Nothing in the world is absolute. Everything is relative, cultural difference being no exception. Culture, as the total pattern of human behavior and its products, oversteps geographical limits and historical conditions in many ways, and it is characterized by its strong penetrativeness and fusibility. The advancement of the globalized economy and the rapidity and ease of modern communication, transportation and mass media have resulted in an ever-increasing exchange between cultures, unprecedented in scale, scope and speed. Consequently, an increase in universality and reduction in difference between cultures is an inevitable trend. It is no surprise to see phenomena characteristic of one culture existing considerably in another. As a result, some people even fear that the world will become a dull place when all the different nationalities behave exactly alike. The exploration of cultural difference conducted under the condition of tremendous exchange between cultures might be misled into the pitfall of generalization or absolutization. Nevertheless, the “cultural sediment” formed through long-range accumulation is not to be easily removed and the cultural tradition handed down from generation to generation shows great consistency and continuity.

A review of foreign-language teaching in relation to the predominance of English in Europe and in the world at large.

The theme of a conference of the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages (part of the Modern Language Association) in 2000 was the future of language teaching and learning. My discussion here is based upon remarks made in Phoenix.

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

With the popularisation of the Internet, the use of e-mails and computer-based chats (CBCs) has increased dramatically among university students. An interesting feature of such communication, however, is that a written medium is treated like speech (cf. Maynor, 1994). Conversations turn into notes where grammatical accuracy and conventional formalities take a backseat to instant communication. In the case of on-campus CBCs, informality and a certain disregard of the conventions of standard English are all the more manifest.

It is commonly believed in Hong Kong that this general freedom to write ‘bad English’ has encouraged the habit of randomly incorporating Cantonese words into English e-mails. Yet an examination of students' e-mails and icq (‘I Seek You’) communications reveals that far from ‘polluting’ their English by substituting Cantonese words haphazardly for English ones, or by applying Cantonese structures to their English writing, students tend to incorporate certain kinds of Cantonese words systematically into their texts for specific identifiable purposes.

What can – or should – writers, editors, and usage critics do about actual and perceived errors in print? A reply by Tom McArthur to Bryan A. Garner's article ‘A Texas Fowler?’ in ET64 (Oct 00) that seeks to widen the issues.

Tom McArthur reflects on the long and fruitful life of Frederic Gomes Cassidy, who died on 14 June 2000, aged 93.

A response to the articles on e-mail by Li Lan and Li Yongyan in ET64 (Oct 00). This article discusses what has been happening to e-mail English and what might yet happen as a consequence to off-line English. The paper first examines the effect on the use of English in the electronic medium. It then talks about the influence of e-mail English on the off-line use of English, and closes with a description of the interface between English and Chinese in e-mails.

Li Yongyan focuses on the discursive aspect of e-mail messages in her article. She mainly talks about styles and coherence in e-mail writing. In contrast, Li Lan primarily describes the linguistic aspect of e-mail English. Her article discusses both the conversational style of, and innovations and distinctive usages in, e-mail English. Both also describe English-Chinese code-mixing in their articles, as well as the emergence of novel linguistic features in e-mail English, such as the omission of the sentence subject.

A discussion of the nature and productivity in Internet vocabulary of the prefix e- as in e-mail. I decided to pursue my own analysis of the prefix e- and some observations on the productivity of e-, the variety and nature of the vocabulary taking this prefix, the frequency and distribution of e- prefixed words in texts, the exploitation of words already beginning with e or other prefixes for punning or other creative effects, and, to a lesser extent, the appearance of other Internet-related one-letter prefixes (primarily i-, but others as well).

Pam Peters of Macquarie University, New South Wales, Australia, provides the second part of a two-part concluding review of a project which is an important contribution to the creation of her prospective international English style guide (to be published by Cambridge University Press).

