English is a global language, and the fact has been reiterated by various studies conducted both in native and non-native countries. In India, English, since the British era, has dominated the domains of administration, business, higher education, science and technology and mass media. Post-Independence the visibility and functionality of English increased manifold. English is everywhere on the streets: from billboards to hoardings, from advertisements to road signs, English is omnipresent. Even for petty official works in places such as banks, post offices, hospitals, railway stations, bus depots, schools and colleges, English becomes indispensable.

Children's literature is an important resource for knowledge construction among young children. As they read the stories or have the stories read to them, children are presented with multiple ideologies and belief systems and this includes notions of masculinity and femininity (Taylor, 2003: 301). These ideologies are absorbed by young children and go on to influence their attitudes and behaviour as they participate in society. Perhaps for this reason, the reading of gender in children's literature has been an area that has drawn the interest of numerous researchers over the decades (Bender and Lach, 1990; Collins, Ingoldsby & Dellman, 1984; Crabb & Bielawski, 1994; Dellmann-Jenkins, Florjancic & Swadener, 1993; Desai, 2001; Dutro, 2002; Gooden & Gooden, 2001; Kortenhaus & Demarest, 1993; Oskamp, Kaufman & Wolterbeck, 1996; Poarch & Monk-Turner, 2001; Turner-Bowker, 1996; Weitzman et al., 1972). These studies have generally pointed to evidence of sexism, that is, the denigration of females realised in tandem with the exaltation of males (Ivy & Backlund, 1994: 72).

Recently, new varieties of English, in particular insular ones, have been discovered and described by sociolinguists: Bermuda English, Falkland Islands English, St Helena English, Tristan da Cunha English, to name but a few. Concomitantly, applied linguists have started to take an interest in ‘lingua franca English’ as used in countries where English has no official status. Euro-English and, more recently, Swiss English are examples of such English as a Lingua Franca (hereafter, ELF) varieties. Any scientific exploration into unknown territory presupposes that there is something to be found – ideally something that already has a name. Quests for new varieties of English are motivated by the same fundamental desire, namely, to find ‘X-an English’ (Groves, 2011: 35).

In the past 30 years, China's open-door policy and rapid economic growth have been accelerating English as a foreign language (hereafter EFL) teaching in an unprecedented way. To facilitate the learning process for students, English teachers in China have switched from using traditional ways of teaching English to adopting a variety of modern English teaching methods from the West (Rao, 2002). Of all these imported methods, Communicative Language Teaching (hereafter CLT) is the most popular and widespread one in Chinese schools. However, conflicts have appeared in the process of this transformation. On the one hand, the Chinese government and education administrators are aware of the importance of English communicative competence as contact with foreigners speaking English increases. On the other hand, some problems in the current English teaching prevent teachers from getting their students involved in the communicative activities in their teaching process. They still cling to the traditional teaching methods and techniques. In this paper, I trace the development of EFL teaching in China, analyze some difficulties and challenges that EFL teachers and learners must face, and look at the prospects for EFL teaching in China in the future.

This paper, a spin-off from a larger-scale research project, advances a novel perspective on recent introducers to quotations in interactive communicative settings, with the (current reporting) speaker and addressee(s) co-present: be like, quote, quote unquote, and the air-quotes are all ‘newcomers’ to the quotative system in English; they are constrained in usage to face-to-face contexts, and they foreground through animating the quote, resorting to the various modalities available in such situations: verbal, vocal, and gestural.

This paper reflects on the recently published Dictionary of South African Indian English (Mesthrie, 2010, henceforth DSAIE) in terms of the decisions that have to be made over content in a New English variety. ‘New English’ is used in the commonly accepted sense of a variety that has arisen as a second language in a multilingual context, mainly under British colonialism, but which has gained an identity of its own on account of its characteristic linguistic features which differ from those of the erstwhile target language, viz. educated British English. Dictionaries of English outside of England and the United States of America are no longer novel: well-known efforts include the Macquarie Dictionary of Australian English (Butler et al., 2009) and The Dictionary of South African English on Historical Principles (Silva et al., 1996). In the same vein Hobson-Jobson (Yule & Burnell, 1886) recorded the lexis of colonial India, concentrating more on the vocabulary of the British there, though usage characteristic of Indians is also cited. Post-colonial India is still served by lexicographers of British origins: Hanklyn-Janklin (Hankin, 1994) and Sahibs, Nabobs and Boxwallahs (Lewis, 1991) are both true to the Hobson-Jobson tradition in feel and style, whilst being fairly up-to-date. I am unaware of any systematic dictionary work treating of the more colloquial words of Indian English, this 30 years on from Braj Kachru's (1983) article ‘Toward a Dictionary’. The popular guidebook series Lonely Planet has stolen a march on the lexicographers in producing a vibrant, popular book Indian English: Language and Culture (2008), with an emphasis on vocabulary amidst other culture lessons. The new internet era has also provided online dictionaries, the most sophisticated in my experience being the Dictionary of Singlish and Singapore English launched in 2004 (www.singlishdictionary.com).

