The two African English-lexifier Creole languages Krio (Sierra Leone) and Pichi (Equatorial Guinea) are closely related. A close look at specific aspects of their grammar, however, shows divergence due to differing contact ecologies since their split in the 19th century. Krio has been spoken alongside its lexifier (the main lexicon-providing language) and superstrate (the socially dominant colonial

Nigerian English (NigE) is a second language (L2) variety of English which has been domesticated, acculturated, and indigenised (Taiwo, 2009: 7; Jowitt, 2019: 26), due to its co-existence with about five hundred indigenous Nigerian languages (see Eberhard, Simons & Fennig, 2019). It is the language of education, governance, law, the media, and formal financial transactions in Nigeria. Based on Schneider's

One of the problems of English spelling is the dual representation of the so-called ‘eyes’-words, rendered in discourse as -ise and -ize, both with high-frequency verbs such as modernise/modernize and rare coinages, as in burglarise/burglarize, etc. Eyes-words have historically evolved from two different language systems as two different forms with the same meaning, which have eventually come to coincide

This paper examines the contribution of Horae Subsecivae to Joseph Wright's (1855–1930) English Dialect Dictionary (1896–1905) (EDD). Horae Subsecivae (‘spare hours’) is an obscure manuscript glossary that was possibly compiled by Robert Wight of Wotton-under-Edge in c.1777–78, and is now preserved amongst Wright's papers at the Bodleian Library as Bodl. MS Eng. lang. d. 66. Even though it has received

English, in the course of its progressive evolution and global spread, has had contacts with different languages (Hogg & Denison, 2006) which have led to the emergence of native and non-native varieties spoken in different countries of the world. This, in part, has resulted in variable pronunciations of English lexical items, such as anti- pronounced as /ænti/ or /æntaɪ/ at the segmental level and

This paper focuses on the use of preverbal so in present-day English. While its use as an intensifier (meaning ‘so much’ or ‘very much’) has been attested already in Early Modern English (OED online, s.v. so, adv. and conj., sense 15), it has only recently acquired emphatic meaning (‘truly’ or ‘definitely’, see OED online, s.v. so, adv. and conj., 2005 Draft Additions). Compare: (1) I do so love weddings

A brief stroll about the cityscape of South Korea (henceforth ‘Korea’) testifies to Curtin's (2014) presumptive cosmopolitanism, whereby locals are expected to possess a high degree of competence in linguistically accommodating newcomers or world travellers by using English or other international languages in the linguistic landscape. One can easily spot English monolingual, Korean–English bilingual

A student hovers over red-underlined text, clicks a button, and watches her errant writing replaced. The red line disappears. She continues typing, pausing to address the flagged words and phrases. When she stops typing, what appears before her is spotless – its errors coded out of existence by a modern grammar checker. Her teacher may never become aware of the artificial intelligence that has augmented

Morocco is a multilingual country where the official languages, as indicated in the constitution of 2011, are standard Arabic and Tamazight, while French is the nation's second language, pervading sectors of business, administration, diplomacy and higher education. English and Spanish are used as foreign languages in many contexts for different purposes and tasks (Ennaji, 2009). Unlike French and Spanish

In an interesting paper, Fong (2020) raises objections to my approach to English modals (and modality in general) which he views as too general and not fully compliant with the postulates of Construction Grammar. In this response paper, I intend to explain in some depth the benefits of my approach, as well as the reasons why Construction Grammar, in particular Cognitive Construction Grammar (Goldberg

Across the world, in many places in which English is not widely spoken, English text often appears on posters, storefronts, billboards, street signs, warning signs, menus, and many other forms of publicly visible written texts. English is often featured alongside one or more additional languages. These signs are typically seen as unremarkable by passersby looking to buy goods, for information regarding

