. We argue that these policy attempts were made based on a set of beliefs separate from the reality of the stakeholders (e.g., students, parents and teachers). More specifically, the failures can be largely attributed to the governments’ monolithic view of the English language and their insufficient consideration for equity rather than equality.

To become lifelong learners is the ultimate goal of many if not most learners irrespective of their target of learning, and being able to self-learn is one major prerequisite of this goal. As far as the learning of a second language is concerned, dictionaries are among the most readily available and easily accessible self-learning tools available on the market, and are regarded as the most systematic and comprehensive lexical descriptions that users have access to (Jackson & Amvela, 2000). An increasing number of dictionaries are now available for learners at different levels and for different learning purposes, including general dictionaries, learners' dictionaries, translation dictionaries, pictorial dictionaries, collocation dictionaries, specialized dictionaries and encyclopaedic dictionaries (Jackson & Amvela, 2000). Of these, learners' dictionaries are among the most popular for second or foreign language learners, providing a range of information including word meanings, pronunciations, collocations, correct usage and syntactic behaviour.

Almost every Taiwanese university has some form of an English Department, some with straightforward names (e.g., Department of English) and some with ambiguous names (e.g., Department of Applied Languages). The so-called ‘Applied Courses’ are in fact English for Specific Purposes (ESP) courses covering a range of Business and Tourism topics. While pursuing my doctorate I taught these courses as an adjunct lecturer in several universities. This experience continuously reaffirmed suspicions that one particular aspect of English language education was being neglected in Taiwanese secondary and tertiary education, that is, how to translate the names of the foods and dishes that make up the culturally laden Taiwanese cuisine.

The use of ‘as’ as a post-modifying intensifier is a construction that has become well-established in Australian and New Zealand English but is rare elsewhere. Only recently has its usage begun to be studied. In 2002, Laurie Bauer and Winifred Bauer included adj + as in their study of intensifier usage among middle-school aged children in New Zealand. Later, in 2006, Michael Head and Peter Petrucci built on Bauer and Bauer's work by studying this specific construction using the Wellington Corpus of Spoken New Zealand English (WSC) and quotations in newspaper articles. Since these studies, adj + as has become increasingly grammaticalised, as evidenced by its use in the predicate and attributive positions, its modification by adverbs, and its use as an adverb. The usage is further examined in this article.

A review of the problems learners of English can have with actual and borderline taboo usages in the United States

A discussion of loan translations, metaphors and other usages that have arisen in the English of Hong Kong in recent years

A review of the kinds of dictionaries now being created to cope with English as a universal language

Yiddish has served the English language as a comparatively minor donor language of words and meanings over the course of time. However, Yiddish has provided English with a number of borrowings that have become fairly common in present-day usage. This paper provides a rounded overview of the different lexical domains to which Yiddish contributed in the form of new words and expressions over the centuries, which has been relatively neglected in existing studies. The focus of linguistic concern is on those Yiddish-derived terms that have become established in current English.

A report on, and a glossary of, imaginative usage in the world of drug-taking.

As regular readers of English Today would probably be aware, in the early years of the 21st Century, when applied linguists discuss the world-wide significance of the most widely learned and used language, it is not always enough to simply refer to it as ‘English’ or ‘the English language’. On the contrary, it has become almost de rigueur to collocate the word ‘English’ with ‘world’, ‘international’ or ‘global’. Thus, we have the six commonly used expressions set out in Table 1. At the risk of adding further to the crowded landscape of abbreviations in applied linguistics, I will refer to these as ‘CEWIGs’ (Collocations of ‘English’ with ‘world’, ‘international’ and ‘global’).

English lexicography is undergoing a transformation so profound that both dictionary makers and users need new strategies to cope with the challenges of today's technologies and to take full advantage of their potential. Rundell has rightly stated that dictionaries have finally found their ideal platform in the electronic medium (2012: 15), which provides quicker and more sophisticated access to large data collections that are no longer subject to space restrictions. But the innovations go far beyond storage space and ease of access - customization, hybridization and user-input are amongst the most promising trends in electronic lexicography. Customization means that dictionaries can be adaptable, i.e. manually customized by the user, or even adaptive, i.e. automatically adapted to users’ needs on the basis of their behaviour (Granger, 2012: 4). Paquot lists genre, domain as well as L1 as examples of fruitful areas for customization (2012: 185). In the electronic medium, the barriers between different language resources such as dictionaries, encyclopaedias, databases, writing aids and translation tools are disappearing, a development referred to as hybridization (Granger, 2012: 4). And the concept of user-input is exemplified by the well-known platforms Wiktionary and Urban Dictionary, both of which are online reference works based on contributions by users.

Slovenia, like many former Eastern bloc countries, is now coming to terms with the increasing popularity of English.

Today English is the most widely used foreign language in Europe. It is used in business, education, science, the media, advertisements, music, graffiti, and in many other places, although its greatest use can be found in commerce, culture, science and education (Phillipson, 2003). The presence of English is felt more in some parts of Europe than in others, however. In the Scandinavian countries, for example, English manifests itself in all parts of society and the knowledge of English is so high that some consider it a second language (McArthur, 1996). In Eastern Europe, the acquisition and use of English has traditionally not been as widespread, although in recent years, the picture has changed greatly, as English has become more and more popular in what were formerly Eastern bloc countries.

In many ways Slovenia has been following the trends in other Central and Eastern European countries. The influence of English has been growing since the Second World War and in particular after the end of the Cold War. Its influence has intensified even more after Slovenia became an independent country. Today, Slovenes feel both cautious and enthusiastic about English. There is extensive legislation to protect the Slovene language, while at the same time there is a ‘certain enthusiasm for both “western” ideas and the world language, English’ (Schlick, 2003: 4).