Attitudes to English Usage is the title of a book published in 1970 by W. H. Mittins, Mary Salu, Mary Edminson and Sheila Coyne from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne that reported on an enquiry held among some 450 informants concerning the acceptability of 55 usage items. These items had been selected because they were at the time ‘subject to variation in practice and dispute in theory’ (Mittins et al., 1970: 4), and they include sentences like He refused to even think about it, It looked like it will rain and Everyone has their off-days. In each case the offensive feature had been highlighted so that informants would know what they had to comment on: to even think (a split infinitive), the use of like for as if, and of their with a singular antecedent (everyone). For fifty sentences the informants had to indicate acceptability in informal speech, informal writing, formal speech and formal writing, and for the remaining five only for informal and formal writing, since usage of these items was believed to be restricted to writing (1970: 4). The sentences were subsequently ranged from highest general acceptability (did not do as well as) to lowest (veryunique), and correlations were calculated with the occupation of the informants (students, teachers, lecturers, examiners and non-educationists), while the items were also classified as colloquial (pretty reliable), etymological (data is), grammatical (did it quicker) and lexical/semantic (inferred/implied), or as language myths, ‘where the censorious tend to invoke a prescription of dubious authority’ (dangling participles) (1970: 15). The main part of the book dealt with the individual constructions, analysing the reasons for their status as debated usage items and providing further historical context in the process.

Ever since the 1980s, when research interest in the field of ‘World Englishes’ began to gather speed, the view of the English language around the world has been largely dominated by the construct of so-called ‘varieties’ of English. These varieties are usually given a geographical label (‘Singapore English’, ‘Welsh English’, ‘South African English’, ‘Fiji English’, etc), and are described in terms of their pronunciation, their grammar, and their vocabulary. The resulting anthologies (see e.g. Wells, 1982; Trudgill & Hannah, 1982; Kortmann et al., 2004) have contributed a lot to our understanding of how English varies globally, as well as to raising the profile of non-inner circle (Kachru, 1985) varieties, which had previously not benefited from as much attention.

The English language has been part of Malaysia for a long time, going back to the beginning of British colonial rule in the 18th century. The present attitudes towards English can be said to vary from conservative (e.g. referring to it as bahasa penjajah, literally ‘language of the coloniser’) to general acceptance (e.g. English is part of Malaysian history) and to a liberal/modern/Western outlook (e.g. calling for the return of English-medium schools). The conservative view stems from the history, or, for some, the memory, of the role English played in the colonial education system as the language of the elite which served to separate the urban and rural populations into the haves and the have-nots. Inevitably, the abolition of English-medium education became one of the key matters for debate during the campaign for independence from British rule in the 1950s. Malay nationalists considered English-medium education to be part of a British agenda to maintain control of the country after Independence. Replacing English with Malay as the medium of instruction as well as the national language in Malaya was, therefore, vital. In 1967, through the National Language Act, Malay became the sole official language in Malaysia a decade after Independence. Thus, from 1970 onwards, the phasing out of English as a medium of instruction from the Malaysian education system was carried out fervently, while at the same time Malay was zealously promoted, not only in education but in all spheres of public life.

Of all the major colonial varieties of English, South African English (SAfE) is arguably the most under-studied. Its linguistic history is also one of the most complex, South Africa having been the site of a series of immigration events involving English-speakers from a vast array of regional and social backgrounds. On top of this the English spoken by native speakers of other languages also, conceivably, had a role to play in this dialect's formation. This paper provides a brief historical reconstruction of the formation of SAfE, drawing on recent work which seems to indicate that in many important respects SAfE is younger than many might suspect.

The development of Hong Kong English (henceforth HKE) has triggered a number of concerns amongst the local population with respect to its status (Joseph, 1996; Luk, 1998; Bolton & Lim, 2000; Pang, 2003; Stibbard, 2004). However, despite the prominence of research into attitudes towards language variation within sociolinguistics, very few studies focus on Hong Kong English (Bolton & Kwok, 1990; Candler, 2001; S. Poon, 2007) or Mandarin-accented English (He & Li, 2009; Hu, 2004; F. Poon, 2006). The aim of this study is to uncover language attitudes towards HKE and Mandarin-accented English (henceforth ME) in the Hong Kong region through the application of the verbal-guise technique.

