Gobbledygook, jargon, bureaucratese and legalese – people rail against them all. Can anything be said objectively about these ‘symptoms’ of a ‘diseased’ and ‘degenerate’ English? Is there, indeed a case for surgery?

English has played a role in Cuba since the 19th century. This article provides a brief history of English in Cuba (see Figure 1 for Cuba map), contextualizing it in terms of other foreign languages in the Cuban environment, and describing Cubans’ attitudes toward English. This article also overviews the presence of English in the Cuban media, workplace, and diplomacy. Additionally, a large portion of this article is devoted to describing the teaching of English in Cuba at all levels of education. Finally, predications are made about the future of English in Cuba.

English spelling has a reputation for being notoriously difficult to learn, whether for native speakers of English or for those who learn it as an additional language. An additional problem for EFL learners is that there are two somewhat different systems to choose between: the British system and the American one. As Bondesen (2004: 4) points out, ‘although the two spelling systems are much more similar than they are different, there is variation between them.’ (For surveys of some of the main differences see Trudgill & Hannah, 1994; Carney, 1997.) The spelling discrepancies between the two varieties are systematic, and originate in large part from American spelling reform as a symbol of ‘linguistic independence’ (Knowles, 1997), and from the work of early American linguists such as Benjamin Franklin and Noah Webster. The aim of this article is to investigate the spelling preferences of English users in a few regions outside Britain and the United States, and to establish whether any clear patterns of regional variation are discernible.

AS ELECTRONIC engineers create virtual reality in and through computer software, they are also creating new English words to describe their ongoing technical achievements. While following existing rules of word formation, they are also changing these rules: for example, by making new nouns from prepositions. Their neologisms seem to be driven by humorous responses to electronic requirements of speed, multi-functionality and reversibility. This paper examines the current but on-going impact of their usage on the grammatical structure of the language. In a rapidly-evolving electronic future, their usage is likely to have a major impact on how ‘ordinary’ Internet users communicate online.

Two inter-related essays deal with matters of current English usage. The first is on an orthographic theme, while the second is on a lexical one. (1) On the letters ‘ph’ in English, (2) On Beedham on Pinker on ‘computer mouse’

Will the final t become totally bottled up? It was about 15 years ago, I suppose, that I was told by an 18-year-old student that you shouldn't pronounce the final t in words like went. She meant in no circumstances. So struck was I by this that I reflected on my own practice, as a British English speaker, with such words. I decided that, in general, I released a final t before a following vowel, before a pause and before ‘soft’ consonants like h or w, but might sometimes keep it in before a ‘strong’ consonant, like m or b. So, I would say ‘I went away’, ‘What?’ and ‘That hospital’, but, pre-consonantal, either ‘He sent bottled water’ or ‘He sen’ bottled water’. You would, of course, refer also to words spelled with te at the end, like mate, as being pronounced with a final t.

Since that time, and particularly in recent years, I have noticed an increase in the non-released version of final t, pre-vowel or pre-pause, from BrE speakers in contexts where before I would not have expected it, as, for example, from BBC newsreaders.

Chinese and English belong to different language families, so they often have different forms of expression. Chinese has no definite grammatical category of number and has almost no number inflection. Plural meaning is usually implied in the syntactic structure or in the context by a bare noun, or is expressed through the plural marker 们 and the numerical adjectives such as many, numerous and each, as well as by quantifiers and reduplications. However, English nouns express number category by inflection as well as by quantifiers at times, so their grammatical number is far more complicated than that of Chinese nouns. From the point of view of grammatical form, English nouns are often considered as countable and uncountable nouns. Uncountable nouns cannot be directly modified by a numeral without unit specification, nor can they be combined with an indefinite article. Thus, cheese is quantified as three slices of cheese. However, uncountable nouns can also be quantified without specifying a unit of measurement, such as much coal. A number of uncountable nouns can be used in the plural form to mean ‘a large amount of’ as in the following example from Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (hereinafter, LDCE) ‘The ship drifted into Turkish territorial waters’. In such cases, although water is uncountable, it has the plural form. In some cases, native English speakers can turn the theoretical uncountable nouns into countable ones (Landau, 2001). There seems to be no absolute boundary between countable and uncountable nouns.

