The use of the English language in Nigeria dates back to the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century when British merchants and Christian missionaries settled in the coastal towns called Badagry, near Lagos in the present day South Western Nigeria and Calabar, a town in the present day South Eastern Nigeria. The merchants initially traded in slaves until the slave trade was abolished in 1807, at which time freed slaves of Nigerian origin returned to the country. Many of them, who had been exposed to Western education and Christianity, later served as translators or interpreters for the Christian missionaries. The primary aim of the Christian mission was not to make their converts speak English; rather, it was to make them literate enough to read the bible in their indigenous languages. This must be the reason why Samuel Ajayi Crowder translated the English bible into Yoruba, the major language in South Western Nigeria.

With the attainment of independence, English gradually grew to become the major medium for inter-ethnic communication. Like most African nations, the country, after independence, had to grapple with multi-ethnicity and acute multilingualism. In this article, we shall examine the expansion in the functions of English during the post-colonial period.

Cameroon Pidgin English (CPE) is increasingly becoming an important language in the country, judging from its use in the media (both private and public), in literary texts, the Bible and other religious materials. The soaring of writing in CPE has been hailed by many as a positive signal for the spread and survival of the language, but this begs the question of how it should be written. Formal statements made so far on how CPE should be written are divergent (see Todd, 1986; Mbangwana, 1983; Ayafor, 1996 and Schr¨der, 2003) and in practice the present situation of CPE writing is marred by inconsistency, where the English- and the phonetically-based options compete (see Schneider, 1960 and Awah, 1981). For a full-blown literature (which standardises a language in many respects) to flourish, there is need for an agreed writing system that can make its literature better accessible to the public. We need to know what makes the one option superior to the other and why. Showcasing the literature in CPE as guarantee of viability, as Ayafor (2005) does, is not helpful if we do not pause to ask ourselves how it is, and should be, written. The purpose of this paper is to assess the controversies involved in talking about and conceiving a writing system for CPE. It is also to propose a writing system for CPE, based on linguistic and extra-linguistic parameters.

Is there a Zimbabwean variety of English? If so, who speaks it? Although Zimbabwe is a multilingual speech community, the Shona language, which is composed of dialects and sub-dialects, enjoys numerical dominance because it is spoken by the majority of the Zimbabweans. On the other hand, English, the official language, enjoys status dominance and it occupies a special position in the lives of many Zimbabweans. There is dispute, however, whether English in Zimbabwe is an interlanguage, and its speakers have adopted the native variety as a model, or whether it is better to observe that there are many varieties of English in Zimbabwe which are pragmatically identifiable as Zimbabwean, and that the vast majority of Zimbabweans appear to speak an English which reflects the linguistic characteristics of Shona.

Research on new varieties of English often reflects specific lexical shifts between a standard variety of English and an outer or expanding variety of English. Studies conducted on Nigerian English, Indian English, Malaysian English, etc., list examples of morphological, syntactical, and lexical nativization without mentioning the evolutionary progression of a post colonial English (PCE). Edgar Schneider (2007) posits a Dynamic Model for plotting the timeline of any post colonial variety of English (PCE). The model reveals five fundamental evolutionary phases to any new English: foundation, exonormative stabilization, nativization, endonormative stabilization, and differentiation. At each phase, the structure of the settler strand (STL) and the indigenous strand (IDG) of English is affected at four different linguistic levels: history/politics, identity construction, sociolinguistics, and linguistic developments. In each phase, researchers of a PCE must find specific instances of development that correspond to the correct phase of evolution. In an attempt to assess the universal applicability of Schneider's (2007) Dynamic Model, this study seeks to use the country of Malta as an example of a new post colonial English residing primarily in phase three: nativization.

A follow-up of Jin-Kyu Park's contribution in ET97 on ‘English Fever’ in South Korea, by examining one of the consequences in Singapore – the destination for thousands of ‘study mothers’ who migrate from South Korea and China to help their young children acquire ‘linguistic capital’ by learning English.

