Singing is a very dynamic and innovative mode of communication through which artists often express themselves with a set of various voices. Today, pop music circulates across national boundaries and English is the main medium of communication in transnational pop culture. In this special context different varieties of English meet at a high density. Rihanna's single Work is an example of this prevalent multivocality in pop music culture. Her language performance attracted public attention of various sorts as she audibly incorporates several Caribbean English Creole (CEC) features. While some critics describe her lyrics as ‘gibberish’ (cf. Noelliste, 2016), others acknowledge her performance as a ‘reclamation of her Barbadian heritage’ (Gibsone, 2016). The example of Rihanna shows that singers can be transporters of English varieties: she is a Caribbean artist who started a successful career in the US, and whose music today has global reach. Singers, like Rihanna, are thus mobile, transnational linguistic agents. On the one hand, she physically travels the world playing concerts to her audiences. On the other, her persona, music, videos, and further media commodities are part of the global ‘mediascape’ (Appadurai, 1996). In other words, her products easily spread across the globe and are reproduced, transcending national and social boundaries. New technologies (e.g. smart phones, tablets) and applications (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) facilitate as well as accelerate the transnational dissemination of media resources. Moreover, singers show that the linguistic (and cultural) resources as such are mobile. Different language influences are formed into individual linguistic repertoires. Singers often playfully employ certain features to highlight parts of their identity or locate themselves in a particular music genre.

Following his article ‘Global English invades Poland’ (ET50, Apr 97, Vol 13.2), the author explores the comparable impact of English on advertising in a second Eastern European nation.

Global English continues its unchecked spread, not only as the second language of choice for more people than any other, but also as an infiltrator whose words creep into the fabric of other languages through such avenues as film, television, popular music, the World Wide Web, advertising and youth culture.

An analysis of the cultural differences in rhetorical styles across the many varieties of English worldwide, particularly as expressed through writing

Heart-felt opposition to the status and spread of English in the world at large and most particularly in China today. It can hardly be denied that England has given the world maritime law, contract law, and an international language. However, whether by accident or design, the effect of these ‘gifts’ over time has, we would argue, been the destruction of many ethnic customs, social structures, and other aspects of culture. There appears to be little or no dissent among linguists regarding the proposition that language and culture are inseparable: what affects one affects the other.

This paper discusses how the global spread of English has affected – deleteriously – many languages and cultures, and currently engages too much time and too many resources in China today. Maritime and contract law may have been less problematic.

This paper explores popular perceptions of language, in particular linguistic prescription. It focuses not on formal acts of censorship such as might be carried out by a language academy, but on the attitudes and activities of ordinary people in, say, letters to newspapers or comments on radio. In these contexts, language users act as self-appointed censors and take it upon themselves to condemn those words and constructions that they feel do not measure up to the standards they perceive should hold sway.

People's concerns about language and the kind of linguistic censorship and puristic activities that accompany them belong to our tabooing behaviour generally. Prescriptive practices are part of the human struggle to control unruly nature – in this case, to define language and to force the reality of ‘the boundless chaos of a living speech’ (as Samuel Johnson put it in his Preface) into neat classificatory systems. As with tabooing practices generally, linguistic purists see a very clear distinction between what is clean and what is dirty – in this case, what is desirable and undesirable in a language. Linguists who challenge these prescriptions are challenging their ‘cherished classifications’. Small wonder there is often such a schism between linguistics and the wider community.

A report on German university students learning and working in English.

WHEN A student produces a sentences like “I learn English since ten years” it can be assumed that they haven't had a very good English teacher, that they may not, in fact, be very good in English despite the amount of time they've spent learning the language. However, some of my students may indeed produce a sentence like this. In the English Department of the Freie Universität in Berlin, I teach students who have already studied English for at least ten years by the time they enter university. And in order to study in our department, the students must pass a proficiency-level entrance exam. These students then have English as one of their major subjects, so their knowledge of the language is fairly sophisticated and their contact with the language regular.

China's rapid development and growing engagement with the rest of the world have prompted much discussion and debate about the Chinese language, especially its prospects for becoming a global language. A report in China Daily (2004), for example, suggests that:

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).

Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) is ‘a dual-focused educational approach in which an additional language is used for the learning and teaching of both content and language’ (Coyle, Hood & Marsh, 2010: 1). It represents a model of bilingual education which, broadly speaking, involves some use of two (or more) languages of instruction in connection with teaching courses other than language per se.

One of the recent trends in Korean English Language Teaching (ELT) is that Korean parents are sending their children to countries in which English is a second language (ESL). Among these countries, the Philippines is the most preferred country due to its low tuition costs, low cost of living, and a population of well-educated ESL teachers. Every year, approximately 30,000 Korean students study in universities, elementary and secondary schools, and language academies in the Philippines. 10% of this student population consists of student visa holders and 90% are Special Study Permit (SSP) holders. SSPs are issued to international students studying non-degree special courses for a period not exceeding one year, and 90% of Korean students are presumed to enroll on short-term intensive English programs. The exodus of Koreans to the Philippines to learn English is being led by private language academies, which are founded and run by Koreans, solely targeting Korean students. In 2011, the number of such private language academies was estimated to be 280 (Kim, 2011). Furthermore, it was reported that Korean students were spending over 425 million US dollars annually in the Philippines (KEDI, 2012).

No matter where you are in the world, English seems to have its own way of cropping up, and the Gulf is no exception. Drive through the Omani–Emirati border crossing at Mazyad and a sign on the Emirati side announces, ‘Helping support AIDS’. Turn on KTV2, a state-run television channel broadcast out of Kuwait, and an English subtitle reads, ‘May God give you long life’; scan the headlines of the Gulf News and read, ‘Emiratisation is vital for the country’; eavesdrop on an expatriate Indian family ordering lunch in the food court at the Muscat City Centre mall and hear, ‘Give me the biriyani chicken’, ‘Give me the thali set’; follow a Bahraini Twitter tweeter and read, ‘say the truth don't fabricate BHR’.