The development of African varieties of English has been attributed to a variety of factors, and the emergent forms of English spoken in various African countries have been the subject of study for several decades now. Among the factors mentioned as leading to the ‘Africanness’ of African Englishes is the exposure to written language, which tends to lead to the observation of linkages between spelling and pronunciation in some of these varieties of English (Schmied, 1991a, 2006). The argument has been that due to exposure to the written word, second language learners reproduce elements of written language in speech, leading, for example, to the pronunciation of silent letters in words such as ‘heir’, ‘tomb’ etc. This phenomenon of ‘spelling pronunciation’ is more pronounced in some varieties than in others, and the practice may not be confined to non-native environments. In general, spelling pronunciation has been shown to lead to cross-cultural miscommunication and therefore has implications for English as a global language.

Chinese and English belong to different language families, so they often have different forms of expression. Chinese has no definite grammatical category of number and has almost no number inflection. Plural meaning is usually implied in the syntactic structure or in the context by a bare noun, or is expressed through the plural marker 们 and the numerical adjectives such as many, numerous and each, as well as by quantifiers and reduplications. However, English nouns express number category by inflection as well as by quantifiers at times, so their grammatical number is far more complicated than that of Chinese nouns. From the point of view of grammatical form, English nouns are often considered as countable and uncountable nouns. Uncountable nouns cannot be directly modified by a numeral without unit specification, nor can they be combined with an indefinite article. Thus, cheese is quantified as three slices of cheese. However, uncountable nouns can also be quantified without specifying a unit of measurement, such as much coal. A number of uncountable nouns can be used in the plural form to mean ‘a large amount of’ as in the following example from Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (hereinafter, LDCE) ‘The ship drifted into Turkish territorial waters’. In such cases, although water is uncountable, it has the plural form. In some cases, native English speakers can turn the theoretical uncountable nouns into countable ones (Landau, 2001). There seems to be no absolute boundary between countable and uncountable nouns.

I still recall, with a mixture of amusement and embarrassment, the time I took a visiting Italian friend to lunch in a café along London's Holloway Road. After studying the menu, he ordered a mozzarella and tomato panino – ‘so that'll be one panini for you’, jotted down the young woman behind the counter. My friend confirmed his choice by repeating it in a way that signified he could speak only for himself. And to make his point, he leaned somewhat on the singular -o of the ending, keen, I imagined, to avoid the kind of mix-up that leads to extra portions being brought to one's restaurant table in error. But to no avail: before proceeding to take his order, our waitress told my companion firmly, in an unmistakeably eastern European accent, that he would be having a ‘mozzarella and tomato panini’, and that was that.

The BBC Voices website will probably already be familiar to those involved in English Language teaching and research. Along with local and national radio programmes about English that were broadcast in the UK in 2005, this site is one of the outputs of Voices, a large collaborative multi-platform project undertaken by the BBC and the University of Leeds in 2004 and 2005. Members of the public were asked to submit to the site the different words they use for a range of concepts, and to air their views on English and language use around the UK. In parallel, regional radio journalists who had been trained by Leeds linguists conducted over 300 sociolinguistic interviews with small groups of speakers, discussing the same set of concepts as the online questionnaire, and similarly eliciting opinions on English and language use.

In this paper we will provide a preliminary overview of the Chinese diaspora in South Africa, with particular focus on non-metropolitan, rural contexts.