Street signs are an everyday part of our lives. Yet their language and form reveal important aspects of written English. The aim of this article is to open the reader's eyes to some common features of English street signs by looking at some of the signs in a typical street, Leazes Park Road in Newcastle upon Tyne. On one side of Leazes Park Road the buildings are three-storey nineteenth-century brick townhouses, on the other assorted modern brick and concrete offices, shops and clubs. It is a mixed street of dentists, offices, shops, restaurants, flats and clubs; its signs are typical of English city streets. The paper forms part of a research programme looking at street signs in England from different perspectives (Cook, 2013); a complementary short paper looks at the signs of the traffic junction in Leazes Park Road.

It is a sad fact that physical violence and, as a subtype, the corporal punishment of children and juveniles, practised by parents and other guardians, schools and clergy in both Europe and North America, have been part of our ‘Western’, i.e. Christian, cultural heritage, not to mention other world-cultures. I myself am old enough to remember the various common practices of physical violence used on children in the 1950s. At school in Germany, caning and face-slapping were officially tolerated and quite common, applied as a kind of educational instrument, sometimes even to 17-year-olds. In state-run schools of the United Kingdom, corporal punishment was politically banned only in 1986. Private schools followed suit from 1998 (England and Wales) to 2003 (Northern Ireland) (Country report for UK, 2015). In the United States, corporal punishment is still lawful in 19 states, in both public and private schools (Country report for USA, 2016).

THE AIM of this paper is to study the rhetorical use of tense and voice in research writing undertaken in both English and Arabic medical research. Six reports (three by native speakers of English, three by native speakers of Arabic) were analysed, all being typical of texts containing functional information. Moreover, several medical prescriptions were also analysed. The analysis showed important differences between medical English and medical Arabic, in terms of tense, voice and the use of modals. The study concludes with a number of practical and research recommendations.

This paper draws attention to some uses of the singular collective nouns congress, council, government, management, parliament, and senate in contemporary English. In particular, it demonstrates how in such uses, the singular collective nouns – like members of the main class of proper nouns – have unique reference, occur without any determiner, take singular pronoun substitutes, and as subject in the sentence have singular concord with the verb. It concludes by providing from contemporary English texts some examples illustrating the uses of the six singular collective nouns discussed.

A response to Pearl Ntlhakana, ‘People's English’, on the language situation in South Africa, in ET62 (16:2), Apr 2000.

If you have a non-standard local form of English, what do you do with it?

Pearl Ntlhakana gives a bold answer, supporting her arguments by reference to an article by Chick and Wade (1997), also on the South African situation. By “People's English”, Ntlhakana means what is usually referred to as Black South African English (BSAE), the English that is said to be characteristic of the indigenous African population of South Africa. What she suggests is that “a restandardised variety would actually replace the current standard (White South African English with Southern British English as its model), performing the whole range of formal functions”.

In the December 2012 issue of English Today, Philip Durkin argues that lexis is currently a ‘Cinderella’ subject: he suggests that the methodological problems generated by the study of lexis have led to it being marginalised in contemporary linguistic research (2012: 3). Nevertheless, Durkin notes that ‘lexis (or vocabulary) is probably the area of linguistics that is most accessible and most salient for a non-specialist audience’ (2012: 3). Thus, one cannot overestimate the importance of lexical research with regards to engaging a wider audience in linguistic discourses. Prior to the advent of the internet, however, researching etymology was a laborious process for English language enthusiasts, especially when the lexical items of interest were considered to be colloquialisms or slang. Indeed, ‘non-standard’ lexis, historically, has been marginalised and sometimes even excluded from dictionaries (Durkin, 2012: 6); however, the rise of the internet and social media has led to the increased visibility of ‘non-standard’ lexis, making information about language use more accessible to researchers outside of the local speech community (Browne & Uribe-Jongbloed, 2013: 23). Moreover, the internet has given language enthusiasts unprecedented access to a range of historical and contextual information which proves invaluable when considering etymology. This article demonstrates how more conventional language resources such as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) can be used alongside a variety of other online resources and fictional and nonfictional texts to identify the etymologies of contemporary English lexical items. Specifically, this essay explores the etymologies of three Australian colloquial nouns (bogan, cobber, and sandgroper) taken from travel website TripAdvisor's (2011) user-generated glossary of Australian English colloquialisms.

