All of the contributions in this special issue respond to a somewhat paradoxical situation: lexis (or vocabulary) is probably the area of linguistics that is most accessible and most salient for a non-specialist audience, but at the same time it presents some uniquely difficult challenges for systematic scholarly linguistic analysis. This is especially the case for approaches that focus on statistics or quantification of data, such as are typical of modern work in sociolinguistics. For this reason, it often seems that lexis is the Cinderella that is excluded from the ball, a topic that modern sociolinguists tend to steer clear of because of the methodological difficulties. This special issue will try to investigate the background to this problem, and suggest some possible solutions.

According to a 2010 China Daily article, the number of English learners in China is now around 400 million, approximately one third of China's population (see also Wei and Su, this issue). The importance of English in the state education system has been supplemented by the rapid growth of privately-run language schools and training institutes across the country in recent years. The same article quoted a comment by Ms Xiao Yan, the public relations manager of the Wall Street English language school chain, who gave her explanation for the current popularity of English in the following terms:

French has long served as the donor language par excellence in the history of English. French has enriched the English vocabulary throughout the centuries since before the Norman Conquest (Serjeantson, 1935: 104–5). The French impact on the English lexicon has received much attention in studies of the language and its development. However, French borrowings which have recently been introduced into English have figured little if at all in research thus far.

For second language learners, the value of the explicit teaching of English grammar has never been questioned. However, in recent times there has been dissent about whether or not to teach English grammar to native speakers. From the late 1960s onwards English grammar teaching in the United Kingdom largely disappeared from the curriculum, and was replaced by teachers focusing on students learning to express themselves. This was in the main not a bad thing, because it made students active participants in their own learning, and they were expected to think critically and express themselves well. The teaching of grammar, with its emphasis on rules, drilling and learning by rote, was seen as conformist, dull and unnecessary, and this view seemed to be confirmed by research into the effectiveness of grammar teaching.

Quality or speed: that is the question. The big problem for professional translators nowadays is that our clients want both. We are required, on a daily basis, to try to do the impossible, to square the circle, to attempt to maintain a satisfactory degree of accuracy and style while meeting deadlines that at times can only be described as sadistic. Levels of translator stress have gradually risen, though sadly they have not been accompanied by a commensurate rise in translation rates. I cannot help but wonder, as I glance nervously at the clock, how we have ended up in this sorry state of calendarial bondage, in which we would hardly be surprised to hear an indignant client remark, in the immortal words of Louis XIV: ‘I almost had to wait!’

In the mid-1980s, Crystal (1985) lamented that there were no reliable figures available for the number of learners to whom English is taught as a foreign language in many regions of the world, and that ‘China has always been excluded from the statistical reviews, because of the shortage of information from inside the country’ (Crystal, 1985: 9). More recently, Bolton (2008: 6) similarly notes that because of ‘the absence of accurate language surveys’ academics have to make educated guesses regarding the total number of those learning/knowing English. The figure of the total English learners/users in China has been estimated to be somewhere between 200 and 350 million (cf. Bolton, 2003: 48; Kachru, 1997; McArthur, 2003; Zhao & Campbell, 1995; Graddol, 2006: 95). Fortunately, a national language survey in China conducted at the turn of the century does provide some hard statistics on the number of English language learners/users in the world's most populous country, and also sheds some light on the realities of use of English and English proficiency among the Chinese people.

The English language and the Internet, both separately and taken together, are nowadays well-acknowledged as powerful forces which influence and affect the lexico-grammatical characteristics of other languages world-wide. In fact, many authors like Crystal (2004) have pointed out the emergence of the so-called Netspeak, that is, the language used in the Net or World Wide Web; as Crystal himself (2004: 19) puts it, ‘a type of language displaying features that are unique to the Internet […] arising out of its character as a medium which is electronic, global and interactive’. This ‘language’, however, may be differently understood: either as an adaptation of the English language proper to internet requirements and purposes, or as a new and rapidly-changing and developing language as a result of a rapid evolution or adaptation to Internet requirements of almost all world languages, for whom English is a trendsetter. If the second and probably most plausible interpretation is adopted, there are three salient features of ‘Netspeak’: (a) the rapid expansion of all its new linguistic developments thanks to the Internet itself, which may lead to the generalization and widespread acceptance of new words, coinages, or meanings, hundreds of times faster than was the case with the printed media. As said above, (b) the visible influence of English, the most prevalent language on the Internet. Consequently, (c) this new language tends to reduce the ‘distance’ between English and other languages as well as the ignorance of the former by speakers of other languages, since the ‘Netspeak’ version of the latter adopts grammatical, syntactic and lexical features of English. Thus, linguistic differences may even disappear when code-switching and/or borrowing occurs, as whole fragments of English appear in other language contexts. As a consequence of the new situation, an ideal context appears for interlanguage or multilingual word formation to thrive: puns, blends, compounds and word creativity in general find in the web the ideal place to gain rapid acceptance world-wide, as a result of fashion, coincidence, or sheer merit of the new linguistic proposals.

This article focuses on Anglophone writing of a British postcolonial legacy as opposed to writing of a Lusophone, Francophone, Belgian, Dutch, or German legacy. Moreover, this specific phrase of ‘Anglophone writing of a British postcolonial legacy’ is employed in recognition of a move away from the label ‘postcolonial writing’. The article will suggest that recently published texts are engaged in new departures which seemingly appear to be taking us away from the classic ‘postcolonial’ text. Thus, in recognition of these new departures, the terminology used in this article will attempt to better encapsulate the sense of the provenance of the writing and yet at the same time move the terminology ‘forward’, away from the label of the ‘postcolonial’.