The migrations of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries have produced a complex array of Chinese communities around the world. While we know a fair amount about the Chinese diasporas in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and also diasporic communities within Asia, Africa's Chinese community remains a vastly understudied aspect of this larger Chinese diaspora (Ma & Cartier, 2003). Yet there have been long-standing ties between Africa and China, going back to the fifteenth century, and presently China is one of Africa's biggest trade partners and investors (Rotberg, 2008).

The production of content-appropriate discourse in academic English has proved a difficult task for learners in different disciplines in Colombian universities. There is plenty of blame to go around: among other problems, educators frequently point to the belief that language courses (isolated from university subjects) automatically promote linguistic skills transferable to a specific subject-language, the informal approach to subjects demanding high-skill communicative proficiency, the abuse of L1 informal register in both L1 and L2 academic writing and speaking; the idiosyncratic academic culture dominated by a blinkered return-of-investment thinking, and the lack of academic rigour leading to distinct increments in existing knowledge. In such a scenario, it becomes apparent that a practical, unambiguous approach is to be taken in order to facilitate the implementation of a more seamless integration of language and content in Colombian EAP classrooms.

Arguably, anaphora is one of the most interesting linguistic phenomena. Broadly speaking, the term refers to a relation between two linguistic elements. In this relation, the interpretation of one element, the anaphor, is determined by the interpretation of another: the antecedent. Thus, in the sentence Cordelia said she loved Manet, the pronoun ‘she’ is the anaphor, which refers back (the word ‘anaphor’ is derived from a Greek term which translates as ‘to carry back’), while Cordelia is its antecedent. Anaphora is closely linked to deixis, the phenomenon in language whereby the meaning of certain elements requires contextual and/or co-textual information.

It is well known that native speakers of English around the globe are by far outnumbered today by speakers of English as a second or as a foreign language (Crystal, 2008). English is thus regularly used as a lingua franca, i.e. an intermediary language used between speakers of various linguistic backgrounds, for transnational and intercultural communication in many domains of life (such as business, diplomacy, higher education, tourism, etc.). The study of conditions of using ‘English as a Lingua Franca’ (ELF), intrinsically connected to the fields of World Englishes and Second Language Acquisition (Schneider, 2012), has come to be a booming sub-field and topic of research in English linguistics over the past few years, as is indicated by the publication of a few textbooks, the establishment of a conference series, and the launch of a scholarly journal (JELF). The focus of these approaches has been on the functions, usage conditions, and practical applications of ELF (Seidlhofer, 2011), and also, though to a lesser extent, on any characteristic structural properties (Dewey, 2007; Jenkins, Cogo & Dewey, 2011; Cogo & Dewey, 2012). Clearly, ELF can be found in a wide range of possible applications and contexts, as Cogo & Dewey (2012: 31) have stated: ‘As a natural phenomenon of sociolinguistic variation, ELF includes all types of communicative events, from the transactional to the interactional, and various possible settings, such as the institutional and the casual.’ It is considered to be independent of the interactants' native-speaker status: prototypically ELF involves communication between non-native speakers of English, but sometimes native speakers participate in such encounters as well. It centrally involves accommodation, negotiation and adjustment of forms to achieve successful communication.

English is in many ways the language that is assumed to be the giant in the South African literary field. The mere mention of South African literature has a different nuance to, let's say, African literature, since African literature has a vast array of national, colonial and post-colonial contexts, whereas South African literature is focused on one nation and one historical context. This difference in context is important when evaluating the use of English in South African Literature. In many ways, the South African literary field has grown, not only in number of contributors, and the diversity represented there, but also in genre or style. South African literature is becoming more fluid, more energetic, and more democratic in all the ways that the word implies. Writers like Lauren Beukes and Lily Herne are writing science fiction worlds where Cape Town is controlled by autocratic fascists or zombie wastelands that stretch from Table Mountain to Ratanga Junction; Deon Meyer writes crime thrillers, and Renesh Lakhan plumbs the depths of what it means to be South African after democracy. In many ways, the entire field of literature has changed in South Africa in the last twenty or so years. But one aspect has remained the same: the expectation, that while anyone who has anything to say at all, creatively, politically or otherwise, can by all means write it in their mother tongue, if the author wants to be read by more than a very specific fraction of society, then they need to embark on the perilous journey that is translation, and above all, translation into English.