In an article published a little over a decade ago (Betteridge, 2009), the journalist Ian Betteridge offered some scathing comments about a piece published a few days earlier in TechCrunch by Erick Schonfeld (Schonfeld, 2009). Amongst other things, Betteridge suggested that the headline concerned (‘Did Last.fm Just Hand Over User Listening Data to the RIAA?’) was ‘a great demonstration of my maxim that any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word “no”.’ Readers of English Today will realise immediately that this ‘maxim’ cannot possibly be watertight as expressed by Betteridge, since only polar questions can be answered with a ‘yes’ or ‘no’. For example, WH-questions (Quirk & Greenbaum, 1973: 196) such as ‘Who opened my letter?’ and ‘How long have you been waiting?’ obviously cannot be responded to in any sensible way with a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Furthermore, it is not difficult to find media headlines taking the form of non-polar questions: for example, “What would a no-deal Brexit mean for business?” (O'Dwyer et.al., 2020).

The most widely accepted origin of the word ‘Pidgin’ is that it is a Chinese pronunciation of the English word business (etymonline.com). Pidgin English in mainland China has another popular localised nickname, i.e. yangjingbang 洋泾浜 English, a trade jargon term often used in Shanghai. However, this popular Pidgin English has been played down in linguistic research in mainland China because of the assumption of colonial connotations (Jin, 2011). Although it did not thrive or even survive in mainland China, Pidgin English has influenced to no small degree both contemporary culture and language in Shanghai, as well as other Chinese varieties.

The verb to like has fallen repeatedly under the gaze of scholars. One aspect which has stimulated vigorous discussion is its original use in impersonal constructions and its later change of argument structure along with the disappearance of impersonals from English. Nonetheless, evidence from current informal English shows that like is now used in constructions which bear a close resemblance to the older impersonals, although always displaying alternative spelling variants, especially likey. This paper seeks to further our understanding of the verb to like, focusing specifically on these new constructions. To this end I will use likey as a generic label to refer to such new uses and constructions, regardless of variations in spelling (unless otherwise stated). Using data from the Corpus of Historical American English and iWeb Corpus, the study will seek to answer the following research questions:

1. RQ1. What are the morpho-syntactic features of the expression ‘me (no) likey’ in Present-Day English?

2. RQ2. What is the origin of the sequence ‘me (no) likey’?

3. RQ3. Where do phrasal patterns with likey fall on the continuum of idiomaticity (Michaelis, 2017)?

When Timor–Leste became the first new nation of the 21st century in 2002, one of the many decisions that needed to be made concerned language. Timor–Leste is a country of around one million people, with at least 16 indigenous languages and three foreign languages contributing to its multilingual character. For reasons related to its 400-year colonial history and the resistance to Indonesian occupation from 1975 to 1999, the new constitution declared that Portuguese would be one of two official languages, the other being the indigenous Tetun Dili. The choice of Portuguese rather than English was controversial, and criticised in some quarters, for it appeared to defy geographical location (e.g. Savage, 2012). After all, Australia lies an hour's flight south of Timor–Leste, and English has been adopted as the working language of ASEAN, an organisation which the country has aspirations of joining. English is certainly the regional lingua franca, and very often referred to as the global lingua franca. Not, however, that the constitution was ignoring this reality. As well as naming Portuguese and Tetun as official languages, it named English and Bahasa Indonesia as working languages, and all indigenous languages as national languages. Thus the decisions around language in the constitution laid claims to identity and culture, as well as remaining open to global engagement in trade, technology, education and other contributors to modernisation.