Grammarians and teachers would admit that modality is one of the most difficult areas to deal with in English grammar, and it is particularly difficult for learners of English to master this area of grammar. Modality can be achieved by different means (see, for example, Huddleston & Pullum, 2002; Lyons, 1977; Quirk et al., 1985). The following examples illustrate modality by the use of words of various

Although English is one of the two official languages in Cameroon, it is seldom used out of official circles where indigenous languages, French, and Pidgin English reign supreme (Jikong & Koenig, 1983). This has made the language a matter of concern for teachers, learners, and researchers. An aspect of the language which has so far been little investigated, but which is significant to English proficiency

The area of East Anglia in which its traditional dialects are spoken has shrunk significantly over the past few decades and seen a marked decline in the use of traditional features. These include lack of -s marking on third-person singular forms (Kingston, 2000; Potter, 2018), as well as the long-standing distinction between those words descended from Middle English /ɔ:/ and /ɔu/, as in ‘moan’ vs ‘mown’

Situated at the extreme south west periphery of the British Isles, Cornwall's territorial isolation bred cultural isolation which has been construed and reconstrued over time, giving Cornwall a distinctive cultural flavour. Initially borne out by facts of geography, Cornwall, or ‘Kernow’, experiences a dynamic yet enduring peripheral existence (see Payton, 1992). This article explores how Anglo-Cornish

Dialects in the South East of England are very often perceived as one homogenous mass, without much regional variation. Rosewarne introduced the notion of Estuary English and defined it as ‘variety of modified regional speech [ . . . ] a mixture of non-regional and local south-eastern English pronunciation and intonation’ (Rosewarne, 1984). However, studies such as Przedlacka (2001) and Torgersen &

There have been a number of studies investigating the phenomenon of t-d deletion in English, the process through which /t/ or /d/ can be deleted in word final Ct or Cd coda clusters. This diverse body of research ranges from sociolinguistic studies examining the role of social factors in deletion variation (such as Guy and Boyd 1990) through to more phonological based analyses. The latter approaches

The Forest of Dean (henceforth Forest) is one of the lesser known English Royal Forests. The area is considered locally to be a special place with a distinctive dialect. The Forest lies at the intersection of three regions: South East Wales, West Country, also known as the South West, and the West Midlands. The Forest is situated between two rivers: the River Severn to the East separates it from the

East Anglian English was the first British variety of English to be subject to dialectological scrutiny using sociolinguistic techniques (Trudgill, 1974, and his subsequent work) and since then has been subject to only sporadic investigation (e.g. Britain, 1991, 2014a, 2014b, 2015; Kingston, 2000; Straw, 2006; Amos, 2011; Potter, 2012, 2018; Butcher, 2015). Recent research has suggested that, in those

This study investigated whether and how pre-adolescent girls style-shift in Multicultural London English (MLE), a variety of English that is relatively new and potentially still changing. We looked at the extent to which five 11-year-old girls in a homework club in East London, where MLE is spoken, changed their pronunciations in different speech contexts. The results showed that the girls did indeed

The English language is a global lingua franca that has itself been experiencing rapid change. This change can be attributed mainly to easy access to the internet worldwide and the popular use of social media. Frequent and common online communication amongst multilingual speakers mediated in English has naturally generated a diverse semiotic repertoire. As a result, new words are constantly and rapidly

In a 2016 article published in this journal (Roig–Marín, 2016), I argued that the coinage of cyber-blends reflects our blended digital/physical relationships in today's world. The current pandemic has put a halt to our everyday lives and all forms of physical contact, and so technologies and digital experiences now play a more conspicuous role than ever. We have gone online and got used to vocabulary

English dialects demonstrate considerable variation in their pronominal systems (see for example Trudgill & Chambers, 1991 and Hernández, 2011). In England, pronouns in the north east of the country – the urban areas of Tyne and Wear and Teesside and the counties of Durham and Northumberland (hereafter NEE) – are often different from those found in Standard English (SE). The most extensive modern accounts