Perhaps there is no better illustration of Bourdieu's view that language can be converted to political or economic power (1991) than the success of the New Oriental School, which started as an English teaching organization, with the motto ‘Language is power’, mainly to prepare Chinese students for the TOFEL and the GRE tests. They have been so successful that they have now expanded into a full-scale educational institution, with English as its key component. Also, many people in China have prospered through English, including the world-famous teacher Li Yang, who achieved phenomenal success with his ‘Crazy English’ method, whose approach pushes a language-as-power message. In addition, the prosperity of the publishing houses selling English materials, the huge number of the teachers, and the enormous English-learning population in China all seem to contribute to the belief that English can enrich anyone who can find a way to capitalize on the language. However, despite the booming success of various English training agencies, it is ironic that English departments at Chinese universities now face an unprecedented crisis for survival. One major reason for this is that the recent craze for English in China has been accompanied by a parallel and steep decline of interest in the study of English as a ‘major’ at university level. In this article, I will address the problems that English departments in universities have in their response to the practical turn in English studies, with reference to the teaching of writing to English majors in particular.

Taking as our starting-point the results of an investigation conducted on data collected in the 1950s for the Survey of English Dialects (SED) (Glauser, 1985), in this paper we look at data collected between forty and fifty years after the SED to examine variation in the semantic fields BOYS/GIRLS; SONS/DAUGHTERS. Glauser's SED data consisted of single-word responses mainly from older male informants to questions such as: ‘Children may be of either sex: they're either….boys, or …. girls.’1 (Orton, 1962: 89), but we have examined data from two more recent sources – the Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (DECTE) and Burbano-Elizondo's (2008) study of linguistic variation in Sunderland – in order to ascertain which words occur in these semantic fields. Whilst Glauser's observation that lad is elicited more frequently than lass is borne out, we find that, in the sense of ‘sexual partner’, where these words do not appear in the SED data, lass is used more frequently than lad in the more recent data from Tyneside and Sunderland. We also find that, whilst there is no clear correlation between use of the words lad and lass and the social class of speakers, males use both these words more than females.

Today many people associate Korea with large corporations such as Samsung, Hyundai, or LG. As remarkable as its rapid technological advancement is the country's growing fervor for learning English. Compared with other countries, Korea is rather distinctive in remaining monocultural in its overall demographic composition. Behind the seemingly quiet, monolingual and monocultural façade is a vibrant force that drives its people toward an Anglophone world. Once colonized by Japan, Korea was heavily influenced by the Japanese language and culture. It is no coincidence that the Korean lexicon contains many words of English origin (Anglicisms) that are also found in Japanese. Examples include hotchkiss (‘stapler’), ball pen (‘ballpoint pen’), pama (‘perm’), manicure (‘nail polish’), salaryman (‘salaried man’), and mass com (from ‘mass communication’, used for ‘media’). These represent only a handful of examples among numerous Anglicized words that entered the Korean language during the Japanese colonization which spanned a period of thirty-six years.

The Canary Islands are very well known as an all-year-round tourist resort, thanks to their mild climate. References to the Islands have been many and varied since ancient times. Caught between legends and reality, the Canaries were described as marvellous islands on the limits of the world. They were referred to as ‘the Isles of the Blest’, the Hesperides or the Elysian Fields by the Greek poets of the Golden Age.

This paper presents preliminary findings from the lexicographic strand of a British Library (BL) project to document variation in British English. Voices of the UK (VoUK) is the first attempt to present significant amounts of raw data emerging from a nationwide survey of spoken English in the UK since the 1950s. The data derive from the BBC Voices Recordings: a set of group conversations about language, accent and dialect recorded in locations across the UK by BBC Local Radio in 2004 and 2005. The recordings capture speakers from all walks of life exploring their responses to an identical set of prompt words. The result is a large, rich but targeted corpus of lexical variation.

With the acceleration of globalization, universities in East Asia are increasingly under pressure to compete internationally, and ‘internationalization’ of tertiary education in the region has topped the education reform agenda of each government (Mok & James, 2005). In an effort to join the league of world-class universities and attract international students, East Asian universities have expanded the number of English-medium lectures (EMLs) offered as part of their internationalization strategy, and no country has embraced the move more than Korea (Newsweek, February 26, 2007). As of 2010, all the classes at the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) are conducted in English only and 93 percent of classes at the Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH), the nation's two best science and engineering universities, with rates of EML averaging around 10 to 30 percent among the top 7 universities in Korea as of the first half of 2008 (Chosun Ilbo, March 10, 2008). Reforms of Korean universities characterized by the introduction of EMLs have been praised by many local as well as top international media such as the New York Times and the Science Magazine. Often lost amid the hype, however, are the challenges facing local students in learning complex material in English, a language which most have learned only as a foreign language and to limited levels of proficiency. This article compares opinions expressed in the mainstream media with those from university presses run by student organizations that have been most active in expanding English-medium programs by analyzing articles related to EMLs. The aim of this comparative research is to find out if there are any observable differences in views presented by these two types of print media, in an attempt to shed light on the move to EMLs in this exclusively monolingual country.

In China, most universities have a school of foreign languages, where students majoring in English, German, French, Japanese, and other languages study the language for the first two years, and take introductory courses in the linguistics and literature of the language concerned, and then progress to higher-level linguistic and literary courses, as well as translation studies. English is the most popular foreign language in China, and, with the improvement of English teaching in high schools, the average student entering university now has a higher level of English proficiency than previous generations of students. However, students with high scores in English often choose to study ‘practical’ subjects other than English, such as business studies, computer science, economics, medicine, etc. Increasingly, a number of programs at universities in China are even being taught through the medium of English. Consequently, English majors have less and less advantage over non-English majors, and departments of English have had to restructure their syllabi to cope with the situation. Courses in translation studies, intercultural communication and applied linguistics have thus gained greater recognition because of their functional importance in the real world (see Qu, this issue).