Some reflections on why English is necessary but not enough.

On 11 May 2001, as part of the EU-Japan Friendship Week, and on the occasion of the European Year of Languages, a one-day symposium on ‘The Future of Linguistic Diversity’ was held at the Japan Foundation in Tokyo: see ET67, Jul 01. In his contribution to this symposium, Professor Reinier Salverda of University College London (as the representative of the Netherlands) discussed how it may be possible to work towards successful international communication in a world that is nonetheless marked by great diversity of language. The following adapted and extended version of his EYL presentation discusses both multilingualism today and the view that English, while necessary in global terms, is hardly enough.

An analysis of ‘public English’ and (not) learning the language in Japan.

Visitors to Japan, whether linguists or laymen, frequently come back with their own collection of quaint uses of English, gathered from public signs, advertising and so on, which vary from the odd to the simply incorrect. This may provide complacent amusement for the native speaker, but is not surprising or unique: Budapest airport until relatively recently sported a large sign reading Welcome in Hungary. What is especially interesting in Japan is not the mistakes but the puzzling function of many such signs. English words and messages are often combined with Japanese, so that, as a non-Japanese speaker, your eye is at first attracted then baffled, until you realise that the English is not aimed at you, a native speaker, but at native speakers of Japanese. But who among the Japanese is it aimed at, and why?

A study in accentual compromise.

There is something in the very name Estuary English which fills certain sectors of British society with horror and fear, as if we were in the presence of a contagious and potentially devastating disease. It can provoke what John Maidment (1994:7) termed the ‘Disgusted-of-Tunbridge-Wells Syndrome’ (DTWS):

“Nothing is likely to enrage DTW more than the suggestion that the standard language which he/she holds so dear, the grail of which he/she sees him/herself the guardian, is usurped by the usage of people who are NOT OUR CLASS. DTW is not going down without a fight, you may be sure.”

This Times-reading, Radio 4-listening guardian of the English language, armed with pen and paper, is ready to pick up on mispronunciations, misspellings, and misusages of grammar and send in a letter of complaint, bemoaning the decline of the language.

A study of commercial names that extends ET's on-going discussion of ‘shop-sign English’ and similar phenomena from Europe and Asia into Latin America.

A large body of literature describes the use of English loanwords all over the world. When it comes to developing nations, one of the most common explanations for such a phenomenon is the superiority attributed to what is foreign, especially when business and advertising are involved. This article discusses the phenomenon of English loanwords and advertising using the case of Brazil as a scenario. It exemplifies the many motivations that lead to the incorporation of English into the world of business and advertising, and argues for a comprehensive view of this phenomenon, balancing external and internal forces contributing to the use of English.

A quantitative analysis of usage in Computer-Mediated Conversation (CMC).

While commentators as ‘early’ as 1984 were predicting that the “organizational, social, and personal effects of computers will be deeply felt”, they could only speculate on the strength of its impact. As this account was being written, at the end of 2001, the effects of Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) were fast overtaking our poor ability to measure them. There are many ways to communicate through computers: Usenet newsgroups, mailing lists, and message boards, which allow users to discuss specific topics with each other. (The term CMC allows for the possibility that some methods of communication, e.g., “chat rooms”, will not meet the definition of ‘mail’. The most popular method of CMC is e-mail. For those who have internet access, CMC is often their preferred choice of indirect (i.e., non face-to-face) communication, thanks to its speed, efficiency, and flexibility. Perhaps for these reasons, e-mail has already overtaken the telephone as the primary means of business communication.

A survey of attitudes to other people's English among students at a university in the United States. Attitudes toward varieties of English as used in European contexts reflect changing viewpoints among their speakers (see Westergren Axelsson; Söderlund & Modiano; and Mobärg; see also Mobärg 1998). In this paper, I focus on the multifaceted attitudes toward varieties of English held by American undergraduate students in one department of English in the United States. I focus on perceptions of varieties of English, particularly on viewpoints of standard and acceptable spoken varieties of English. The wider aim of this project – described here in its early pilot stages – is to identify to what extent American undergraduates accept regional, national, and international varieties of English. A guiding question is whether American undergraduate students expand their view of which varieties of English are standard as the students gain more exposure to varieties that are not their own.

Mixed local feelings about the use of local words in the English of Ghana. A Ghanaianism is a vocabulary item peculiar to Ghana. It may be an English item that has undergone a local semantic shift, an item of local origin used consistently in English, or a hybrid of the two. In addition, the term Ghanaian English as used here refers, not to a variety whose features have been more or less fully recognised and described, but broadly to the English used by Ghanaians who have had at least some formal education and are able to use English in some registers. Drawing on a collection of Ghanaianisms compiled over the last 10 years, this paper looks first at some of the prevailing problems in attempting to define the transference phenomena widely identified as code-switching (CS) on the one hand and lexical borrowing (LB) on the other, then at how Ghanaians deal with the phenomenon of borrowing into English at the text level.

A discussion of the centrality of imagery in the promotion and use of English worldwide. Metaphor is traditionally considered a “figure of speech”, describing one thing by stating another with which it can be compared, as discussed by rhetoricians and grammarians, from Aristotle in his Poetics and Rhetoric to I. A. Richards in The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936) and Kenneth Burke in A Grammar of Motives (1945), a growing number of recent linguists have been trying to establish metaphor at a cognitive, conceptual level (such as Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Gibbs, 1994).