A reply to Tom McArthur, ‘Error, Editing, and World Standard English’, ET65 (Jan 01)

When modern linguists focus exclusively on speech, they're overreacting to their predecessors' preoccupation with writing. Descriptivists have a bias toward studying speech; prescriptivists have a bias toward studying writing. Both are important. Speaking precedes writing. It's the essence of language. Yet writing is a form of language worth studying in its own right. For some reason, though, many linguists refuse to recognize this.

The rapid spread of Information Technology (IT) in recent years and the role it plays in many aspects of our lives has not left language use untouched. A manifestation of this role is the degree of linguistic creativity that has accompanied technological innovation. In English, this creativity is seen in the semantic relabeling of established terms such as web, bug, virus, firewall, etc. Another strategy favored by IT lexifiers is the use of lexical items clustered in heavy premodifying groups, as in random access memory, disk operating system, central processing unit, and countless others (White, 1999). In brief, IT technology – and in particular, the World Wide Web – has made it possible for users to break free of many linguistic codes and conventions (Lemke, 1999).

For the linguist, the happy outcome of the spread of IT is that it has created an opportunity to analyze the simultaneous development of technology and the language that encodes it and the influence of one on the other (Stubbs, 1997). To linguists of a broadly functional disposition, this is a chance to confirm the observation that scientific language differs substantially from everyday language. More importantly, it is also a chance to verify the claim made chiefly by Halliday & Martin (1993) that this difference in the characteristics of each of these discourses stems from a radical difference between scientific and common sense construals of the world around us.

A description of ‘the mantle of communication ... extended around the planet’

The new perceptions afforded by the era of telecommunications may be compared to those of the Renaissance or the Enlightenment. That the world is a globe, or that blood circulates around the body, became obvious only a few centuries ago...as it now becomes apparent that all spoken and written languages form an organic continuum, a global medium for human communication and the circulation of ideas.

The continuity of communication between communities in contact has always been maintained by those who speak more than one language, by those whose brains have attempted to bridge the differences of viewpoint and expression embodied in the use of differing languages by different communities. It is only in modern times, however, that networks of bilingual links among thousands of speech communities around the world can be seen in global perspective. The ancient continuum of multilingual speech is becoming a system of immediate worldwide communication.

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.

A personal account of ‘additive multilingualism’ that involves Polish, Russian, English, French and Chinese.

This article reports on work on English in Scandinavian countries that is currently available in Danish, and in particular presents and analyses a recent book. This contains six papers given at a conference in Copenhagen in March 1998 on the influence of English on Danish, along with a newspaper article that had raised several of the language policy issues somewhat earlier. The book also contains the text of a policy document written for the Swedish government by the Swedish Language Council, ‘Proposal for a plan of action to promote the Swedish language’.

An analysis of naming patterns among ethnic-Chinese Singaporeans.

The study of names (or, to give it its Sunday name, onomastics) has not always been accorded high academic prestige and is often thought of as a non-specialist's hobby horse. The fact that most books on naming in bookshops seem to address only prospective parents who need to name their child also does not give the study a high standing. In the university context, this is not something that receives a lot of attention, except within semantics and philosophy where the status of names (as opposed to other words) has been discussed; and within the history of English where place names are studied in relation to their etymology. In this journal, though, attention has been given to commercial names (Banu & Sussex (2001), McArthur (2000)) because of interesting instances of hybridisation involving English and other languages.

The vowel phonemes of English conventionally subdivide into ‘pure’ vowels and diphthongs, and diphthongs are a well recognised component of the system. Triphthongs are a different story. The very word ‘triphthong’ sounds faintly preposterous, as if somebody has dared a coinage with ‘diphthong’ and wants to have some further fun. Without wishing to prejudge the question of the actual existence of triphthongs, I shall use the word to refer to a sequence of three vocalic elements that may be interpreted as a single unit and, as a phoneme, has a contrastive function.

An account from Jordan of an ‘elitist’ phenomenon that is spreading elsewhere in Asia.

This study explores the reasons and conditions which have recently led a substantial number of families to hire private tutors of English for their sons and/or daughters studying science and technology through English in Jordanian state universities.