Camfranglais is a newly created language, a composite slang used by secondary school pupils in Cameroon, West Africa. It draws its lexicon from French, English, West African Pidgin, various Cameroonian indigenous languages, Latin, and Spanish. Secondary school pupils use it among themselves to exclude outsiders while talking about such matters of adolescent interest as food, drinks, money, sex, and physical looks. There are four sections: language in the Cameroon educational system; Camfranglais defined; an analysis of a sample Camfranglais text; and the semantic domains of Camfranglais. There is a glossary of the terms cited.

NEW ZEALAND ENGLISH is one of the most closely studied national varieties of English outside of the USA and UK, and a source of significance for the dialect differentiation and historical evolution of English. Most of the work has been done in the relatively short period of about 15 years compared with the longer time frame of studies in British and American English. One reason for this is that New Zealand English has, from its beginning, benefited from significant co-operative and collaborative activity among New Zealand linguists.

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 the difficulties that beset teaching the history of the English language in American universities.

The present study reports on the history and current circumstances of the English language in Malawi (formerly the British protectorate of Nyasaland), where the standard of English, in terms both of teaching and use, has been in decline since the time of Dr Hastings Banda, the first president (who insisted on high standards in English and education). The study also describes and analyses Malawi's currently rising appetite for English in an environment in which the language is more or less synonymous with education itself.

IN 1989, English Today published an article by Sangsup Lee entitled “The subversion of Korean” (ET20 Oct 89). Dr. Lee was concerned with the importation from English into written Korean of hitherto unmarked grammatical distinctions like singular/plural, past/past perfect and active/passive. More recently, Korean scholars and commentators have become concerned over what they see as a different kind of subversion, this time lexical rather than grammatical, with the widespread adoption of English words into the Korean language.

Some thoughts on a complex pronoun. Some expressions seem so familiar to us that we do not bother to reflect on the meanings they convey. We can be surprised to learn that in some languages, like Malay, it is necessary to distinguish between we referring to the speaker and the interlocutor (kita) and we referring to the speaker and someone other than the interlocutor (kami). Both possibilities are covered by the English we.

SINCE ITS introduction in the 18th century, English in China has gone through three stages: partial colonization and Chinese Pidgin English (CPE); a Chinese-influenced variety often called Chinglish; and a more recent indigenization that has resulted in a variety known as both Chinese English and, more recently (with a subtle change of emphasis), China English. This paper discusses these stages and calls for more attention to be paid to the nativization of English in China in the 21st century.

This survey considers the emergence of English as a language shared across the European Union in particular and the European continent at large, and together with its distinctive ‘lingua franca’ dimension among the mainland European nations. It considers in particular the situation of ‘non-native speakers’ who regularly use the language as well as the concept of a ‘Euro-English’ in general and the Swedish, ‘Swenglish’ and English relationship on the other. It concludes by considering the liberation of non-native users from ‘the beginning of native-speaker norms’.

In the paper to which this study responds, Bruthiaux discussed verbal creativity in IT, ranging from short figurative terms such as bug and virus to such ‘heavy premodifying groups’ as random access memory and central processing memory. He also drew attention to both intransitive verb forms such as Setup is initializing and The menu will repeat, and (most notably) such ‘unaccusative’ constructs as ‘Close this dialog box when download completes’ and ‘Sit back and relax while Windows 98 installs on your computer’. The present paper takes the discussion further in terms of ‘fog’ and ‘inflation’, ‘unaccusatives’, superfluity and excessive Latinity, tautological phrasing, and such lexical curiosities as overwrite used to mean ‘replace’.

A discussion of the kinds of English emerging in the world at large and in the European Union. In recent years, the world's Anglophone media, in the company of a range of other observers, have routinely been calling English ‘the world's lingua franca’. As a result, the phrase is now something of a cliché. We're all ‘global’ now, and need to use the first truly universal language, whether we are business people, politicians, teachers, tourists, or terrorists.

