A consideration of the nature and use of the language in the EU in terms of Braj Kachru's model of the inner, outer, and expanding circles of world Englishes

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 transition from Arabic to English as a lingua franca. The developing economies of the Gulf states have relied heavily on expatriate labor at all levels to support the spectacular development which has taken place over the last 50 years; so much so, that in most of the Emirates expatriates outnumber locals. Nowhere is this more true than in the UAE, and in Dubai in particular. This situation has had fundamental socio-linguistic implications, one of which is the emergence of English as a lingua franca at all levels of the society. As is the case in Singapore, where English has replaced Malay as the lingua franca over the last 50 years, English in Dubai is replacing Arabic. This paper discusses this situation in general and looks in particular at the language needs and attitudes towards English amongst government employees in the police force. It uses data collected as part of a needs analysis survey which was conducted to determine the learners' needs, expectations, aspirations, and feelings towards English language learning which can illuminate its role as a lingua franca in the UAE. The data was collected from regular commissioned and non-commissioned police officers and cadets enrolled in courses in Dubai Police Academy as well as on-duty police officers from various police departments, divisions, and sections in Dubai. The data is discussed in relation to wider socio-linguistic issues within the UAE.

An outline of a new worldwide project for the study of the language

When new nations are created national languages and identities are often created with them. The British Caribbean in recent decades has provided opportunities to see such processes evolve and to consider their wider implications.

The sociolinguistics of a small community of English users. A journalist for a local Macau English-language newspaper recently wrote to me and several other friends and asked us to describe Macau with one word. Many words came to mind: historic, multicultural, casinos, growth, etc.; but the word I chose to suggest does not necessarily come to mind until one has lived here, small. Indeed, Macau is a very small community. At the end of September 2007, the resident population was 531,400 and the territory occupied 28.6 sq km, although the largest concentration of population lives within the 9.3 sq km area of “Peninsular Macau” (DSEC, Macao, 2008). In terms of both population and land mass, then, Macau is a very small community, and this fact has influenced the status, functions and forms of English within the territory.

As the English language spreads and functions as an international language, scholars have been investigating some of the ideological issues behind the function and use of English in various contexts, and have pondered the future status of this global language. From early research of World Englishes (WE) the legitimacy of post-colonial Englishes, or ‘New Englishes’, as they have been termed, has emerged in scholars’ discussions (Platt, Weber & Ho, 1984; Kachru, 1985, 1992). Some have argued that the research on WE envisages the varieties of English in the outer circle contexts, such as the varieties of English spoken in Singapore, Nigeria, and India, and that people have used those varieties of English to exhibit their own identities (Kachru, 1992; Kachru & Nelson, 2006). Therefore, WE has created ‘new paradigms and perspectives for linguistic and pedagogical research and for understanding the linguistic creativity in multilingual situations across cultures’ (Kachru, 1985: 30).

Just how many millions are there? China’s huge English-knowing population of 200–350 million is often cited as evidence of the language being nativized in the world’s most populous country. We may note, however, that the words user and learner are used interchangeably in reference to its speakers of English. When however the focus is on the nativization of English in China, a country in Kachru’s ‘Expanding Circle’ of Englishes, it is imperative to distinguish between users and learners of the language. Kachru points out that institutionalized varieties of English in Outer Circle countries have four functions: the instrumental, the regulative, the interpersonal, and the imaginative/innovative. For English to perform any such functions, there needs to be a large number of proficient bilingual users of the language – which seems not to be the case in China, where English is primarily learned in the classroom as a foreign language. This means that college graduates should have learned the most English, but some constraining factors have prevented the majority of them from obtaining an advanced level of proficiency.

This article discusses the current role of English not only as a world but as an Asian language. Beginning with a consideration of the views of Graddol (1997) on the role of English in Asia, especially in relation to Chinese, it discusses the situation of English in the various parts of the continent: Central, West, South, and East, noting that the language plays a distinct role in each. It also notes the vast and increasing influence of the language despite the fewness of its native speakers in the world's largest continent, drawing attention to the disproportionate influence of three small indigenous communities of more or less native-speakers: the Anglo-Indians, the East Indians, and many Filipinos. It then considers a range of countries throughout the continent, concluding with comments on Singapore and East Asia, and the vast numbers of users of English in China and India alone.