In Japan, the ability to speak and understand English is widely regarded as essential for communication in a ‘globalized’ world. At the same time, however, many Japanese are reluctant to communicate in English because they perceive themselves (and are often perceived by others) to be poor speakers of English, despite the fact that they will have studied English for at least six years in junior and senior high school. In response to this, the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) has recently revised the national syllabus for English teaching. The revised syllabus places more emphasis on developing oral communication skills, and proposes a much greater use of communicative language teaching (CLT) methodology in order to bring this about. This paper describes the present situation of CLT in Japan based on questionnaire data obtained from 48 Japanese university students, and proposes that a more effective and practical approach to CLT and English teaching more generally may be obtained by adopting a ‘World Englishes’ point of view.

This wide-ranging book, focused on the use of English as a lingua franca in intranational and international contexts, explores the ecologies in which interactions in English occur and the phonological, grammatical, lexical and pragmatic processes that take place when speakers of different varieties of L2 English come into contact. For Meierkord, a key difference between intranational and international contexts is that in the former interactions tend to take place in relatively stable communities, circumstances which are more propitious for the adoption of new features and the eventual emergence of new L2 varieties; for example, the nativised varieties of post–colonial societies. In international contexts, by contrast, lingua franca encounters tend to be more short-term, and there is therefore less opportunity for the emergence, adoption and stabilisation of new features. Accommodation, rather, is one of the more common pragmatic responses. These, however, are rough generalisations, for throughout the book an important motif is heterogeneity: heterogeneity in the varieties of English entering into contact, heterogeneity in speaker characteristics such as their level of English proficiency, and heterogeneity in the purposes and contexts of the encounters.

When reviewing a much-translated canonical text such as Homer's Iliad, it has become something of a topos to question the need for yet another translation of it. In the twenty-first century alone, Homer's Iliad has benefited from at least six published English translations already: Rodney Merrill (2007), Herbert Jordan (2008), Anthony Verity (2011), Stephen Mitchell (2011), Edward McCrorie (2012) and James Muirden (2012). Richard Whitaker adds his translation to the list with a slight variation on the standard Anglo-American English translations already available, presenting his readers instead with a ‘Southern African English’ version. With such a variety of Standard English prose and poetic translations already on offer, is there really a need for yet another Iliad? Will the novelty of its subtitle, as a ‘Southern African English’ Iliad, justify its publication, and what will prevent it from being judged merely as a postcolonial curiosity?

Since Romaine's (1982) pioneering work, historical sociolinguistics has been studying the relationships between language and society in its socio-historical context by focusing on the study of language variation and change with the use of variationist methods. Work on this interdisciplinary sub-field subsisting on sociology, history and linguistics is expanding, as shown, for example, by Milroy (1992), Nevalainen & Raumolin-Brunberg (1996; 2003), Ammon, Mattheier & Nelde (1999), Jahr (1999), Kastovsky & Mettinger (2000), Bergs (2005), Conde-Silvestre (2007), Trudgill (2010), or Hernández-Campoy & Conde-Silvestre (2012). These works have been elucidating the theoretical limits of the discipline and applying the tenets and findings of contemporary sociolinguistic research to the interpretation of linguistic material from the past. Yet in the course of this development historical sociolinguistics has sometimes been criticised for lack of representativeness and its empirical validity has occasionally been questioned. Fortunately, in parallel to the development of electronic corpora, the assistance of corpus linguistics and social history has conferred ‘empirical’ ease and ‘historical’ confidence on the discipline.

Eric Partridge's A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, first published in 1937, ran to 8 editions culminating in 1984 and is widely acknowledged as the definitive record of twentieth-century British slang. The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (NPD) maintains the tradition impressively, enhanced by a more conventional approach to citing sources, a broader focus to include examples of colloquial and vernacular vocabulary worldwide and prominence given to usage since 1945. A thousand new entries from the UK, USA, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India, South Africa, Ireland and the Caribbean, and increased representation of the language of social media, document linguistic innovation and/or reflect more sophisticated lexical data capture since the previous print edition of 2006. The 19 pages of introductory text outline criteria for inclusion, describe the structure of entries and provide a fascinating set of observations on slang drawn from Partridge's many published works. With over 60,000 entries the second edition of NPD is complemented for the first time by Partridge Slang Online (PSO), a resource which offers new ways to access and interrogate the data.