As the suicides by a few students at one of South Korea's (hereafter Korea) most prestigious universities drew a great deal of attention from the public, partial blame went to the new institutional policy imposed by the university's top administrator: exclusive use of English as the medium of instruction across the entire curriculum (McDonald, 2011). The fanatical pursuit of English education and the overall status of the English language in Korean society have been well documented in the literature (e.g., Jeon & Lee, 2006; Jeong, 2004; Lee & Shin, 2008; Park, 2009; Seth, 2002). However, little has been written about another controversial trend, English-only instruction, recently introduced at a few selective institutions of higher education in Korea.

The English language has gone through cycles of prominence and decline in China since it arrived on Chinese shores in 1637 for the purposes of trade (Adamson, 2002). Since then the language has evolved in China from the stage when it was regarded as a language spoken by ‘barbarians’ (Adamson, 2002) in the 1700s to the present day which sees an unprecedented surge of enthusiasm for the language. This significant change in the attitudes of the Chinese people towards English has accelerated since China's open door policy gathered steam in the early 1990s. Conservative estimates place the number of people learning English in China at about 200 million. A recent estimate by Crystal (2008) suggests that the number of English speakers in China has, in fact, doubled, with the widespread enthusiasm for English generated by driving forces such as China's entry into the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the hosting of the Beijing Olympic Games, international tourism, foreign investment, the development of Western China, and the China-ASEAN Free Trade Area (CAFTA) launched on January 1, 2010.

The study of meaning and changes in meaning has enjoyed varying levels of popularity within linguistics. There have been periods during which the exploration of meaning was of prime importance. For instance, in the late 19th century scholars considered the exploration of the etymology of words to be crucial in their quest to find the ‘true’ meaning of lexemes (Geeraerts, 2010; Malkiel, 1993). There have also been periods where semantic analysis was considered redundant to linguistic investigation (Hockett, 1954: 152). In the past 20–30 years semantics has enjoyed a period of revival. This has been mainly led by the advances in cognitive linguistics (and to some extent, historical linguistics) as well by the innovations associated with the development of electronic corpora and computational methods for extracting and tracing changes in the behaviour of the lexicon (cf. Geeraerts, 2010: 168ff, 261ff). However, there are still areas of linguistics which hardly involve lexis in their theoretical and epistemological considerations. One such area is sociolinguistics.

As a mother tongue English is the second most spoken language in the world. Chinese is the first, but English is far more widely spoken around the world. ‘Today English is spoken or written, with varying levels of fluency, by a third of the world's population’ (Crystal, 2010: 8). It has been accepted as the most common means for international communication worldwide. Hence, it occupies a special position as the international language of communication in almost all the countries of the world. Before 1971 in Bangladesh, English was used as a second language. It was first introduced when the country was a part of India when British imperialists mandated the teaching of English in 1835 throughout India. After its introduction in the curriculum, English consolidated its position as the language of the ruling class. It became the most important subject of study in the curriculum. Its dominance increased when it replaced Persian as the official and court language in 1837 and even further in 1844 when Lord Harding announced that Indians who had received an education in English would receive preference in all government appointments. However, towards the end of the British rule, a reaction arose against English education and the use of English generally. With the departure of the British rulers in 1947, English lost its earlier prominence and prestige. During the Pakistan period, when Bangladesh became a part of Pakistan (1947–1971), English retained its position as an essential subject of study. Learning English was still considered indispensable for social, intercultural and international communication, educational advancement, professional success and progress in life. In independent Bangladesh, English occupies the place of being the most important foreign language. It is taught and learned as a compulsory subject alongside Bangla, the first language, from the primary level up to the highest level of study.

Saudi English (also called ‘Arabicised-English’ by Al-Shurafa, 2009) is probably one of the least studied varieties among the ‘New Englishes’. This paper aims to provide an introduction to the main syntactic features of the variety. In order to do this I will use the list of features discernible in varieties of English world-wide as ascertained by two scholars working actively on the typology of the different Englishes, Kortmann & Szmrecsanyi (2004). They use the term ‘angloversals’ for recurrent non-standard features widely found in English across the globe. This paper investigates three such ‘angloversal’ features which I believe to be widespread in Saudi Arabia: (a) #57: deletion of be; (b) #17: irregular use of articles; and (c) #53: invariant present tense forms due to zero marking for the third person singular (Kortmann & Szmrecsanyi 2004: 1146–7). This article also aims to study the effects of the Arabic substrate on the variety of English spoken in Saudi Arabia. The occurrence of the features is investigated among different strata in the society.

This article is about some very short words: the permutations for monosyllables in common use in standard British English having the phonetic pattern: single consonant + short vowel + single consonant. It is similar, therefore, to my article ‘Consonantal beginnings’ (ET80), in which I looked at what pairs of consonantal sounds could be found at the beginnings of English words. The pronunciation is to be taken as that given in the OED for British English.

