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 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)?

Scholarly attention to English in relation to L1 Chinese speakers in China has yielded fruitful research insights and publications, which present us with various names, such as Chinglish, Chinese English, China English and a few more, leading to terminological controversies (e.g. Eaves, 2011; Y. Li, 2018; Zhang, 1997). A review of different theoretical stances illuminates that recent research under different names converges toward an attempt to reflect the role of English as a lingua franca (ELF) for Chinese individuals, given the context of globalisation and digitalisation. The article proposes to address terminological puzzles by adopting the notion of Chinese English as a lingua franca (ChELF) to elucidate the role of ELF and acknowledge Chinese ownership of English, hoping for collaborations among researchers interested in Chinese legitimacy in English creativity emerging in intercultural practices.

Owing to the extensive spread of English around the globe, English words have penetrated the lexicon of many languages. Modern Greek has been no exception as various English loanwords are used daily by its native speakers. The present paper discusses the use of English loanwords on the Greek web and more specifically in three online women's magazines. The focus, however, is not on all types of borrowings, but solely on what Myers–Scotton (2002: 239) calls core borrowings, which are defined as ‘words that more or less duplicate already existing words in the L1’. Essentially, core borrowings do not serve genuine communicative needs as they do not fill any lexical gaps in the speakers’ native language (Bybee, 2015). Nonetheless, they are borrowed as a result of the cultural pressure exerted by the more prestigious and dominant donor language (Myers–Scotton, 2006). On the other hand, cultural borrowings are words used for new objects and concepts for which there is no equivalent in the recipient language. It should also be noted that the loanwords examined in this paper have not been morphologically or orthographically assimilated into the Modern Greek language, but maintain their distinctive foreign features.

Blends have long been a source of new lexical elements in English word formation. Classic examples of such elements include -burger in words like soyburger or oysterburger, -furter in words like turkeyfurter or chickenfurter and -scape in cloudscape or manscape. Among more recent examples are -zilla (bridezilla, momzilla), -cation (staycation, mancation) or -splain(ing) (mansplaining, whitesplaining). Some of these have been studied in greater or lesser detail, highlighting various researchers’ interests in the topic, such as regularities in blend formation, formal and semantic patterns of blends, or the emergence of new combining forms from lexical blends (see in particular Baldi & Dawar, 2000; Frath, 2005; Kemmer, 2003; Lalić–Krstin, 2014; Lehrer, 1998; Mattiello, 2017a, 2017b; Panić–Kavgić & Kavgić, 2009).

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.

The popularity of English in early foreign language teaching is a global phenomenon. Parents and policymakers in Europe are eager to expose young children to a foreign language, which is usually English (De Houwer, 2015). Likewise, in Japan, English is the de facto foreign language subject in schools (Sakamoto, 2012). The introduction of English education in lower elementary grades and the use of English examination scores to enter schools or universities or gain employment has made English more important than ever. These educational policies motivate many Japanese parents to send their children for English lessons or enroll them in English preschools or after-school programs. Attending an international school is a definite way to acquire high English proficiency, but not every family can afford the high tuition.

Over the past decades, the pageantry of selecting the appropriate terminology for representing the Chinese English variety has evolved into a movement promoting the widely celebrated term, China English. In He’s (2020: 14) book of Chinese English in World Englishes: Education and Use in the Professional World, an old Chinese saying, ‘without a legitimate name, without authority to the words’, is conjured to justify the rebranding of the Chinese English variety. However, initially, the term ‘China English’ did not automatically win the bid; many other terms were also pitched for being the representative terminology, including ‘Chinese colored English’ (Huang, 1988), ‘Chinese-style English’ (Gui, 1988), ‘Sinicized English’ (Zhang, 1997; Jin, 2002; Jiang, 2003), and even the widely criticized ‘Chinglish’ (Wang, 1999; Zhuang, 2000; Qiong & Wolff, 2003) had its day in the sun. Gradually, scholarly endorsements of China English begin to grow. However, one might wonder: What is the uniqueness of English in China that could trigger such decades of efforts to assert the ownership of an English variety through a mere terminological update?

