Why do some foreign users of English make certain, almost predictable ‘mistakes’?

Starts with excerpt from Geoffrey Hughes, Words of War (ET17, 1989). The lexicon of war in the twenty-first century. The major development since this article was published (1989, the year that the Berlin Wall came down) was the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001, now styled ‘9/11’. This used a stupefyingly original strategy of attacking the heart of America's capitalist and military establishment with the unconventional weapons of civilian aircraft and kamikazi pilots. Indeed, the bombing was a more ruthless variation of Pearl Harbour, being a hijack, less damaging in terms of hardware, but far more devastating in its effect on national morale and its propaganda impact. On a smaller scale, suicide bombings have now become relatively common.

The Japanese linguistic landscape is a dynamically vibrant area with words and phrases appearing in a vast array of locations written in a wide range of scripts, fonts, sizes and colours, and all serving a complex and interconnected array of functions. This visual landscape of shop signs, street signs, advertising posters, information boards and vending machines is complemented by a similar vibrancy and dynamism in more private domains such as restaurant menus, product packaging, clothing, newspaper articles, magazine stories and TV advertising. Immediately striking an observer of these contexts is the fact that, although the Japanese language has a highly complex writing system incorporating an admixture of logographic, syllabic and alphabetic characters, a great many of the words and phrases in Japanese social contexts are transcribed in Latin alphabet characters. Because the vast majority of these lexical items are either direct imports of words from the English language (often termed ‘loanwords' or ‘borrowings') or domestic creations based on English vocabulary (often termed ‘wasei eigo'/‘Japan-created English'), those who are familiar with the English language are assisted in their orientation around Japan by this pervasive use of English-based vocabulary.

English is used by more than one and a half billion people as a first, second or foreign language for communication purposes (Strevens, 1992). In this context, the purpose of teaching English has shifted from mastery of the grammatical rules to the ability to use the target language for successful communication. Consequently, the communication aspect of teaching and learning English has become the key issue in the domain of second language acquisition (Yashima, 2002: 54). Therefore, the issue of whether the learners will communicate in English when they have the chance to do so and to what extent they are willing to communicate gain importance. These questions have led to the emergence of an important construct in the field of L2 instruction, i.e. willingness to communicate (hereafter, WTC), which is defined as a learner's ‘readiness to enter into discourse at a particular time with a specific person or persons, using a L2’ (MacIntyre et al., 1998: 547). MacIntyre and his associates even proposed that WTC in L2 should be conceptualized as ‘the primary goal’ of language instruction (MacIntyre et al., 1998: 545). This paper explores the important concept of WTC by looking into Pakistani students' WTC in Canada.

A tale from the streets of New York. In the main story I focus on two people in particular as an example of the ways in which a writer's workshop helped awaken me to the lives outside the workshop of the participants.

TIM CONNELL considers some cases of particle abuse in British English

In the last issue of English Today I argued that while the differences between American and British English may be small, they are innumerable, varied and interesting. But that article (and many of the things I write) invited the question of whether it even makes sense to talk of American English and British English. These labels are extremely problematic on geographic, linguistic and political grounds. Are we justified in using such sloppy terminology? Shouldn't linguists like me know better? Let's look the problems of nomenclature, starting with the eastern side of the Atlantic.

An examination of some specimens of notional and proximity concord in recent academic writing

Most disciplines seem to have their “K factors”, though linguistics has so far been an exception. Now a language-related K factor has surfaced, kindled by Italian text messages and the influence of English.

Comment: Euro-evolution?, Tom McArthur; Usage 1: Klamp Santouits – buttered or battered?, Michael Bulley; Usage 2: Following Langscape..., Grahame T. Bilbow and Li Lan; Usage 3: Its time for a sound change, Mary Blockley; Review: The dictionary and the disk, Paul Pauwels; Post

Translation techniques favoured by Tolkien in rendering Beowulf and other medieval poetry into modern English. J. R. R. Tolkien was a prolific translator, although most of his translation work was not actually published during his lifetime, as occurred with the greater part of his fiction. He never did any serious translation from modern foreign languages into English, but rather devoted himself to the task of turning Old English and Middle English poetry into something that could be readily understood by speakers of the modern idiom. His largest and best-known published translation is of the anonymous 14th Century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which was published posthumously with two other translations from Middle English in the volume Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl and Sir Orfeo (Allen & Unwin 1975). The translation of Middle English texts constitutes the bulk of his output in this field, both in the above volume and in the fragments that appear in his lectures and essays. However, his heart really lay in the older, pre-Norman form of the language, and particularly in the greatest piece of literature to come down to us from the Old English period, the epic poem Beowulf.

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

TOVE SKUTNABB-KANGAS replies to Anthea Fraser Gupta (‘Language rights’, ET50: Apr 97) regarding issues of linguistic diversity

In nineteenth-century England, Dickens wrote about the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future, imagery that can be applied to South Africa today

LI LAN considers the current state of on-line lexicography