In a widely cited paper, Schneider (2003) offers a model of the developmental phases undergone by new Englishes. One important feature of this model is reference to exonormative and endonormative standards, and Schneider suggests (2003: 264) that Singapore currently finds itself at stage four on this developmental journey – a stage at which local norms may be beginning to gain acceptance and literary creativity in English by local writers is abundant. In this paper I would like to provide a few examples of distinctively Singaporean use of English and raise the question of when (if ever) Singapore will move to an endonormative, Singaporean English, as the standard variety taught in schools.

‘They all speak good English. So how come they are jobless?’ The Spring Festival Gala, broadcast alive on TV across China and among international Chinese communities, is one of the most popular and widely viewed performances for Chinese people on Chinese New Year's Eve. In a situational comedy at the 2012 Gala, one Chinese lady threw out the above remark to her friend with reference to the folk she had met in a foreign country she had just visited. The tone in which she said it was intended to invoke laughter at her sarcastic comment about the presumed almightiness of English. The audience, however, only reacted with a slightly audible mumble, which evidently reflected their ambivalence on this issue. After all, many in the audience – like the general population – are currently convinced that gaining a command of English is a very good thing, if not a national pursuit. To mock their pursuit of English is almost equal to mocking their view of life. This article takes a glimpse into this national craze towards English by presenting a brief ethnography of a new form of English learning in China: ‘English educational tourism’, that is, traveling for the purpose of learning English. By doing this, it explores the relationship between English and political economy, noting how English, the language of imperialism, at its current stage (re)produces new subjectivities among Chinese people as a semiotic form of modern/cosmopolitan imagination. Before outlining this argument and introducing the specific evidence upon which I base my claims, however, it is necessary to position this article with reference to previous theorizations relevant to the English language and the Chinese context.

The aim of this illustrative paper is to show how words and expressions are coined or changed in Cameroonian speech in English and French in order to insult or stereotype other groups of people. Taken along official language lines, ethnic boundaries and social divides, these lexical elements reproduce some aspect of the addressee's history, social stance, academic achievement, professional background, linguistic and political belonging, and even gender. The expressions are from four major sources: French, English, Pidgin English and various indigenous languages. Some of them capture common social phenomena in the society. For example, Pidgin English supplies a descriptive name for a woman who moves in with a man to whom she is not married, i.e. come-we-stay. This appellation focuses more on the woman and the relationship rather than on the man. Such coinages are also common elsewhere in Africa. For instance, Nigerian Pidgin English supplies the appellation face-me-I-face-you for cramped up residential apartments in which rooms face each other on the corridor. Lexical strategies for naming and derogation are common in these two societies where groups compete with each other for their voices to be heard and respected.

The longstanding vernacular literary pedigree of the county of Lancashire has made it home to a large body of regional writings comparable only to those of the neighbouring Yorkshire. Both past and present scholarship have acknowledged this fact, arguing that the literary tradition of the dialect may be taken as a source to get some insight into the linguistic history of the county. Research so far concentrated on the linguistic mining of Lancashire literary texts has shown that they provide valuable guidance to approach the language of bygone times, especially in terms of phonology and morphology (see Brunner, 1920; Haworth, 1920, 1927; Whitehall, 1929; Shorrocks, 1988, 1992, 1999; Wagner, 1999; Ruano-García, 2007, 2010b). To my knowledge, there is however little research that has attempted to evaluate the lexicographic potential of these documents, and their contribution to Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary (henceforth EDD), so as to further our understanding of lexical variation in regional Englishes of the Late Modern English period (LModE).

English as a lingua franca (ELF) is a means of communication in English between speakers who have different first languages. While some definitions (e.g. House, 2003) exclude native speakers of English (NSs) from ELF interactions, others allow NSs to take part in ELF interactions as long as they defer to ELF norms (Jenkins, 2009b). In order for an interaction to be classified as ELF, however, NS contributions are always expected to be minimal (Jenkins, 2009b: 41). ELF is therefore mainly, if not exclusively, used between non-native speakers of English (NNSs).

One of the most fascinating aspects of Chinese English in the contemporary age is the growing practice of code-mixing on China's Internet. This study uses participant observation to explore the ‘mixing’ practices of Chinese netizens in online social networking communities, by focusing on code-mixing in domains of government administration, pop culture and social interaction. The results of the study suggest that a mixed-code variety of Chinese English is gaining popularity in China's homegrown social networks. For the young generation in mainland China, ‘mixing’ has become part of their everyday communication practices as they build multicultural identities, transform the traditional social relationships and practice their social responsibilities, using new communication technologies as well as their linguistic and cultural repertoires.