The dominance of North American (U.S. and Canadian) English is widely prevalent in Korean English language teaching (ELT). Students show more positive attitudes towards American English than any other English variety (Jung, 2005; Yook & Lindemann, 2013), and teachers impart and reinforce American English norms (Ahn, 2017; Ahn, 2011). Administrators and employers consider American English as the sole model for Korean ELT (Ahn, 2013; Harrison, 2010; Jenks, 2017; Song, 2013). Koreans’ preference for American English dates back to the 1950s, when the first national ELT curriculum explicitly favored American English over British English (Lee, 2015). Since then the status of American English as the standard among all varieties of English has been strengthened due to Korea's strong political, military, and economic ties with the US (Harrison, 2010; Yim, 2007).

China English or Chinese English? To my mind, the time is ripe for Chinese English to be adopted as the preferred term, or banner, for characterizing the variety of English of a country which has the largest number of users and learners of English in the world. There are sound linguistic and sociolinguistic reasons for this important terminological choice and decision. There is little research on the naming of the multiplicity of Englishes to date. After discussing the theoretical underpinnings of the acts of naming, Seargeant (2010) provides a taxonomy consisting of six clusters of name labels categorized by function (e.g., ESL, EFL, EAL, EIL, ELF), community (e.g., native vs. non-native varieties; immigrant Englishes), history (e.g., indigenized varieties; language-shift Englishes), ecology (e.g., three concentric circles of world Englishes; new Englishes), and structures (e.g., pidgin English, creolized English). The sixth category, which he calls multiplex, is much broader in scope, featuring English as a link language between specific groups transnationally (e.g., World English). After conducting a meta-analysis of 100 research articles written in Chinese by mainland authors between 1980 and 2013, Xu (2017) found that compared with Chinglish and Chinese English, China English is preferred by the majority, but there are signs that change is in the offing:

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.

The linguistic landscape of any country reveals a lot about the linguistic identity of its citizens, especially if it is a bottom-up linguistic landscape. In Algeria, which is a multi-cultural and multi-lingual context, the linguistic landscape witnessed a remarkable shift in linguistic preferences that is represented in bottom-up signs. This shift is characterized by the addition of a new linguistic entity, English, to the Algerian linguistic landscape. In Algerian society, it is easily observed that English is not commonly present in the top-down signs assigned by the Algerian government, which contrasts with the signs of private businesses such as fashion shops, restaurants, and coffee shops. In fact, English has been found in Algerian signs since the 1990s when foreign energy companies like British Petroleum (BP) arrived and introduced the language in the country (Euromonitor, 2012), but it has become prevalent in the bottom-up signs of private businesses, which were previously dominated by other languages, i.e., Arabic and French. For those who are unfamiliar with the Algerian context, Arabic and Berber (or Tamazight) are the official languages of the country while French and English are the foreign languages. French is the first foreign language, while English is the second foreign language. Despite this clear linguistic planning, there has been unclear planning of the linguistic landscape on the part of the Algerian government, mostly in top-down signs. For instance, the government uses monolingual and bilingual signs that disregard English in the majority of signs. The monolingual signs are either Arabic or French. Berber is used in monolingual signs only in cities of Berber ethnicity. On the other hand, the bilingual signs are mostly written in Arabic and French or Arabic and Berber, the latter signs being found only in Berber-ethnicity cities such as Bejaia, Khenchela, Batna, and Tizi Ouzou. Overall, the government and Algerian citizens have rather different linguistic landscape practices since Algerians opt for integrating English, the language of globalization, presenting it in different bottom-up signs alongside other languages.

Expressing gratitude and patronage in the form of dedication or acknowledgment can be traced back to the 16th century (Görlach, 2004). In the present time, writing an acknowledgment section has become a common practice in scholarly works, such as books, dissertations, theses, and journal articles. Research on acknowledgments as a text type, however, is relatively new. In his pioneering work, Hyland (2003) dubbed dissertation acknowledgments ‘a Cinderella genre’ because it is often regarded as a taken-for-granted component in a dissertation and has not received due academic attention. Unlike other conventional academic genres that aim to establish claims and reputation, dissertation acknowledgments reflect the reciprocal gift-giving among scholars, constituting ‘the most explicitly interpersonal genre of the academy’ (Hyland, 2004: 323). In addition to expressing gratitude to others, writers also use the acknowledgments section to build interpersonal relationships with their academic colleagues and/or professional communities (Chan, 2015). In this study, we adopt computerized text analysis to further explore how language patterns mark the interpersonal features in English dissertation acknowledgments.