The use of the English language in Nigeria dates back to the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century when British merchants and Christian missionaries settled in the coastal towns called Badagry, near Lagos in the present day South Western Nigeria and Calabar, a town in the present day South Eastern Nigeria. The merchants initially traded in slaves until the slave trade was abolished in 1807, at which time freed slaves of Nigerian origin returned to the country. Many of them, who had been exposed to Western education and Christianity, later served as translators or interpreters for the Christian missionaries. The primary aim of the Christian mission was not to make their converts speak English; rather, it was to make them literate enough to read the bible in their indigenous languages. This must be the reason why Samuel Ajayi Crowder translated the English bible into Yoruba, the major language in South Western Nigeria.

With the attainment of independence, English gradually grew to become the major medium for inter-ethnic communication. Like most African nations, the country, after independence, had to grapple with multi-ethnicity and acute multilingualism. In this article, we shall examine the expansion in the functions of English during the post-colonial period.

An account of consonantal ‘twinning’ in English and other languages.

THIS ESSAY concerns itself with gemination in English, but more specifically, it asks whether English has consonantal gemination (CG), as has been reported by some in the literature. Gemination is usually defined as a phonetic doubling (cf. Latin geminus ‘twin’); however, phonetic length (as opposed to a single or nongeminated segment) is a more accurate designation (see Matthews 1997:141, who cites Italian atto [at[Length mark]o] ‘act’, making reference only to ‘doubling’). It has long been known that English does not have contrastive CG as is recognized, say, from the phonemic difference between Classical and Modern Standard Arabic kasara (‘he broke’) and kassara (‘he smashed’) or darasa (‘he studied’) and darrasa (‘he taught’).

In the past two decades, there have been two important events in English as a Foreign Language (hereafter, EFL) teaching in Chinese universities throughout the country. The first event was a gradual growth in student enrolment in universities, and the second was the EFL teaching reform that aimed to introduce Communicative Language Teaching (hereafter, CLT) into the English classroom (Rao, 2010). There is an apparent conflict between the increase in student numbers in each class and the use of CLT in the language classroom, thus resulting in a series of problems for current EFL teaching in Chinese universities. On the one hand, frequent contact with foreigners speaking English nowadays makes it necessary for English teachers to develop students’ communicative competence. On the other hand, some problems such as large classes, high demands on English teachers and a lack of financial resources prevent teachers from getting their students involved in the communicative activities in their teaching process (Rao, 1996; Yu, 2001; Hu, 2002).

AS ECONOMICS and trade turn the world into “a global village”, English is playing an increasingly important role in China as a lingua franca for such matters as business, information, international travel, the Internet, cultural entertainment, and the environment, all of which have brought great changes in every aspect of our lives. Native English speakers are regarded as linguistically privileged, but such non-native English-speakers as the Chinese, in order to overcome their disadvantage, are launching campaigns to enable themselves to use English more accurately and fluently. ‘Communicative competence’ has become the chief goal of English language learning and teaching. This essay seeks to analyse the great changes that are taking place educationally in China, especially in ELT, emphasizing the importance of communicative language teaching (CLT), teacher training, reform of the examination system, and raising people's awareness of new challenges in education and life.

A discussion of both the selection and significance of sub-varieties of English in Malaysia. Malaysia is a multi-racial country, with a diversity of languages that includes Bahasa Malaysia (the national language), English (introduced during the colonial period from the late-eighteenth to mid-twentieth centuries), and a number of Chinese dialects, Indian languages, and other minority languages. Despite this complex linguistic tapestry, English continues to command considerable respect and prestige, and demonstrates an impressive range of intra- and international uses. It is a vehicle of communication within and across diverse linguistic and cultural groups at many levels of interaction, but clusters mainly around particular domains of use. It is important to the educational endeavours of the people and the technological, economic, and political aspirations of the nation.

THIS ACCOUNT of the growth of English language teaching in South Korea moves from the grammar-fixated traditions of the late 19th and earlier 20th centuries through more recent politically and educationally lively times to an English – and especially American English – ‘fever’. This urge towards English involves much of the nation and many kinds of schools and universities. In particular it constrasts school English with a massive parallel realm of private tuition, and, more recently, the widespread individual use of audio-materials. More recently still it has led to the emergence of a novel private university, the International Graduate School of English, founded and financed by a publisher who has himself been closely involved with the issue of how young Koreans can most effectively learn a language which much of the nation considers vital to the nation's future.

This review explores the histories and meanings of, and similarities and contrasts among, three labels for English at large: world English, international English, and global English, first as phrases containing the words world, international, and global, then in terms of their history and use, and how a range of dictionaries has dealt (or failed to deal) with them. The first has been used to mean both standard English and all English; the second refers to the multinational use of English (notably in language teaching); and the third both implies vast use and links the language (often negatively) with socio-economic globalization. Since all three are likely to go on being used, they may need to be handled with care.

A review of the development and nature of Pakistani English.

Starts with excerpt from John Dougill, English as a decorative language (ET12, 1987). Twenty years on English still decorates Japan. At the end of the 1980s, Japan's bubble economy burst and the country has been rectifying the ills of the past ever since. The drive to improve is a marked feature of the culture, and much has changed in the past twenty years. The number of ‘international Japanese’ has grown, as has the number of competent English speakers. Education has been freed up, English introduced into primary schools, and listening tests established in national exams. Yet the peculiarities of Japanese English (called Janglish or Engrish by some) continue to adorn the country's buildings, goods and items of clothing.