The newly renovated Seoul Express Bus Terminal, which reopened at the end of 2019, has caused an uproar among the South Korean public. The fact that its ticket booth sign is written only in English – ‘TICKETS’ – was pointed out by one Twitter user (see Figure 1), and the message went viral among internet users. It took only a week or so for the issue to make headlines in Yonhap News – one of the major

There are two main ways to communicate messages linguistically: verbally and non-verbally. In verbal communication, the message is transmitted by means of such devices as stress, intonation and pausing. An example of stress is the word object which has differentmeanings when stresseddifferently, as in obˈject and ˈobject. The first is a verb which means ‘disagree’. The second is a noun which means

When I was growing up, there was no internet. Luckily, I had Dad. My father Tom McArthur was my search engine long before Google existed, answering questions that kept me awake at night, often with long, intricate stories. If he didn't know an answer, he would consult one of the many dictionaries and reference books that lined the shelves of our home. There was no such thing as a casual question with

In the introduction to the book he co-edited, Social Justice through Multilingual Education, Mohanty (2009: 3) mentions how, while conducting research in a remote underdeveloped area of the Indian state of Orissa, he came across a schoolboy who asked him about the purpose of his research. The schoolboy told him that indigenous tribal people in ‘this part of the world’ were the subject of too much research

English is an official language in Uganda and is said to be in its nativization phase when placed within Schneider's (2007) model of the trajectorial development of Englishes (Isingoma & Meierkord, 2019). In the present study, we delineate the general features of the Ugandan accent of English (i.e. those that cut across regional or ethnic boundaries) as well as features that evince variability among

In Issue 135 (Volume 34, Number 3, September 2018) of English Today there was an article by Blasius Achiri-Taboh entitled ‘English spelling: Adding /ʃən/ (or /ʒən/) to base-words and changing from -tion to -sion.’ The author's stated aim was to provide help for deciding the forms of these words and whether -tion or -sion was the correct ending. All the words he cited were ones that can be traced back

Korea is probably one of the few countries, if not the only one, that observes a holiday in honor of the national language's alphabet. Hangulnal, which falls on October 9, is the Korean Alphabet Day. Each year, the government hosts events to celebrate one of the most prized possessions of the country, Hangul – the writing system of the national language. Created by King Sejong and his Royal Academy

As is well known, English spelling is a major problem even to native speakers. In Achiri-Taboh (2018a), I present arguments for a synchronic base-word-based rule for the spelling of shun-words, given the notoriously troubling variation in the spelling of their ending as underlined here in words like fraction, dictation, equation, and persuasion (with a t-form) and extension, collision, and expression

The present study focuses on the word cheeky which, in the past few decades, has taken on a new meaning of ‘mildly illicit’ in addition to, and partly overtaking, its original meaning of ‘impudent’. We examine how this semantic change is spreading in different age groups and in different parts of the English-speaking world. As we demonstrate, the newer meaning of cheeky is associated with younger speakers

Korean parents are strongly committed to investing time, effort, and money into improving their children's English competence in order to maximize their human capital in the era of globalization, a phenomenon often referred to as ‘English fever’ (Park, 2009). However, because of the Korean socio-economic structure, there is considerable disparity among families in the financial investment they can

Intensifying adverbs are devices which scale a quality up, down, or somewhere between the two (Bolinger 1972: 17). To intensify the adjective cool, speakers of British English have a variety of functionally equivalent intensifiers at their disposal. They can use very, really, so, dead, bloody, right and well, among many others. A seemingly recent arrival to the British intensifier system is proper

The purpose of this study is to identify the perceptions of 80 Korean university students majoring in English about sociocultural elements embedded in the Korean language and KVE. A secondary objective is to enhance students’ awareness of the connection between culture and language and some of the unique sociocultural characteristics of these two languages. To this end, all participants took part in

