THIS ARTICLE addresses differences in meaning that are current in English as it is used along the West African coast. It is not uncommon for an ESL teacher to be confronted with such questions as, ‘Is that what “stranger” means?’ or such responses as, ‘Sir, I do not have a “belly”!’ However, in this context, a sound knowledge (or simply an awareness) of new meanings attached to old words may save some embarrassment. This paper proposes that, for the sound and successful teaching of English as a second language in West Africa, teachers should acquaint themselves with such usages.

Some thoughts on a complex pronoun. Some expressions seem so familiar to us that we do not bother to reflect on the meanings they convey. We can be surprised to learn that in some languages, like Malay, it is necessary to distinguish between we referring to the speaker and the interlocutor (kita) and we referring to the speaker and someone other than the interlocutor (kami). Both possibilities are covered by the English we.

The impact and implications of British and American pronunciation models in South America's largest country

The choice of an official language in a linguistically pluralistic society often poses thorny problems, not least of which is that concerning perceived threats to the linguistic rights of minority language communities. This article discusses the importance of Cameroonian pidgin English (CPE) in relation to the two imperial languages inherited from colonial masters – English and French. I will contend that for the purpose of socio-political integration and national unity in Cameroon, it is incumbent upon policy-makers and language planners to choose pidgin English as one of the official languages in the country. CPE is a national lingua franca spoken by the rich and poor, men and women, educated and uneducated, young and old. Being one of the most widely spoken languages in the country, having met the communicative needs of Cameroonians for more than 500 years, and being a language that carries the identity and ecology of Cameroon, pidgin English has the potential to be promoted to the status of an official language and made to serve as a compromise medium for socio-political integration in an ethnically pluralistic nation such as Cameroon.

It was the late Robert Hughes's remarkable TV series and book on modern art, The Shock of the New, first seen in the early 1980s, that with its title so deftly captured the both the excitement and the puzzlement to the beholder of creative novelty and innovation. And it is in many ways a self-fulfilling phrase, since epigrammatic, yet meaning-laden titles and names are the stuff of the broadcast programmer and the namer of new products. The new can indeed be shocking to the beholder, and Hughes's title says it in a sharp, monosyllabic manner whose five-word cadence has both balance and rhythm. Shuffle the words – or render them in a different grammatical format (‘novelty shocks’, for example) – and it falls apart. Words applied to new things and events matter, because they need to be repeated and, the makers hope, be talked about; resonance and repeatability are important to original things being launched on an unsuspecting public.

JOHN D. BATTENBURG of California Polytechnic State University (CalPoly) discusses tensions currently inherent in university departments of “English”, especially in the United States

A plain-language campaigner takes on the traditional linguistic apparatus of government and legislation in Britain

Changing emphases in the use of English and Chinese in the recruitment of business managers in a British colony soon to be reintegrated into China

Following Elizabeth Anne Malischewski's report on the English of Newfoundland (ET24, Oct 90), a review of the many kinds of English in mainland Canada

In a well-known and much discussed article, the philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote as follows (Russell, 1952):

Mesthrie & Bhatt (2008: 125) note that ‘all New Englishes varieties treat [θ] or [ð] as something other than an interdental fricative’. Malaysian English, as a variety of New English, constitutes an interesting case study. In Malaysian English, what Mesthrie & Bhatt (2008: 125) call ‘something other than an interdental fricative’ is realized as the dental stop [t] (e.g. thought), which in this paper is dubbed ‘a new [t]’ or presented orthographically as [th > t], whose acoustic quality is strikingly different from the ordinary alveolar stop [t] (e.g. taught).

A status report on a controversial and much-maligned area of technological research and development.

Machine Translation does not often make the headlines, though it can happen. In the non-English-speaking world, at least, the last time the spotlight briefly fell on this normally unexciting activity was in September 1998, at the height of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. The report on the case by the Independent Council, Kenneth Starr, containing an account of the President's intimate dealings with Miss Lewinsky, was placed on the Internet and to satisfy the morbid curiosity of surfers everywhere was immediately translated into the world's major languages using the free translation software available on a number of WWW sites. The results, not surprisingly, were laughable. A capable human being would have had a hard enough time translating such a potent combination of technical and colloquial English: the MT applications were quite out of their depth. The silliest gaffes appeared in newspapers and everyone agreed that the on-line MT programs were useless; the subject was soon forgotten.

One new feature of English Today in this issue, and for future issues, is The ET Column, where we'll be asking people in the know – academics, broadcasters, educators, linguists, teachers and others concerned with English worldwide – to write a column for the journal on issues of controversy, debate, work in the field, and matters of topical and immediate interest. In this issue, David Graddol is writing from India, where he's currently researching English Next: India.

One of the problems of English spelling is the dual representation of the so-called ‘eyes’-words, rendered in discourse as -ise and -ize, both with high-frequency verbs such as modernise/modernize and rare coinages, as in burglarise/burglarize, etc. Eyes-words have historically evolved from two different language systems as two different forms with the same meaning, which have eventually come to coincide in their use in English with competing orthographic forms. The present paper first assesses the origin and development of the competition of these forms in the history of English from their introduction into English to their current configuration in British and American English; and then analyses their distribution in 13 varieties of English worldwide from the perspective of diatopic and text type variation. The study concludes, on the one hand, that the adoption of -ize in American English was an early 19th-century phenomenon while -ise spread in British English in the late 20th century; and, on the other, that the dissemination of -ize is constantly on the rise in many varieties, and the growing Americanisation of English, among others, is taken to be the most decisive element factor.

PAUL RASTALL takes a linguistic stroll round an English country garden

The English language, although a second language, plays a prominent role in Nigeria. As the official language in the media, governmental administration, education, law courts, commerce, entertainment and politics, it has assumed a hegemonic position over indigenous Nigerian languages (Oladipupo, 2021). In view of its long years of interaction with these languages, the absence of native models, and the influence of Nigerian teachers who lack Standard English pronunciation competence (Awonusi, 2015; Akinjobi, 2020), it has been nativised and acculturated (Adegbija, 2004). This has, therefore, resulted in a Nigerian English (NigE) variety that is markedly different from Standard British English, its precursor and target model, at the syntactic (e.g., Akinlotan, 2021), pragmatic (e.g., Fuchs, Gut & Soneye, 2013) and phonological (e.g., Awonusi, 2015; Akinola & Oladipupo, 2021) levels.

I first heard of the term ‘Chinglish’ when I was at Baiduizi (白堆子) Beijing Foreign Languages School in the 1970s, through Janet Adams’ book, From Chinglish to English. The book contained 60 short dialogues in simple American English. It was meant to be teaching us colloquial English, compared to, I suppose, the textbook English written by Chinese teachers. I found the term Chinglish rather odd, and it was an odd thing for us pupils at that particular school to be made aware of, because the school was, quite literally, the only school in China at the time where foreigners were directly teaching Chinese children foreign languages and cultures. Few of these foreign teachers had formal teaching qualifications, and they were not using any textbooks written by Chinese teachers, but in their own ways using material the school compiled specially for the pupils. It was a form of audio-lingual and direct method. The language we were taught was pretty colloquial and we did not, as far as I could tell, speak Chinglish that the examples in Adams’ book illustrated.

THOMAS M. PAIKEDAY lists some more new words and senses that do not yet appear in mainstream dictionaries.