Black South African English (henceforth BSAfE) has received more attention from corpus linguists than any other variety in the country. In the early 2000s, two corpus projects were initiated more or less simultaneously: the corpus of spoken Xhosa-English, compiled by Vivian de Klerk at Rhodes University, and the Tswana Learner English corpus that I compiled. A number of further corpora have also been compiled in the more recent past, many of which are available in the public domain for research purposes.

The emergence of Student Pidgin in Ghana is estimated to have started fairly recently: between 1965 and the early 1970s (Huber, 1999; Dako, 2002). Male students in high prestige senior secondary schools and universities have been credited with leading in the development of Student Pidgin. The use of Student Pidgin has since been spreading among some girls and is currently found in an increasing number of contexts, including the home. The fact that students use Student Pidgin seems unexpected, considering the fact that they are competent speakers of Standard English.2 In this context, the question to consider is what underlies this behavior? This has been the subject of recurrent debate. Educational authorities typically feel that Student Pidgin reflects the fact that the standard of English in Ghanaian senior secondary schools and universities has fallen. An example of this comes from a speech given by the Vice Chancellor of the University of Ghana, Professor Kwadwo Asenso-Okyere, on 28 October 2002:

This study investigates a number of non-interference sources of some Cameroon English (CamE) prepositional usages. It is based on the observation that the investigation of causes or sources of post-colonial Englishisms (peculiarities of newer varieties of English spoken in former English and American colonies) has so far favoured the interference factor. More clearly, post-colonial English (PCE) specificities have generally been attributed to the influence of the speakers' other tongues on their (English) production (see, for example, Platt et al., 1984; Mbangwana, 1989; Bokamba, 1992; Gramley & Pätzold, 1992; Asante, 1995). Although the interference factor is indeed easily perceptible in CamE, it is interesting to note that other factors might have played a major role in the emergence of English in Cameroon. In reality, there are several non-contrastive causes that could underlie some grammatical constructions of PCE in general and CamE in particular. Many such causes are being studied, especially at the phonological level. However, few studies have been devoted to the non-interference sources of CamE grammatical usages in general and preposition use in particular. This paper will thus examine how CamE speakers use prepositions to express direction and location. From the analysis, non-interference sources of a good number of CamE specificities such as the colonial factor, logicalization, analogy and tacit national norm seem to be some of the autonomous routes unconsciously used by CamE speakers to yield a variety of English that markedly differs from the standardized varieties of British English (StE), officially the target of national education.

Post 9/11, traditional Islamic educational institutions, better known by their Arabic name ‘madrasas’, have been catapulted into the foreground of heated and at times shrill debates on modernization and reform (Malik, 2008; Noor et al., 2008; Riaz, 2008; Hefner, 2009). Discussions on reforming the madrasa system revolve around, among other things, introducing ‘modern’ education in the madrasas and the role of English in this process. Contrary to popular assumptions, however, such tensions are nothing new. On the contrary, the madrasa has witnessed recurrent attempts at reform in Muslim societies during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Since the eleventh century, when it first emerged as the pivotal centre of Islamic higher learning, the madrasa has undergone many changes, adapting in varying degrees to local cultures and changing times (Zaman, 1999). Nevertheless, these changes and reforms may not necessarily conform to the standards set by Western liberalism and it would be a gross mistake to judge the success, merit and relevance of the madrasa through the prism of such a discourse, given that the very raison d'être of madrasas is the production, dissemination, promotion and preservation of Islamic learning in a modern world which has brought into sharp relief the divide between the religious and the private on the one hand, and the secular and the public on the other, a distinction with little precedent in earlier Muslim societies. It is modernity that constructed the notion of religion as occupying a distinct sphere in society. Developments in modern Europe, and especially the impact of the Enlightenment, have led not merely to the subordination of religion to the state or the confinement of the former to the sphere of ‘private’ life but also to ‘the construction of religion as a new historical object: anchored in personal experience, expressible as belief-statements, dependent on private institutions, and practised in one's spare time. This construction of religion ensures that it is part of what is inessential to our common politics, economy, science, and morality’ (Asad, 1993: 207).