The current paper examines how English has evolved to become valued language capital in South Korea (henceforth ‘Korea’). Since the late 20th century, Korea has experienced the phenomenon of ‘English fever’, which refers to the frenetic and at times over-zealous pursuit of English-language proficiency across Korean society (J. S. Y. Park, 2009). Researchers have examined ‘English fever’ through various

English today is a conglomerate of a vast array of different varieties of English. This linguistic diversity, captured most prominently in the World Englishes paradigm (Kachru, 1985), poses a challenge to English language teaching (ELT) in countries where English does not have an official status (i.e. there is no codified local norm) and is learned as a foreign language, such as Armenia or Germany

Most recent research on teacher identity in the TESOL field has focused on how non-native English-speaking teachers (non-NESTs) view and position themselves vis-à-vis native English-speaking teachers (NESTs), and which factors influence their construction of their professional identities. However, the perceived native speaker/non-native speaker (NS–NNS) dichotomy greatly oversimplifies a complicated

Store image is an important factor in the consumer's decision-making process (Nevin & Houston, 1980). As a cue to a store's image, a store sign and its visual design and content form (which may include the name of the store or brand) serve as vital elements that can immediately attract potential customers. In particular, a store's name can be used as an extrinsic signal to suggest and maintain quality

This study focuses on the residential neighbourhoods of Johor Bahru city, the administrative and business centre of the Johor Bahru region and the Malaysian state of Johor. Johor Bahru is a border town, located in the very south of peninsular Malaysia, less than one mile away from Singapore. According to City Population (2018), the Johor Bahru region has a multi-ethnic population of almost 1.4 million

How do people choose a language when they are proficient in more than one language? This research sheds light on language choice, English use in particular, in diplomacy where an individual speaks primarily for negotiation on behalf of an organization or a community. Nick (2001: 39) argued that ‘language is not a simple tool … but very often the very essence of the diplomatic vocation’. Despite its

Attitudes toward the global spread of English have been one of the major issues in research on the development of world Englishes. Because language attitudes construct an invisible language policy that influences the use of English in a local speech community (Curdt–Christiansen, 2009), many studies addressing the spread of English into non-English contexts have focused on the attitudes of diverse

In Vietnam, English has been held in high regard since the country embarked on its economic reform known as Doi Moi (Renewal) in 1986 (Ngo, 2018a; Nguyen, 2016). Yet, over the past decades, the country's English teaching sector has consistently been underperforming (Le, in press; Ngo, 2018a, 2018b; Nguyen, 2016; Nguyen & Nguyen, 2019).

The UK is facing important changes in the near future, with Brexit, i.e. the UK leaving the European Union (EU), looming ever more closely on the horizon. These important political and economic changes will certainly have an influence on Europe as a whole, and have had linguistic consequences for the English language, such as Brexit-related neologisms (Lalić-Krstin & Silaški, 2018). As Modiano (2017a)

The present study explores spelling variations of translingual words of Korean origin which are used in the English context across the globe. Four sets of English-language databases including the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the CNN website, Google Search and Google Trends were employed to locate and examine examples of such words. Variations in the spelling of Korean-origin words listed in the

Linguistic landscape (LL) research has been subject to a great deal of attention since the publication of the well-known research paper by Landry and Bourhis (1997), whose most quoted definition of LL covers diverse linguistic tokens, including but not restricted to government-related inscriptions, street-name signs, commercial signs, and noticeboards. There is an increasing number of contributions

English-medium instruction (EMI) has been perceived as a key strategy through which universities, propelled by academic, political, social and economic motives, respond to the influence of globalisation (Altbach & Knight, 2007). This has been fuelled by the fact that English, defined as the global common language, is needed to create the knowledge base in global tertiary education (Fishman, 2000).

