Editorial

In October of 2018 the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) released its latest quarterly update with more than 1400 new words, senses and subentries added to the dictionary.¹ One might reasonably wonder how 1400 additions could be justified in the dictionary on a quarterly basis, but a quick look at the update's description is enough to demonstrate the range of sources that continue to supply new words. Some of the new words are from popular culture or contemporary discourse, and are not surprising additions: nothingburger describes ‘a person or thing of no importance, value or substance’; Tarantinoesque is the feature ‘resembling or imitative of the films of Quentin Tarantino’; and a Mrs Robinson is a — well, if readers don't already know this reference, then we encourage them to look it up in the OED. 100 new words use the highly productive suffix -cracy, as in democracy or theocracy, in new words like idiocracy ‘a society consisting of or governed by idiots’. But what caught our eye was the addition of 20 new words from Philippine English, described with vivid and entertaining detail in the OED's blog post.²

The OED blog explains that the Philippine English words are especially notable not only because so many are included in a single update, but because they were suggested by Filipino English speakers who responded to the OED's call for new words. The OED calls this elicitation technique ‘crowdsourcing’ (a word that was, by the way, added to the OED in the June 2013 update). The new words from Philippine English aptly express and illustrate so much of what we already know about the Philippines. Some of the words describe the creative uses of English, like dirty ice cream ‘ice cream of a type that is typically made from coconut milk, sold from handcarts by street vendors’, holdupper ‘a person who commits a robbery using threats or violence’ or ambush interview ‘a media interview that has not been prearranged’. Other words remind us that the Philippines is a highly multilingual place. English words borrowed from Filipino languages such as Tagalog are expected, and words like bagoong ‘a sauce or paste made from fermented or salted fish’ and bongga ‘extravagant, flamboyant’ are both welcomed additions to the OED. Other languages that are not necessarily native to Philippines are also represented within the borrowings: bihon ‘very long, thin noodles made with rice flour’ from a Hokkien etymon; ensaimada ‘a spiral-shaped pastry made with sweet yeast dough’ from Catalan; cartolina ‘thick, stiff, coloured paper used for making models or posters’ from Portuguese; and querida ‘a mistress’ from Spanish. These words remind us that ports within the Philippine islands have a long history of multilingualism and cosmopolitanism, although enforced by colonial domination.

A number of the new words also remind us of the playful ways that residents of the Philippines blend words from different languages into forms that echo and recall words from the local or other languages. For example, carinderia and panciteria both describe places to eat by blending etymons from Tagalog with Spanish into forms that echo, imitate and rhyme with the widely understood English cafeteria. Trapo ‘politician perceived as belonging to a conventional and corrupt ruling class’ is a blend of English traditional politician (i.e. ‘tra’ + ‘po’), but the word also recalls (and evokes) the Tagalog word trapo ‘rag’, which is, in turn, borrowed from Spanish trapo. It is exciting and gratifying to see the linguistic diversity and the creative expressivity of the Filipino people codified with the OED, and we look forward to seeing in coming years the possibilities afforded by crowdsourced lexicography.

In this issue Walt Wolfram and KellyNoel Waldorf describe the experience of making the documentary film Talking Black in America and examine the educational impact of the film. Although it is not always easily to communication with the general public about our research in linguistics, Wolfram and Waldorf remind of the responsibility to do so and the profound reward of doing so successfully. Other topics in this issue include: naming of handmade soaps; media Englishes in Cameroon; observations about various aspects of language contact between English and Chinese; a proposal for the development of English education in Indonesia; and a new resource with the Spoken British National Corpus.