In 1986, the International Journal of the Sociology of Language published a special issue on language rights and the proposed English Language Amendment to the US Constitution. A shorter version of the major article in that special issue appeared in ET6, April 86, as ‘An endangered language?’ by David F Marshall. A defender of the ELA exercises his right of reply.

An examination of how the language is used in the literature of Black Africa

Not everyone interested in English needs to give much thought to Chinese. This statement is so true that it borders on the banal, and a similarly true and banal statement might be: Many people involved with Chinese don't need to give much thought to English.

The fruits of the plant family Cucurbitaceae – variously called the gourd family, the pumpkin family, the melon family, or the cucumber family – offer rich pickings for charting the distribution of English dialectal variations and the curious ways in which they get fixed. The cucurbits are a medium-sized plant family, with representatives native to both the Old and New Worlds. They are what taxonomists call a monophyletic family, or a clade: all representatives of the family known today have a single ancestor, which presumably sprouted up somewhere on Pangaea. This paper explores this linguistic phenomenon.

Most disciplines seem to have their “K factors”, though linguistics has so far been an exception. Now a language-related K factor has surfaced, kindled by Italian text messages and the influence of English.

‘Some of our predecessors in the science of lexicography thought it was part of their duty to improve the English language,’ wrote an editor of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) in 1934 (Craigie, 1934: 26). ‘We have got beyond that stage, and consider that if it is to be improved it is not our business to do so, but record it as it was and as it is.’ Such claims for unbiased and objective descriptivism in dictionary-making became standard over the course of the twentieth century and are regularly repeated in dictionaries today. In the words of the first edition of the New Oxford Dictionary of English, published in 1998 and reprinted in many other Oxford dictionaries, ‘A good dictionary reports the language as it is, not as the editors (or anyone else) would wish it to be’ (Pearsall, 1998: xv).

In the last issue of English Today I argued that while the differences between American and British English may be small, they are innumerable, varied and interesting. But that article (and many of the things I write) invited the question of whether it even makes sense to talk of American English and British English. These labels are extremely problematic on geographic, linguistic and political grounds. Are we justified in using such sloppy terminology? Shouldn't linguists like me know better? Let's look the problems of nomenclature, starting with the eastern side of the Atlantic.

A tale from the streets of New York. In the main story I focus on two people in particular as an example of the ways in which a writer's workshop helped awaken me to the lives outside the workshop of the participants.