A look at the complex layering of the vocabulary that English has inherited from Germanic, Romance and Greek.

The purpose of this paper is to foreground the extent to which the English language has eroded the originality and purity of the Yoruba language. The main focus will be on code-switching practices, which I believe to be detrimental to Yoruba in the long run. Although linguists have long proposed a ‘leave-your-language-alone’ attitude (see Hall, 1950), there is little doubt that the effects of first British colonization and then globalization have changed the linguistic ecology of Africa. Few sociolinguists would deny that a people's language is a symbol of their identity and culture. In an important textbook in the field, Holmes (1992: 70) confirms that ‘Language is an important component of identity and culture for many groups, maintaining their distinct identity and culture is usually important to … self esteem.’ What are we then to make of the extensive code-switching that I will be documenting in this article? Linguists' tolerance has certainly extended to code-switching studies in Africa, from which much important data has been drawn. The main scholar in this area is Carol Myers-Scotton, whose two books on code-switching (1993a,b) were based primarily on her research in Africa and remain central to the field internationally. Scholars like Coupland and Jaworski (1997) propose that the use of mixed speech in a conversation is not necessarily a language defect but a sign of flexibility and creativity. Understanding the social, psycholinguistic and syntactic motivations for switching is one thing, but the applied linguist and educationist also has to ask serious questions about what this means for the future of local languages heavily implicated in code-switching.

A centenary discussion of the work and the on-going influence of a pioneering English dialectologist

The debate continues over whether the primacy of English should be enshrined in the U.S. constitution. Here, it takes the form of ‘language restrictionism’ versus ‘English plus at least one other language’ for every citizen who so chooses.

Two detailed reviews of four key publications in the EFL world in 1995, the first by a British lexicographer, the second by a Belgian language teacher

When a Canadian exchange student returns home from a semester abroad in the capital city of China, she might tell her friends that she had Peking duck every day, but she would never, as a 21st-century liberal arts student, say that she stayed in Peking for a semester. Rather, she would say Beijing, as would most English speakers in the present day. But such discrepancies between English transliterations of Chinese words are far from uncommon. Is it the Nanking Massacre or the Nanjing Massacre? Who is the author of Tao Te Ching: Lao-Tzu or Laozi? What, then, is the Daodejing? This paper will focus on the English representation of Mandarin Chinese phonology, particularly the consonant sounds. The inconsistency of English transliteration of Mandarin is caused by historical exchanges and encounters between the British and the Chinese and a lack of a monolithic standardization of Mandarin. Paradoxically, while these transliterations attempt to unify and standardize themselves and the representation of Mandarin sounds, they simultaneously represent the concept of a diverse Mandarin.

Demographic data indicate that the English of Mexican Americans is destined to play a key role in the sociolinguistic study of language variation in the United States. In fact, Mexican American speakers are reported to account for more than 12.5% of the U.S. population. In 2003, the U.S. Census released data showing that Latinos and Latinas had replaced African Americans as the largest minority ethnic group in the U.S., and by 2007, 29.2 million Americans listed their ancestry as Mexican (Pew Hispanic Center, 2009). Moreover, in addition to the large numbers of Mexicans (first generation) and Mexican Americans (second generation) living in the Southwest, we are now seeing a new representation of these ethnic groups in other areas, such as the South. For example, between 1990 and 2000, North Carolina experienced a higher percentage of growth in its Mexican American population than any other state (Wolfram, Carter & Moriello, 2004).

These statistics are important with respect to language because they reveal that a large and increasing population of English speakers in the U.S. are Latinos and Latinas of Mexican origin. Our notion of American English, then, must be extended to include the variety traditionally spoken by the children of Mexican immigrants in the U.S., generally referred to in the literature as Chicano English. In addition, if we look at the Mexican American population as a whole, we will find a number of other varieties of English spoken.

‘French continues to outclass the competition among English-speaking consumers of loanwords’

A rare glimpse into a problem in the world of medical lexicography, focusing on the eponyms diverticulum of Kommerell and Gerbode defect

WHITNEY F BOLTON considers the extent to which words that are ‘usually’ nouns frequently function as verbs — and sometimes in rather unexpected ways.

JOHN ALGEO asks some awkward but highly pertinent questions about tomorrow's dates

Answering the critics of A Dictionary of Modern English Usage

The third of a four-part gazetteer of the basic geopolitical vocabulary of the English language, dealing with the facts, fancies, fallacies, ambiguities and subtle implications of such words. For convenience of presentation, the material is not always in strict alphabetical order.

Just after the start of the research project Bridging the Unbridgeable: Linguists, Prescriptivists and the General Public in 2011, we laid our hands on a file called ‘Reactions to L. Trap’. The file contains well over 200 documents: letters, picture postcards, notes, newspaper clippings, and various other items, almost all of them relating to the reception of a pamphlet called The Language Trap, written by John Honey (1933–2001) and published in 1983 by the British National Council for Educational Standards (NCES). The file was offered for sale by Plurabelle Books in Cambridge as part of the late John Honey's library, and acquiring it offered a unique opportunity to study the reception of this highly controversial publication, not only by linguists, but also by the general public. Both groups responded in large numbers to the publicity the pamphlet inspired, in the press as well as on the radio.

The process of aligning Serbian legislation with the legislation of the EU has stimulated the creation of a large body of specialized lexis and the modernization of the existing lexicon. In this paper, I discuss the linguistic mechanisms of contact-induced secondary term creation processes in the Serbian language within the scope of EU legislation and activities under the influence of English. Regarding the standardization of EU legislation terminology, Peruzzo (2012: 177) explores the need for the uniformity of terminology within every language in the EU. Namely, every language should be allowed ‘normative flexibility’ in adopting EU legislative provisions, but should also guarantee the maximum degree of uniform interpretation and the terms used should be clear, simple and precise. This means that in every EU language, consistent use of uniform terminology is of vital importance not only within a single text, but also across different texts related to the same issue. Fischer (2010: 28) observes two steps in the creation of terms in the EU: (1) terms are created in the dominating languages, predominantly in the procedural languages of English, French and German, and (2) they are translated into all other languages. She concludes that in most languages terms are created on the basis of a source term by translation, and that the creation of EU terminology can be described as a process in which (1) multilingual primary term-creation for the dominant languages is followed by (2) a secondary activity, intra-conceptual term-transfer for most other languages.