A survey with large samples trying to find out whether there is a difference in the languages chosen in store signs in a larger city and those in a provincial town, gathering a ‘baseline’ sample in Great Britain in order to see whether shop-front advertising for native speakers of English also draws on foreign languages.

A discussion of the variety of labels given to the language in its worldwide role. In his article ‘Is it world or international or global English, and does it matter?’ (ET79, Jul 04), Tom McArthur welcomes further comment on the names of English in a ‘globalizing world’. He examines the histories and meanings of the three most popular labels for English: world, international and global. In addition to discussing his contribution, I would like to draw attention to other, perhaps less familiar names for English that have been proposed as alternatives. This paper seeks both to survey these labels and uncover why there is such a strong compulsion to rename the language. I suggest that these proposals have arisen in response to postcolonial ambiguity about the spread of English and a desire to shape a new ideology for English language teaching (ELT) which more accurately reflects the global nature of the language and its diverse uses and users.

Perspectives on an emerging variety on the mainland of Europe, from commentators in Sweden, Austria and England.

A report on the salient role of English in Japan's complex commercial signs. A 1989–1990 study by the National Language Research Institute found that loanwords comprise nearly 10% of Japanese language in current use, and most of these loanwords are from English. Loanword dictionary entries continue to grow: the latest katakana dictionary published by Sanseido (2000) contains 52,500 foreign word entries.

In the reign of Queen Elizabeth – the first, that is, from 1558 to 1603 – the number of English speakers in the world is thought to have been between 5 and 7 million. At the beginning of the reign of the second Queen Elizabeth in 1952, the figure had increased almost fiftyfold. In 1962, Randolph Quirk estimated in The Use of English that 250 millions had English as a mother tongue, with a further 100 million using it as a second or foreign language.

This article discusses the use of English as a lingua franca (ELF) by engineering students and its effectiveness in content courses at a technical university, reporting the preliminary results of part of a study that investigates authentic and high-stakes speech events at a Swedish technical university. The main aim of my research is to find out what kind of divergence from standard morphosyntactic forms of English if any leads to disturbance, i.e. breakdown, in ELF speech.

A reply to commentators on ‘International English in the global village’ (ET58, Apr 99) and further thoughts on a contentious issue

ENGLISH is a juggernaut whose sweep across the globe is marked not only by the ever-swelling ranks of those who speak it as a second language, but also by its intrusion into other languages and cultures. While far from omnipresent, English is seen and heard in enough contexts in non-English-speaking countries that social scientists must carefully explore its role alongside indigenous languages. This study, which focused on the city of Rome, examines one dimension of English as an invader – its presence on street signs, on store fronts, in shop windows, outside commercial and public buildings, in billboards and other street advertisements, and in graffiti. It takes a more expansive and comprehensive approach than previous studies in examining the use of English in a foreign locale, in order to get a better sense of how widespread it is on the streets of a non-English-speaking country and in what contexts it appears.

A report on the impact of English on media advertising in France.

English (in all of its creative manifestations) and images associated with English are extremely popular advertising strategies in France. In order to explore the stereotypical images that French consumers commonly associate with different varieties of English and the reasons for such perceptions, this study compares television data collected in France during the summer of 2000 with data featured in an earlier study (Martin 1998).

The development of Hong Kong English (henceforth HKE) has triggered a number of concerns amongst the local population with respect to its status (Joseph, 1996; Luk, 1998; Bolton & Lim, 2000; Pang, 2003; Stibbard, 2004). However, despite the prominence of research into attitudes towards language variation within sociolinguistics, very few studies focus on Hong Kong English (Bolton & Kwok, 1990; Candler, 2001; S. Poon, 2007) or Mandarin-accented English (He & Li, 2009; Hu, 2004; F. Poon, 2006). The aim of this study is to uncover language attitudes towards HKE and Mandarin-accented English (henceforth ME) in the Hong Kong region through the application of the verbal-guise technique.

A description of the background, nature and prospects of the British National Corpus project