A couple of years ago, a few major news websites, such as those of The Guardian, The Telegraph and The Daily Mail, reported that the non-literal use of literally, as in ‘This book literally blew my mind’, was officially recognised as legitimate usage by Merriam-Webster, Cambridge Dictionaries Online and the Oxford English Dictionary. As often happens in today's online media, the news went viral. Language users and language pundits alike condemned the dictionary addition of what they regard as an ‘erroneous’ use of the word. The only problem was that this was not really news. The Oxford English Dictionary, for instance, had officially added this meaning of literally in 2011, dating the first such recorded usage back to 1769.

The Russian Federation, established after the breakup of the USSR in the early 1990s, is the largest country in the world (Blinnikov, 2011). Russians have long considered their capital, Moscow, and the adjoining city of St Petersburg, to be the centres of culture and commerce, as well of the arts and educational facilities. Due to the large size of their country, Russians designate areas west of the Ural Mountains informally as “European Russia.” The Russian territories known as Siberia and the Russian Far East extend east of the Urals to the Pacific Ocean, and cover approximately 10% of the world's land mass (Yudin, 2006). In May 2000, President Putin designated nine federal subjects (provinces and republics) of Siberia as the Siberian Federal District (http://russiatrek.org/siberia-district). The capital of Irkutsk, located in Irkutsk Province, is situated in the southeastern part of the Siberian Federal District.

English control verbs take infinitival complements that include the particle to:

1. (1)

   1. a. She tried to read one book each week.

   2. b. She promised to read one book each week.

Much serious linguistic attention is at present focused on recent and ever more extraordinary developments in the use of the ubiquitous like. In this article I want to take a more light-hearted look at the journey of what is it like? as a way of asking for a description.

Discussion about the official or national language in Tanzania is basically a discussion about Kiswahili and English. These two languages have been competing for official status in Tanzania since Tanganyika (Tanganyika refers to the Tanzania mainland before it united with Zanzibar in 1964) gained its independence from Britain in 1961 (Rubagumya, 1991; Schmied 1991: 195; Mulokozi, 2010). Yahya-Othman & Batibo (1996) describe the competition between English and Kiswahili in Tanzania as a swinging pendulum. In a certain period of time, the status of English rises, and in another period of time the status of Kiswahili rises, and vice versa.

In November 1974 a murder took place which, both at the time and in retrospect, provided British journalists with material for countless articles. Richard John Bingham, 7th Earl of Lucan (generally referred to as ‘Lord Lucan’) apparently killed his children's nanny with a blunt instrument, attacked his wife, and then fled his Belgravia home. His whereabouts since then, and even (despite the fact that he was declared dead in the High Court in 1999) the question of whether or not he is still alive, continue to be a matter of sporadic discussion in the media and among the general public. As British National Corpus (BNC) evidence shows, Lord Lucan is now sometimes lumped together in the conversation and writings of the British with other creatures and objects whose existence is the stuff of legend rather than of scientific certainty:

The subject of stative possession has generated much interest over the past decade, particularly regarding the origin of the construction have got and its use in different varieties of British and North American English (e.g. Tagliamonte, 2003, 2013; Jankowski 2005; Tagliamonte et al., 2010). In these varieties, have got alternates with have to mark possession in sentences such as those in (1) below.

1. (1)

   1. a. We've got a nice lounge there you know, with French doors, and we have these seats we can take outside and sit (0711b).1

   2. b. That's the worse type of person. They have nothing and then they've got something and they think they are better than anybody else (0804a).

English is regularly perceived to be the global language that is used for cross-cultural communication by people from around the world (e.g., Crystal, 2003). Following international trends, English has exerted a presence in the cultures, languages, and interactional patterns of the peoples of Asia (Kachru, 1998: 91). The status afforded English native and near-native speakers reflects the perceived importance and interpersonal functionality of English in the region, and efforts by Asian governments to teach English at younger ages, as well as the demand for English ability by corporations, the media, and individuals, demonstrate its perceived instrumentality. In spite of the presumption of usefulness, there have been surprisingly few studies investigating Asian learners' perceptions of and decision to use English in specific settings. There is also a need for research that extends beyond individual countries to include pan-Asian issues, particularly in the “lesser-researched expanding-circle societies, including … Japan … [and] Thailand” (Bolton, 2008: 9). In order to address this gap in the literature and inform discussions about the comparability of students across Asian Expanding Circle countries, the aim of the present study is to compare and contrast how students in one Southeast Asian Expanding Circle country (i.e., Thailand) and one East Asian Expanding Circle country (i.e., Japan) view the usefulness of English to their lives.

West Midlands English: Birmingham and The Black Country forms part of the series Dialects of English which has so far included volumes on varieties such as: Urban North-Eastern English, Hong Kong English, Newfoundland and Labrador English, Irish English, Indian English, New Zealand English, Singapore English and Northern and Insular Scots. As such, it follows the general format of the series which covers the history and geography of a region, chapters on phonetics and phonology, grammar, lexis and a survey of previous works and bibliography. This contribution to the series follows this same general format and makes it applicable to the West Midlands region of the UK.

The present volume represents one of the most recent additions to a burgeoning number of publications in the field of L2 motivation (Dörnyei & Ushioda, 2009; Murray, Gao, & Lamb, 2011). As in most of these, ideas of the self-concept and identity in learner motivation are clearly visible. However, a welcome aspect of this book is its focus on the local context of language learning and how this interacts with both the learner's concept of self and the motivation to pursue his or her language studies.

Languages, like their speakers, are socially situated. They exist in specific contexts, which they help shape and which, in turn, are shaped by them. Looking at the ways in which these interactions occur can tell us a lot about language users as well as languages (and language) themselves. Broadly speaking, it is this social aspect of language that is the object of study of sociolinguistics. I may be biased (after all, it was after being exposed to Cheshire's (2009) study of language use by a group of adolescents in Reading, England, that I decided to choose it as a field of study), but it is indeed a fascinating branch of linguistics, for it has the potential to appeal to those with an interest in language – either as an entity per se or as an instrument – but also to those who are more attracted by the sociological implications of it.