In this paper I wish to respond to the article published in ET94 by Saraceni while at the same time providing some clarifications concerning the concept of English as a Lingua Franca (henceforth ELF). In his article Saraceni raises three main questions (and a number of related debatable comments which I will quickly deal with in my final remarks) regarding: 1) the nature of ELF and its speakers, 2) the relationship between ELF and the World Englishes (henceforth WE) paradigm, and 3) the distinction between form and function. I will address each of these questions, and in so doing consider a number of notions concerning the ELF research field.

An interim report on the influence of the Maori language on English

In the case of the status of English in Hong Kong, most ‘new Englishes’ classification schemes have been either controversial or inconclusive. Dynamic models seem to be more promising, and these predict two things. First, a trend of ‘linguistic schizophrenia’, where people are exonormative in ideal – holding to the ideals of native speaker English – but endonormative in practice – in actual fact, speaking their own local variety. Second, the future ongoing development and eventual acceptance of the new variety. This article aims to shed more light on some of the complexities surrounding the issue of the status of English in Hong Kong. It undertakes an analysis of the attitudes of local English speakers towards the existence and nature of their own variety, perceptions of their own linguistic behaviour, and attitudes towards norms. The significance of the findings is evaluated in the light of dynamic models postulated by Kachru (1983) and Schneider (2003, 2007). The Hong Kong data present a classic case of Kachru's ‘linguistic schizophrenia’, and confirm the placement of Hong Kong English at the beginning of Schneider's Phase 3 of nativization. The future possibilities for the variety are also discussed.

THE ARTICLE ‘Singlish’, in which Duncan Forbes describes the background and nature of the English spoken by Singapore Chinese students, interested me greatly, not only because I always read with great pleasure the reports and discussions on world Englishes, but also because I myself am a Chinese English teacher and teach English in China.

An analysis of African American English in South Korean hip hop. English is rarely used in face-to-face terms in South Korea, but the use of English in commerce and entertainment is not such a rarity. The presence of English expressions in advertising and pop lyrics is no longer considered extraordinary. Lee (2006) reports that 83.75% of 720 South Korean TV commercials use some type of English, and only 16.25% of advertisements rely exclusively on Korean. Pop music is another discourse space in which English is fairly frequently used, occurring in more than 50% of pop song titles. A detailed analysis of the frequency of English in South Korean pop music (SK-pop) is reproduced.

In this paper I wish to discuss some aspects of the current debates about the concept of English as a lingua franca. In doing so, I will use a recount of the pre-publication stages of the volume English in the World: Global Rules, Global Roles, co-edited by Rani Rubdy and myself (2006) as a starting point, to set the scene, and will move to more theoretical considerations in the second part of the paper.

With the global spread of English and the emergence of different varieties of English around the world, World Englishes (WE) researchers have argued for the recognition of ‘Englishes’ in the plural and called for the need to acknowledge the diversity of English (Kachru, 1985, 1997). Apart from WE researchers who are interested in investigating nation-bound varieties of English in different parts of the world, a growing number of researchers have begun to examine the phenomenon of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) communication, given the growth of intercultural exchanges worldwide (Jenkins, 2000, 2007; Seidlhofer, 2011). Whilst WE researchers are primarily concerned with how varieties of English differ from each other, ELF researchers are interested in exploring how speakers of different Englishes communicate with each other in contexts where English is the common language. For example, these ELF researchers have studied the communicative and pragmatic strategies which people from different lingua-cultural backgrounds use to communicate with one another through English as a common resource in order to achieve mutual intelligibility (Seidlhofer, 2011). Despite their different focuses, both WE and ELF researchers deal with the same global phenomenon of English use and the pluricentricity of English, and share similar ideas about the ownership of English, and language contact and change (Seidlhofer, 2011). A relatively new field, Global Englishes (GE) (Galloway & Rose, 2013, 2014; Jenkins, 2014), has thus emerged to bring together researchers from both WE and ELF. With an inclusive orientation, GE places less emphasis on native speaker English, emphasizes the diversity of English, and questions the relevance of native speaker norms for English Language Teaching (ELT) (see Galloway & Rose, 2015).