In the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (Biber et al., 1999), a new category is identified in the grammar of the English phrase. In conversational data, the most frequent forms cited as examples of this category are or something, and everything, and things and and stuff, which are described as ‘coordination tags’ by Biber et al. (1999: 115–16). This label has not been widely adopted, but

Semantic shifts have been explored via a range of methods (Allan & Robinson 2012). Typically, semantic shifts were usually noted or described with methods such as a literature review or dictionary checking (e.g. Blank & Koch, 1999; Stockwell & Minkova, 2001; Williams, 1976), which are very labour-intensive and time-consuming methods. Other more recently developed methods involve sociolinguistic interviews

English has played a role in Cuba since the 19th century. This article provides a brief history of English in Cuba (see Figure 1 for Cuba map), contextualizing it in terms of other foreign languages in the Cuban environment, and describing Cubans’ attitudes toward English. This article also overviews the presence of English in the Cuban media, workplace, and diplomacy. Additionally, a large portion

According to Kachru's (1992) concentric circles framework, the use of English across countries can be grouped into three circles: an inner circle in which English is the native language, e.g., the UK; an outer circle in which English serves certain functions due to colonization, e.g., India; and an expanding circle in which English is taught as a foreign language, e.g., Turkey. Although many studies

When can a hyphen be described as ‘intrusive’? As with many other ‘rules’ of grammar and of punctuation, use of the hyphen is limited to a specific syntactical context. Hence, to use a hyphen where it should not be used makes it intrusive. Just like the apostrophe, it cannot be used arbitrarily. There is, for instance, a tattooist parlour in the English town of Oldham whose shopfront advertises Inkcredible

Because standard English lacks a true a gender-neutral singular pronoun, there has long been debate over how to refer to generic persons whose genders are unknown, or those who reject binary male or female identities. Singular (or epicene) ‘they’ has a long history as a pronoun to refer to individuals of unknown gender (Balhorn, 2004), and has also been adopted as a personal pronoun by those who identify

There has been much discussion on the use of particles (also referred to as ‘discourse particles’ or ‘pragmatic particles’) as a key feature of Singapore English. Wong (2004) has pointed out that particles are essential in the Singapore speech community, and in order to pass as a functional member of the speech community a speaker needs to have a proficient knowledge of the meanings and functions of

African American Language (AAL) is the most widely recognized – and controversial – ethnic variety of English in the world. In the United States national controversies about the speech of African Americans have erupted periodically for more than a half-century now, from the difference-deficit debates in the 1960s (Labov, 1972) to the Ebonics controversy in the 1990s (Rickford, 1999) and linguistic

The analysis of punctuation in philology is mainly carried out with a view to better understand the meaning of the literature concerned. Punctuation is generally believed to play the role of ‘assisting the written language in indicating those elements of speech that cannot be conveniently set down on paper: chiefly the pause, pitch and stress in speech’ (Markwardt, 1942: 156). Most of us often ignore

It is probably safe to say that whenever an expert encounters their field of expertise outside of science or academia, they shudder at misrepresentations, over-simplifications or flat out untruths. This sort of thing sometimes happens to me when I indulge in a bit of couch potato lounging and come across remarks about English or language in general on sitcoms. Thanks to Netflix, I can watch all the

Yiddish has served the English language as a comparatively minor donor language of words and meanings over the course of time. However, Yiddish has provided English with a number of borrowings that have become fairly common in present-day usage. This paper provides a rounded overview of the different lexical domains to which Yiddish contributed in the form of new words and expressions over the centuries

The concept of the linguistic landscape (henceforth LL) includes all linguistic objects that characterise public environments, including but not limited to warning signs, instructions, public road signs, advertising billboards and posters, street names, graffiti, and notices on government and nongovernment buildings (Landry & Bourhis, 1997: 25). There is no doubt that the LL is a very significant domain

With the spread of economic globalization and the accelerating demand for English, governments in East Asian countries have been updating their English-in-education policies so as to enhance the quality of English education in the region (Hu & McKay, 2012). Of all these policies, the introduction of English as a compulsory subject at younger and younger ages is ‘possibly the world's biggest policy