When it comes to Englishes in Singapore, two terms come to the fore: Singapore English, and Singlish. As part of the methodology and motivation for this paper, I compiled 500 published works on Englishes in Singapore ranging from the 1970s to 2021. These published works include monographs, edited volumes, chapters in edited volumes, and articles in major peer-reviewed journals. 85% of the 500 publications used the term Singapore English, 27% of them had Singlish, and only a mere six publications (around 1%) used the term Singaporean English. One would expect that for a term that speaks of and to the being of the nation, the term Singaporean English would certainly be used with far more frequency. This is especially so when there is in fact nothing morphologically awkward in attaching the suffix -ean to ‘Singapore’. There are immensely more examples of Englishes around the world that have the suffix (or its near equivalent) than those without (American, Tanzanian, South African Englishes are just some of numerous examples); and the two well known Englishes that remain suffix-free are New Zealand English and Hong Kong English, which we can explain by way of a morphological misfit: the -er suffix does sound rather awkward. Since Singapore does not have this problem, why then does Singapore English resist the suffix -ean?

Cities are the natural homes for linguistic and cultural diversity. Valletta, Malta's capital city and the smallest city in the European Union, is no different. When its foundation stone was laid in 1566 by Grandmaster Jean Parisot de Vallette, it was given the formal title of Humillima Civitas Valettae, but ‘there is little that is humble about the appearance of Valletta, that city “built by gentlemen for gentlemen”’ (Luke, 1968: 65).

English as a lingua franca (ELF) is now the most extensive sociolinguistic use of English around the world (Jenkins, 2015). As a widespread language phenomenon, ELF serves as ‘a “contact language” between persons who share neither a common native tongue nor a common (national) culture and for whom English is the chosen foreign language of communication’ (Firth, 1996: 240). More specifically, ELF refers to communication in English between speakers from different first language (L1) backgrounds (Mauranen, 2012; Seidlhofer, 2011). Instead of being a single variety of English, ELF is also conceptualized as a set of practices involving translingual uses of English (Jenkins, 2015; Seidlhofer, 2017).

The field of linguistic landscape (LL) is concerned with monolingual and bi/-multilingual patterns and practices enacted on ‘public road signs, advertising billboards, street names, place names, commercial shop signs, and public signs on government buildings’ (Landry & Bourhis, 1997: 25). Since the publication of Landry and Bourhis’ (1997) research study, much more attention has been paid towards LL research, especially after the appearance of a Linguistic Landscape special issue of the International Journal of Multilingualism 3(1) (2006) (reproduced as the book Linguistic Landscape: A New Approach to Multilingualism [Gorter, 2006]). There has also been increased discussion of specific locations, such as multilingualism in Tokyo (Backhaus, 2007), English in the neighbourhoods of Johor Bahru City in Malaysia (McKiernan, 2019), and Jawi, an endangered orthography in the Malaysian LL (Coluzzi, 2020).

The English language, although a second language, plays a prominent role in Nigeria. As the official language in the media, governmental administration, education, law courts, commerce, entertainment and politics, it has assumed a hegemonic position over indigenous Nigerian languages (Oladipupo, 2021). In view of its long years of interaction with these languages, the absence of native models, and the influence of Nigerian teachers who lack Standard English pronunciation competence (Awonusi, 2015; Akinjobi, 2020), it has been nativised and acculturated (Adegbija, 2004). This has, therefore, resulted in a Nigerian English (NigE) variety that is markedly different from Standard British English, its precursor and target model, at the syntactic (e.g., Akinlotan, 2021), pragmatic (e.g., Fuchs, Gut & Soneye, 2013) and phonological (e.g., Awonusi, 2015; Akinola & Oladipupo, 2021) levels.