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 whose usage prior to COVID-19 was very limited (e.g. quarantine and pandemic) or known to very few (coronavirus, super-spreader, or the abbreviations PPE ‘personal protective equipment’ or WFH ‘working from home’), while coming to terms with the implications of others such as self-isolation, lockdown, or social distancing (which should be better called physical distancing as social closeness, albeit non-physically, is very much needed to get through these difficult times). Short pieces on coroneologisms have attested to the rise of many new lexical formations, mostly blends. According to Thorne (2020; also cited in CBC, 2020), more than 1,000 new words – both non-specialised and technical terminology – have been created during the current pandemic. Journalists and Twitter users are particularly prone to coin words displaying a high level of linguistic ingenuity; yet, the circulation of that lexis may be very limited. The present note overviews some of the most widely spread vocabulary related to our new COVID-19 reality, coming from the laity rather than from medical or scientific professionals. Alongside terms like social distancing and lockdown, less technical and more playful vocabulary has transcended linguistic boundaries. Particular attention will be paid to examples from European languages whose word-stocks share a common Latinate substratum, likewise central to scientific communication.

English nowadays plays an important role in the political, diplomatic, commercial, economic and cultural activities on the global stage (see, e.g., Graddol, 1997, 2006; Jenkins, 2000; Warschauer, 2000; Crystal, 2003). As a result of the widespread use of English around the globe, several scholars contend that English no longer exclusively represents the culture of native English-speaking countries, nor are they the exclusive ‘owners’ of English (see e.g. Widdowson, 1994).

A tale of two cities (Zurich and Uppsala)and their street and store signs

This article discusses recent attempts to describe English as a lingua franca (ELF). In it, I will consider claims made for ELF as a variety of English ‘with a life of its own’, which is said to be emerging among users of English for whom it is not their mother tongue. I examine a number of weaknesses in the case made for ELF by a school of thinking in mainland Europe, focusing on: the role of the native speaker in ELF; the relationship between ELF and Standard English; and the search for a grammatical common core for contexts in which English is used as an international lingua franca. The article draws on research which suggests that the aspect of Standard English which may be inappropriate for ELF is not in the grammatical system but the area of idiomaticity. I conclude with a consideration of the pedagogic implications of the ELF debate.

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.

Singing is a very dynamic and innovative mode of communication through which artists often express themselves with a set of various voices. Today, pop music circulates across national boundaries and English is the main medium of communication in transnational pop culture. In this special context different varieties of English meet at a high density. Rihanna's single Work is an example of this prevalent multivocality in pop music culture. Her language performance attracted public attention of various sorts as she audibly incorporates several Caribbean English Creole (CEC) features. While some critics describe her lyrics as ‘gibberish’ (cf. Noelliste, 2016), others acknowledge her performance as a ‘reclamation of her Barbadian heritage’ (Gibsone, 2016). The example of Rihanna shows that singers can be transporters of English varieties: she is a Caribbean artist who started a successful career in the US, and whose music today has global reach. Singers, like Rihanna, are thus mobile, transnational linguistic agents. On the one hand, she physically travels the world playing concerts to her audiences. On the other, her persona, music, videos, and further media commodities are part of the global ‘mediascape’ (Appadurai, 1996). In other words, her products easily spread across the globe and are reproduced, transcending national and social boundaries. New technologies (e.g. smart phones, tablets) and applications (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) facilitate as well as accelerate the transnational dissemination of media resources. Moreover, singers show that the linguistic (and cultural) resources as such are mobile. Different language influences are formed into individual linguistic repertoires. Singers often playfully employ certain features to highlight parts of their identity or locate themselves in a particular music genre.

With the global spread of English, research in World Englishes (WE) has burgeoned in the past two decades. Its concepts have been taken up by researchers in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) to question ‘native-speakerism’ (Holliday, 2005, 2006) in English instruction. However, the implications of this theoretical discussion have so far yet to be realized in EFL classrooms, where teachers and learners alike still largely submit to native-speaker norms. This study therefore aims to examine how discussions of power, politics, and the spread of Englishes might influence students’ perceptions of English and their experiences of learning and using English. The analysis focuses on papers written by students enrolled in a semester-long WE course, and demonstrates the value of bringing WE into English curriculums to help students become critical learners and confident users of English today.