Black South African English (BSAfE) is now generally regarded as an independent variety of English rather than an interlanguage on the way to Standard English (Van Rooy, 2008: 274, 300 and in this issue). Mesthrie (2006: 115) demonstrates that many of the characteristic features of BSAfE can be ascribed to the overarching tendency of anti-deletion. Anti-deletion is a term coined by Mesthrie (2006: 115) to encompass three kinds of linguistic phenomena that are the opposite of deletion in generative analyses of English, namely undeletion, non-deletion and insertion. Undeletion ‘restores an element that is often assumed to be deleted or to have an empty node in generative analyses of English’ (Mesthrie, 2006: 125), e.g. She made me to go (Mesthrie, 2006: 111) in which the infinitive marker to is undeleted. Insertion entails the addition of grammatical morphemes, e.g. can be able (Mesthrie, 2006: 139–40). After examination of a number of undeletion phenomena in interviews with 12 mesolectal speakers of BSAfE, Mesthrie (2006: 129) arrives at the following principle: ‘If a grammatical feature can be deleted in [Standard English], it can be undeleted in [Black South African English] mesolect.’ He points out that such undeletions are not mandatory and adds the following corollary to the principle of undeletion: ‘If a grammatical feature can be deleted in StE, it can also be (variably) deleted in [Black South African English] mesolect, at a lower rate of frequency’ (Mesthrie, 2006: 129).

English nowadays plays an important role in the political, diplomatic, commercial, economic and cultural activities on the global stage (see, e.g., Graddol, 1997, 2006; Jenkins, 2000; Warschauer, 2000; Crystal, 2003). As a result of the widespread use of English around the globe, several scholars contend that English no longer exclusively represents the culture of native English-speaking countries, nor are they the exclusive ‘owners’ of English (see e.g. Widdowson, 1994).

Investigating the phonological patterns, especially the stress patterns, of verbs ending in -ize such as finalize, constitutionalize, etc, the word recognize has attracted my attention. One would not generally attach too much attention to this word for its phonology: it seems to be a run-of-the-mill case of stressing the third-last (antepenultimate) syllable of a non-transparent derivation by -ize. For instance, Nádasdy (2006: 222) treats -ize as a basically neutral (strong) suffix, that is one that is not supposed to interfere with stress-patterns and otherwise of the stem to which it is attached. Following established analyses, he divides -ize words into two categories, though: those that are derived from a free stem ('character > 'characterize, 'final > 'finalize), where stress (indicated by the ' mark) does not shift in the derived verb, and those whose stem is non-transparent ('recognize, 'categorize), and where stress tends to be furthest away from the suffix itself. The fact that recognize has a non-transparent derivation means that there is no free English word *recogn. Ginésy (2004: 126) analyzes recognize as morphologically having a double prefix, re- and co-, which reduces the stem to Latinate -gn-, which is always bound in English. Whether his etymological analysis is warranted for the contemporary morphology of recognize is at least disputable today, but he correctly claims that 'recognize, with stress on the initial syllable, behaves like a non-transparent derivation so it receives antepenultimate stressing. In other words, the most wide-spread pronunciation of recognize, with initial stress, is generally unproblematic in the literature: it is a case of non-transparent derivation by -ize with antepenultimate stressing.