This paper focuses on the existence of around 7000 Chinese (PRC) and 5000 Korean study mothers in 2007 in the Republic of Singapore (Toh, 2008). Known in their respective home countries as ‘wild goose mothers’ (kirogi omma) and ‘study mothers’ (pei du mama), these mothers leave their husbands behind while they accompany their children, some as young as 7 years, to a foreign country in the pursuit of linguistic gold. ‘We have good science and maths at home but we need the English to make it work.’

Singapore's Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) railway system is a highly effective and rather inexpensive way of getting around the Lion City, although locals sometimes complain about overcrowding in the carriages and about noise levels experienced in apartment blocks situated near the lines. Generally speaking, passengers are well provided with information too, including maps of the MRT system in the stations, screen data about train arrivals, and clearly enunciated announcements (in English, Mandarin, Malay and Tamil) inside the carriages about upcoming stations and connections. However, one quibble can be raised about the English version of these announcements, which sometimes features the verb ‘to alight’. This is explored.

The International Civil Aviation Organization now requires all airline pilots to have at least a basic command of conversational English, but Walter Seiler is concerned that an over-emphasis on native-speaker varieties might lead to even more misunderstandings.

Will World English go the way of Latin? The phrase ‘Latin analogy’ was, it seems, coined by McArthur (1987), who distinguished a pessimistic or what he called ‘Babelesque’, perspective from an optimistic and a neutral (or pragmatic) perspectives to the comparison. The comparison continues to be made even today and generally it comes with a dire warning: the days of English as an international language, or a lingua franca for peoples from different parts of the world, are numbered. It will, sooner or later, break up into a number of different, mutually incomprehensible languages just the way good old Latin did. What is worse, in some cases this apprehension seems only to grow with the passage of time.

Will the final t become totally bottled up? It was about 15 years ago, I suppose, that I was told by an 18-year-old student that you shouldn't pronounce the final t in words like went. She meant in no circumstances. So struck was I by this that I reflected on my own practice, as a British English speaker, with such words. I decided that, in general, I released a final t before a following vowel, before a pause and before ‘soft’ consonants like h or w, but might sometimes keep it in before a ‘strong’ consonant, like m or b. So, I would say ‘I went away’, ‘What?’ and ‘That hospital’, but, pre-consonantal, either ‘He sent bottled water’ or ‘He sen’ bottled water’. You would, of course, refer also to words spelled with te at the end, like mate, as being pronounced with a final t.

Since that time, and particularly in recent years, I have noticed an increase in the non-released version of final t, pre-vowel or pre-pause, from BrE speakers in contexts where before I would not have expected it, as, for example, from BBC newsreaders.

The use of ‘as’ as a post-modifying intensifier is a construction that has become well-established in Australian and New Zealand English but is rare elsewhere. Only recently has its usage begun to be studied. In 2002, Laurie Bauer and Winifred Bauer included adj + as in their study of intensifier usage among middle-school aged children in New Zealand. Later, in 2006, Michael Head and Peter Petrucci built on Bauer and Bauer's work by studying this specific construction using the Wellington Corpus of Spoken New Zealand English (WSC) and quotations in newspaper articles. Since these studies, adj + as has become increasingly grammaticalised, as evidenced by its use in the predicate and attributive positions, its modification by adverbs, and its use as an adverb. The usage is further examined in this article.

A report on the Fourteenth Annual Conference of the International Association for World Englishes was held from 1–5 December 2008 at the City University of Hong Kong. The Conference Theme was ‘World Englishes and World's Languages: Convergence, Enrichment or Death?’ On the first two days, three pre-conference workshops and an open forum discussion were held, addressing theory and methodology in the world Englishes classroom, creativity in world Englishes and the implications of language variation for classroom teaching. This was followed by three packed days of presentations, including a keynote, plenary and presidential address, four focus lectures, and eight streams of parallel paper presentations or special panels/thematic sessions. In total, more than 150 presentations were made, and the conference was attended by well over 200 delegates.