The utterance It's raining (of great relevance to the Irish!) can have a variety of different meanings according to who says it, to whom one is talking, and where it is said, amongst other things. The fact that language in use (whether in spoken or written mode) is obviously much more than the sum of its constituent parts – the individual sounds that make up words, the combinations of words that create sentences or utterances, the meaning that can be derived from different words and combinations thereof – has been what has driven pragmatics as a discipline, from its origins in the philosophy of language. Initially, what drove the research agenda was the potential of words to perform acts, or speech act theory (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969), and later, the complexities of the relationship between what is said and what is meant, the study of conversational implicatures (Grice, 1975) or ‘how people can understand one another beyond the literal words that are spoken’ (Eelen, 2001: 2). Pragmatics is now an inherently inter-disciplinary approach which has as its central orientation this study of, essentially, how speaker meaning is interpreted in context. Critical to interpretation is the concept of context itself, a complex and multi-layered notion involving cultural setting, speech situation and shared background assumptions (Goodwin and Duranti, 1992). Linguistic choices made by conversational participants can simultaneously encode situational indices of position and time, and interpersonal and cultural indices such as power, status, gender and age. Pragmatic research comprises a diverse range of research strands including how linguistic choices encode politeness (Brown and Levinson, 1987; Watts, 2003), reference and deixis (Levinson, 2004) and the relationship between domain specific discourse, such as workplace or media discourse, and specialised pragmatic characteristics (O'Keeffe, Clancy and Adolphs, 2011). Thus, pragmatics provides, as Christie (2000: 29) maintains, ‘a theoretical framework that can account for the relationship between the cultural setting, the language user, the linguistic choices the user makes, and the factors that underlie those choices’.

In recent years it has become increasingly popular to study Englishes in countries traditionally belonging to the Expanding Circle of World Englishes, such as China (see e.g. He & Li, 2009), Russia (see e.g. Davydova, 2012) or the Netherlands (Edwards, 2010, 2011). South Korea (henceforth Korea) belongs to the Expanding Circle as well, which means that English has the official status of a foreign language. Active use of English among Koreans themselves is limited but English has a very prestigious status in Korean society. In the following discussion, the sociolinguistic situation in Korea will be introduced, with a special focus on the status of English. Using data from a pilot corpus, I will argue for the development of several patterns of Koreanized English which seem to be partly influenced by the Korean language but are also possible results of the language learning process in general and idiosyncratic features.

An account of the nature and key features of an East African variety

Perspectives from both World Englishes (WE) and English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) can assist in the description of Hong Kong English phonology. Mario Saraceni's article (English Today 94) provides some useful insights into the current debates about English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). His discussion of the background to this debate identifies three viewpoints: a traditional ENL view with its adherence to native-speaker models; the WE (World Englishes) paradigm with its ‘pluralised and pluricentric view of English in the world’; and the emerging ELF position, with its rejection of native-speaker norms in favour of ‘endonormative realisations of lingua franca varieties’ (Alessa Cogo, English Today 95). However, Cogo believes that the second and third positions are not separate paradigms, and that ELF sits ‘comfortably within a WE framework’, as claimed by Jenkins (2007:17). In this article, I would like to show how the two positions can work together to inform pedagogy by exploring the possible options for English pronunciation models in Hong Kong.

English as a lingua franca (ELF) has received a great deal of attention in the field of applied linguistics in the last decade or so (Jenkins, 2007, 2014; Mauranen, 2012; Seidlhofer, 2011). As is currently conceptualized, ELF refers to the common language of choice among speakers from different lingua-cultural backgrounds (Jenkins, 2007; Seidlhofer, 2011). ELF does not imply a single, unified variety of English but primarily refers to language in use in contexts where multilingual speakers are involved (Cogo, 2010). In other words, ELF can be understood as social practice, with an emphasis on meaning-making processes. Much of the earlier research focused on identifying linguistic features characteristic of ELF communication (see Jenkins, 2000; Seidlhofer, 2001). But with the increased recognition of the variability and fluidity associated with the use of ELF, researchers have recently turned their attention to investigating communicative strategies which multilingual speakers employ to achieve mutual understanding and negotiate meaning in ELF interactions (see Cogo & Dewey, 2012; Jenkins, Cogo & Dewey, 2011). Furthermore, there exists a growing body of research into attitudes and perceptions of ELF communication (see Cogo, 2010; Jenkins, 2007; Kaloscai, 2009), given the impact of ELF perceptions on ELF-related communicative practices, especially with respect to issues relating to (non-) conformity to native-speaker norms.

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.’