Roughly 90,000 taxi drivers in Beijing learned English in preparation for the Summer Olympic Games (Beijing 2008) of some 600,000 total residents of the city that have jumped on the English bandwagon in the past few years (People's Daily, 2001). China is a country of nearly a billion and a half people, most of whom now begin learning English at the age of ten (Dong, 2005: 11). A simple Google search for ‘English in China’ yields more than 36,000,000 results! It cannot be argued that English is unpopular in the Middle Kingdom. With so many learners there, it stands to reason that a variety of English peculiar to China would eventually develop, and there is much evidence to suggest that it has already begun.

Scholarly attention to English in relation to L1 Chinese speakers in China has yielded fruitful research insights and publications, which present us with various names, such as Chinglish, Chinese English, China English and a few more, leading to terminological controversies (e.g. Eaves, 2011; Y. Li, 2018; Zhang, 1997). A review of different theoretical stances illuminates that recent research under different names converges toward an attempt to reflect the role of English as a lingua franca (ELF) for Chinese individuals, given the context of globalisation and digitalisation. The article proposes to address terminological puzzles by adopting the notion of Chinese English as a lingua franca (ChELF) to elucidate the role of ELF and acknowledge Chinese ownership of English, hoping for collaborations among researchers interested in Chinese legitimacy in English creativity emerging in intercultural practices.

Proverbs exist in a plethora of languages to express worldly wisdom, frequently in a metaphorical way. A number of proverbs are documented in more than one language since speakers adopt them from cultures they have been in contact with. The focus of the present study is on animal proverbs in English which have a foreign equivalent in another language, such as French, Latin, Greek, Japanese or Arabic. The Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs (henceforth referred to as the ODP), edited by Jennifer Speake in 2015, is a valuable source for collecting the variety of animal proverbs which have become established in English over time.

Terms of endearment enjoy great popularity in all languages to express feelings such as affection and tenderness. The present paper concentrates on the use of these types of words in English. The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (henceforth the HTOED) serves as a valuable tool to identify the plethora of terms of endearment which became established in English over the centuries.

The 2016 World Bank report on worldwide per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) identified Bangladesh as a lower middle-income country based on its consistent GDP growth throughout last decade (World Bank, 2016). To maintain this growth rate and meet the radical demand for human resources in increasingly globalised world markets, the country needs to communicate more effectively with the outside world. Inevitably, this means improving the quality of English teaching and learning. The significance of English, as the global lingua franca, to Bangladeshi learners is at its zenith. In this developing country, however, economic constraints mean that funds allocated to education are limited compared to many other Southeast Asian countries (Habib & Adhikary, 2016). Even given the generally low level of educational standards in Bangladesh (Islam, 2015), the standard of English language teaching and learning has decreased alarmingly in recent years (Hamid, 2011). English language education in Bangladesh has always been problematic, despite various attempts to initiate curriculum reform. As Hamid & Baldauf (2008) point out, the first of these major shifts in the ELT curriculum took place in the mid-1990s, when the traditional Grammar-Translation Method (GTM) was replaced with a curriculum based on a Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) model. The principal objective of this article is to review the major problems associated with ELT in Bangladesh that have hindered the implementation of the new CLT curriculum from the perspective of teachers, and eventually to make recommendations for more effective ELT curriculum reform.

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.

I first heard of the term ‘Chinglish’ when I was at Baiduizi (白堆子) Beijing Foreign Languages School in the 1970s, through Janet Adams’ book, From Chinglish to English. The book contained 60 short dialogues in simple American English. It was meant to be teaching us colloquial English, compared to, I suppose, the textbook English written by Chinese teachers. I found the term Chinglish rather odd, and it was an odd thing for us pupils at that particular school to be made aware of, because the school was, quite literally, the only school in China at the time where foreigners were directly teaching Chinese children foreign languages and cultures. Few of these foreign teachers had formal teaching qualifications, and they were not using any textbooks written by Chinese teachers, but in their own ways using material the school compiled specially for the pupils. It was a form of audio-lingual and direct method. The language we were taught was pretty colloquial and we did not, as far as I could tell, speak Chinglish that the examples in Adams’ book illustrated.

In the three years and seven months between the referendum on 23 June 2016 and 31 January 2020, when the UK officially left the European Union, there was much speculation over what status English would have in the EU after the withdrawal of the UK. It is now apparent that English has continued to flourish. This is supported by statistics for Member States which chart the extent to which English is a school subject. Well over 95% of the children in the EU are taught English as a mandatory subject. Official EU figures also show that 38% of the population is proficient in English as a second language, three times more than both French and German (Special Eurobarometer 386: Europeans and their Languages, 2012). Moreover, although some, such as Danuta Hübner, EMP, wanted to question whether or not English could maintain its status as an official language in the EU, it is now apparent that it will not be possible to remove English in this respect (with changes requiring a unanimous vote in the Council, which Ireland has said it will not support [European Commission, 2016]), (The Guardian 27 December 2019). English has also retained its position as one of the three ‘procedural’ or ‘working languages’ alongside French and German. This has taken place despite the fact that without the UK, no Member State has English as its official EU language, and only approximately one percent of EU citizens have English as a mother tongue.

English's elevated status within a global economy of languages means that English-language education is increasingly promoted in international development initiatives in countries such as Bangladesh. This is partly due to a growing conviction that English is able to play an important role in helping people participate in global economic markets from which they have previously been excluded (Seargeant & Erling, 2011). Despite the strong associations made between English-language ability and development, there is at present only limited evidence showing a causal relationship between the two (Erling, forthcoming), while a complex of other issues surrounding the cultural politics of the language also play a role in the social implications of its promotion in such contexts. The aim of this article is to examine how English is perceived in rural Bangladesh by the people at whom such international development programmes are targeted. A broad assumption of such programmes is that English is a positive and, in some sense, necessary resource for development. The article investigates whether this matches the perception of those at whom such projects are aimed, and what it is that these communities feel the language can offer both in practical and in socio-cultural terms for the developmental challenges they face. In order to examine these questions the article draws on results from an ethnographical survey of two rural areas in Bangladesh which investigated the attitudes and aspirations of local community members to the potential impact of English-language education on their social prospects and cultural identities.

As the English language spreads and functions as an international language, scholars have been investigating some of the ideological issues behind the function and use of English in various contexts, and have pondered the future status of this global language. From early research of World Englishes (WE) the legitimacy of post-colonial Englishes, or ‘New Englishes’, as they have been termed, has emerged in scholars’ discussions (Platt, Weber & Ho, 1984; Kachru, 1985, 1992). Some have argued that the research on WE envisages the varieties of English in the outer circle contexts, such as the varieties of English spoken in Singapore, Nigeria, and India, and that people have used those varieties of English to exhibit their own identities (Kachru, 1992; Kachru & Nelson, 2006). Therefore, WE has created ‘new paradigms and perspectives for linguistic and pedagogical research and for understanding the linguistic creativity in multilingual situations across cultures’ (Kachru, 1985: 30).