The coastline along the southern Arabian Gulf between Al Jubail, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and Dubai, UAE, appears to have risen at least 125 m in the last 18,000 years. Dating and topographic surveying of paleo-dunes (43–53 ka), paleo-marine terraces (17–30 ka), and paleo-marine shorelines (3.3–5.5 ka) document a rapid, > 1 mm/a subsidence, followed by a 6 mm/a uplift that is decreasing with time. The mechanism causing this movement remains elusive but may be related to the translation of the coastal area through the backbasin to forebulge hinge line movement of the Arabian plate or, alternatively, by movement of the underlying Infracambrian-age Hormuz salt in response to sea-level changes associated with continental glaciation. Independent of the mechanism, rapid and episodic uplift may impact the design of engineering projects such as nuclear power plants, airports, and artificial islands as well as the interpretation of sedimentation and archeology of the area.

On the occasion of the 100th issue of English Today, scholars from around the world were invited to send their thoughts. Excerpts from messages received up to September 6th, 2009 are presented here.

It is an astonishing fact that the dynamo producing some of the most powerful scholarship on the history of the English language is not even in Indo-European territory. Under the inspired leadership of Professor Matti Rissanen, Helsinki has reached an unprecedented level of effort in this field, and, when Rissanen retired in 2001, Terttu Nevalainen became his successor as director of the Research Unit for Variation and Change in English. This volume celebrates her elevation to her new role and, at the same time, her fiftieth birthday.

This important book – hereafter DSE – demonstrates for all linguists how an insightful observation by a young scholar can question basic assumptions and fondly held beliefs. In 1996, Laura Wright published an essay in a Festschrift for Eric Stanley in which she pointed to the fragility of the received wisdom that the modern prestige dialect of Britain emerged from a medieval “Central Midland” progenitor brought to London from the north and promulgated through the scribes in the Court of Chancery. In 1997, a conference was held in Cambridge to pursue the questions she had raised; then, in 1999, further discussion at the University of London led to this volume.

In his preface, Knowles makes clear what his book is not. It is not a history of literary English, and it is not an account of changes in linguistic form; it is a “cultural history.” In the introductory chapter, he declares: “In view of the close connection between language and power, it is impossible to treat the history of the language without reference to politics” (9). Of course, books that purport to be histories of English have often “treated” the subject without apparent politics. Knowles is right in alleging that the politics of such books has often been implicit, since most of them provide information about the ascent of one variety of the language to the elevated status of a standard – as if that were an inevitable and desirable result of the spirit of goodness working itself out through speech.

Following Elizabeth Anne Malischewski's report on the English of Newfoundland (ET24, Oct 90), a review of the many kinds of English in mainland Canada

Dictionaries of English today draw upon a tradition that is almost 400 years old. Depending on your point of view, this is a tradition of competition and cross-fertilization, of plagiarism and lexicographical incest, or something that has wavered and wandered between high originality and low theft. Some commentators have even argued that many English dictionaries are just variations on a common text that has been evolving since the 17th century.

At the end of the 16th century, there was little reason to guess that English would emerge four centuries later as the most widely dispersed language in the world.

Walter S. Avis was so thoroughly a Canadian that it is perhaps necessary to take special note of his contributions to the international community of scholars devoted to the study of English and the English-speaking peoples. Certainly his broad perspective is everywhere revealed in his scholarship. In his study of Canadian eh?, for instance, he speaks of the corpus he collected when his reading was “arbitrarily limited to books in my own library, to newspapers and periodicals that passed normally through my hands, to radio and TV programs, and to such oral examples as I had the opportunity to observe and set down” (1978:174). Yet such “arbitrary limits” encompassed writers and speakers who represent Britain, Canada, the United States, South Africa, and Australia and covered uses from the eighteenth century to the present. With the best of scholars, Avis was meticulous, thorough, wide-ranging, and devoted to the real evidence of real people speaking and writing.