INFORMATION technology has had a profound impact on many aspects of life over the last twenty-odd years. One linguistic area where computers have made important inroads is the compiling of dictionaries. Until the 1980s, such works were still put together, more or less, along the same paper-and-ink lines as when Dr Johnson was at work in the 18th century, although methods of work and levels of reliability had improved. In the last two decades, however, there have been numerous IT-led developments, revolutions and evolutions in lexicography, mostly to the benefit of dictionary users, though some more recent developments are perhaps debatable. [All searches described in this article were made with Google, and only pages in English were requested.]

The English creole now known as ‘Pitkern-Norfolk’ is spoken as a community language only on the widely separated Pitcairn and Norfolk Islands in the Pacific Ocean. Scholars divide the pidgins and creoles of English into two broad types: Atlantic and Pacific. Logically, the creole that arose as a consequence of the mutiny on the Royal Navy's H.M.S Bounty in 1789 should straightforwardly belong in the Pacific group, but internal evidence indicates, paradoxically, that it is an Atlantic rather than a Pacific Creole.

Neville thought of showing Kate's letter to Miss Mellerby, but when he read it a second time he made up his mind that he would keep it to himself. The letter was all very well, and as regarded the expressions towards himself, just what it should be. But he felt that it was not such a letter as Miss Mellerby would have written herself… He was a little ashamed of his Kate, and he thought that Miss Mellerby might perceive her ignorance if he shewed that letter.Anthony Trollope, An Eye for an EyeI am proud of my remedial students' writing. There are often moments and occasionally entire essays where the student, amused or moved and communicating her feelings, moves me to laughter or tears.

Most disciplines seem to have their “K factors”, though linguistics has so far been an exception. Now a language-related K factor has surfaced, kindled by Italian text messages and the influence of English.

In this article, I describe the puzzle of idiomaticity in native and non-native uses of English: why are idioms so resistant to acquisition, even by advanced leaners and users of English? I identify the main cause of this problem in the “idiomatic paradox”, whereby the very reasons which make idiomaticity so natural and necessary in native-speaker discourse are precisely the reasons non-native speakers find them so elusive. I look at some of the implications of of the idiomatic paradox for language teaching and the use of English as a Lingua Franca.

ON MY OFFICE wall I have a Japanese Sumo Wrestling Calendar, a gift from a kind student. The name of the calendar is in kanji followed by the word CALENDAR in gold capitals and the year in numerals, 2003, in red. The numbers of the months are also in red and the same size. The names of the months are in English in a smaller font, January, February, … The names of the days of the week are in kanji. The character for Sunday and the date numbers of Sundays and holidays are in red, the other days and dates in black numerals. Of course, careful design has gone into the calendar, but one is struck by the plethora of visual communication systems involved.

The article discusses seven months as a teacher at a university for women in the UAE. It describes difficulties encountered while teaching English, especially in relation to the kinds of cultural and social constraints experienced by most students in the Gulf nations and particularly women. Although young women are encouraged to pursue higher education and are enthusiastic about the opportunities that are now available, there is little familial or cultural support for their endeavors. In addition, role models of women who have succeeded professionally in a field requiring higher education are extremely rare. Women are expected to marry at a young age and to produce children as quickly as is physically possible. An employment situation that necessitates women working side by side with male colleagues is generally unacceptable. The segregation of men and women is deeply embedded in this Arabic culture and, despite the best efforts of educators and more progressive families, the majority of young women succumb to the cultural and social expectations of their families and their communities.

On the analogy of racism and sexism, the term speciesism has been coined to highlight and protest against an exploitative relationship between humankind and the other living creatures of this planet.

In the biracial southern American state of Mississippi, the Chinese represent a “third culture,” an enclave with their own distinct Mississippi Chinese (MC) culture and community. The MC have learned to negotiate culturally and linguistically between white and black communities, developing speech strategies influenced by both Southern Genteelism and Confucianism. This essay begins with a review of deference, a key rhetorical feature used with particular adroitness by MC living in the Delta. Deference is defined as the courteous yielding to others and may occur in two forms: accommodation (i.e., making the non-MC speaker feel comfortable and welcome) and topic shifting (i.e., changing the subject of conversation). Next, the article includes examples of how this feature has changed or subsided in the speech of urban MC and concludes with some possible reasons for this shift.