Among common speculations about the ultimate demise of English as the world's lingua franca (see Jeffrey Gil in ET 105, March 2011, reconsidering Chinese as a possible replacement) Nicholas Ostler (2010) is one more to project ‘the breakdown of English-speaking hegemony’, but his case is more curious than most. After an exhaustive, not to say exhausting, survey of ancient empires and modes of communication, in which Latin as the last lingua franca has but a late bit part, he arrives at an unrelated conclusion: ready machine translation sooner or later rendering a global ‘lingua-franca’ irrelevant (his hyphenation to legitimise an English plural – ‘lingua-francas’). Our springtime island-hopping pilgrimage rather gave the lie to this.

One's native language is normally a marker of national identity. This is particularly true of China, which many regard as a relatively linguistically homogeneous nation. The huge impact of the spread of English on the local culture of China alongside a buoyant wave of global capitalism raises interesting questions such as the following: (i) Does the spread of English challenge or undermine the sense of China's national identity? (ii) By drawing upon English as a new linguistic and cultural resource, is China now redefining its own culture? (iii) What strategies are observable in the use of English intranationally in contemporary China? To answer these questions, this study examines the use of English in China's real estate advertising. The relatively new discourse of real estate advertisements in mainland China has been attributed to the process of increasing urbanization which has accelerated since 2000. In addition, as one of the most fundamental symbols of a nation, land is closely associated with national identity, which suggests that real estate transformed from land can be taken as a source discourse for an investigation of national identity (Smith, 1991; First and Avraham, 2007). By focusing on the use of English in China's real estate advertising and its possible association with the national identity of mainland China, this study discusses the strategic use of English as a linguistic and cultural resource in identity construction.

It is now common knowledge that the English language has become part of Nigeria's linguistic family, albeit as a second language that has been ‘home-grown…adapted and tamed to suit the Nigerian environment’ (Adegbija, 2004: 19). Summarizing Alamin A. Mazrui (2004), Akere (2006: 9) describes this domestication as ‘the transformation of English as an alien medium, to make it respond to local imagery, figures of speech, sound patterns and the general cultural milieu of the region’. This has been the practice of many writers where English is the colonial masters' language and is now adopted as a second language, but with ‘local colour’, as noted by Emenyonu (2006: xi). This dynamic and creative variety has helped Nigerians express their world view in a more international medium. In addition, there are more ‘pragmatic’ sub-varieties, including what Omolewa (1979: 14–15) calls ‘working English’. This is, however, different from the widespread Pidgin English, which continues to serve as the linguistic bridge across the linguistic Babel of Nigeria. While Pidgin is greatly influenced by the immediate local languages, thus making uniformity difficult to achieve, the emerging Nigerian English (henceforth NE) is not as heavily dependent on indigenous local languages. According to Igboanusi (2002: 4), ‘NE has its origin in British English, and the lexicon of NE has therefore shown a strong British influence.’ In other words, while Pidgin is common among the uneducated and spoken by the educated when necessary, NE is spoken by the educated and the level of education determines the variety of NE used by individuals. NE should be seen as an autonomous variety, showing acceptable departures from the rules of standard diction, pronunciation and grammar. The contact of English with indigenous languages in Nigeria is bound to lead to greater deviation from the standard in the future. Since Nigeria has one of the largest populations of speakers of English as a second language in the world (Akere, 2009; Jowitt, 2009), this is bound to have implications for English as a global language.

In an article published in English Today in 2005, Niu and Woolf contend that:

The purpose of this paper is to foreground the extent to which the English language has eroded the originality and purity of the Yoruba language. The main focus will be on code-switching practices, which I believe to be detrimental to Yoruba in the long run. Although linguists have long proposed a ‘leave-your-language-alone’ attitude (see Hall, 1950), there is little doubt that the effects of first British colonization and then globalization have changed the linguistic ecology of Africa. Few sociolinguists would deny that a people's language is a symbol of their identity and culture. In an important textbook in the field, Holmes (1992: 70) confirms that ‘Language is an important component of identity and culture for many groups, maintaining their distinct identity and culture is usually important to … self esteem.’ What are we then to make of the extensive code-switching that I will be documenting in this article? Linguists' tolerance has certainly extended to code-switching studies in Africa, from which much important data has been drawn. The main scholar in this area is Carol Myers-Scotton, whose two books on code-switching (1993a,b) were based primarily on her research in Africa and remain central to the field internationally. Scholars like Coupland and Jaworski (1997) propose that the use of mixed speech in a conversation is not necessarily a language defect but a sign of flexibility and creativity. Understanding the social, psycholinguistic and syntactic motivations for switching is one thing, but the applied linguist and educationist also has to ask serious questions about what this means for the future of local languages heavily implicated in code-switching.