The presence of French in advertising communication within largely non-French speaking communities has been noted by a few linguists. Haarmann (1984, 1989) found that French is used in Japanese advertisements as ethno-cultural hieroglyphs which connote refinement, poshness, style and tastefulness – stereotypes of France and French culture. The unintelligibility of French to Japanese patrons is perceived as a non-issue, as social or symbolic meanings are deemed to be more vital to attract patrons than denotational meanings. A parallel case was found in British advertisements of food, fashion and beauty businesses where French symbolism or linguistic fetish is seen as attractive to largely non-French, English-speaking patrons (Kelly-Holmes, 2005). Notably, French symbolic meanings are sometimes accompanied by elaborative messages in English. Kelly-Holmes (2005) noted that English is used only where message comprehension is important for explicit communication. Curtin (2009) documented the fact that ‘vogue’ or ‘display’ French shop names favored by high-end restaurants and beauty salons in Taipei occurred concomitantly with vogue English. Vogue English is relatively more ubiquitous across the city's linguistic landscape due to its connotations being exploited in a wide span of applications vis-à-vis the chic prestige of French, which is tied to food, beauty and fashion businesses. The Taipei case shows that non-idiomatic French is employed as a socio-commercial accessory, similar to the case of decorative English used in Japan (Dougill, 1987) and in Milan, Italy (Ross, 1997). However, a more recent study on Tokyo shop signs gleaned linguistic patterns other than vogue English and vogue French (MacGregor, 2003), such as French + Japanese and English + French + Japanese. A recent study by Serwe et al. (in press) found that French and French-like shop names are increasingly in currency, with local shop owners keen to stand out and appeal to the increasingly cosmopolitan and sophisticated clientele in Singapore, who are nevertheless overwhelmingly non-French speaking. They further found that French and French-inspired shop signs of food businesses can be classified into four categories, namely, monolingual French, French + another language, French function words + another language, and coinages, noting that there are idiomatic usages and non-idiomatic usages in the first three categories. In this paper, we throw the spotlight on coinages, which we argue are mostly explicable as French-English code-switched blends. We focus on localized nominal concoctions used by shop owners across food and beauty commercial entities within Singapore. We borrowed the term ‘Frenglish’ from Martin's (2007) study to refer to the French-English blends. However, we noted that Martin's study focused on the use of English in advertising communication in France, where English is the minority language that is largely sidelined by the Toubon Law. Contrastively, English in Singapore is de facto the national language, while French is a foreign language with few speakers.

As Voloshinov has famously argued, ‘the word is the most sensitive index of social changes, and what is more, of changes still in the process of growth’ (Voloshinov, 1986: 19). Scrutiny of young people's discourses on language together with their language practices offers us a window into a society in transition, such as present-day South Africa. This article examines the language ideologies and language practices of Black youth attending previously White, now desegregated, suburban schools in South African cities, important spaces for the production of an expanding Black middle class (Soudien, 2004). Due to their resourcing during apartheid (both financial and human) previously White schools are aligned with quality education and perceived as strategic sites for the acquisition and maintenance of a prestige variety of South African English. This article looks at how mainly African girls (15–16 years) position themselves in relation to English, drawing on data collected using ethnographic approaches in four desegregated schools in South African cities: three in Johannesburg, Gauteng and one in Cape Town, Western Cape. The discussion focuses on two significant themes: English and the [re]production of race; and the place of English in young people's linguistic repertoires. My aim is to show how African youth in desegregated schools orient themselves to English and what their language ideologies and language practices might tell us about macro social processes, including the (re)constitution of race in South Africa. Schooling, as Bourdieu points out, is one of the most important sites for social reproduction and is thus also one of the key sites, ‘which imposes the legitimate forms of discourse and the idea that discourse should be recognised if and only if it conforms to the legitimate norms’ (Bourdieu, 1977: 650). However, co-present with processes of reproduction are practices that work to subvert and unsettle dominant discourses. Suburban desegregated schools are thus productive sites for the re-making of cultural practices (including language) and identities.

As China continues to increase diplomatic and trade relations with about 53 African countries, the position of China becoming the largest trading partner of Africa cannot be over-emphasized, as numerous academic studies and journalistic reports have documented (e.g. Bodomo & Ma, 2010; Laribee, 2008; Mohan & Tan-Mullins, 2008; Mung-Kuang, 2008; Beijing Xinhua, 2005). By the end of 2008, about 1,600 Chinese companies had invested in African countries with a direct investment stock of US$7.8 billion (Wen Jiabao, November 7, 2009, the Opening Ceremony of the China-Africa Business Conference).