Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1017/S0266078423000093
Christiane Meierkord
At the time of writing, spring has arrived in the countries of the Northern hemisphere. As every year, it brings nature back to life with lawns turning green, spring flowers raising their heads and the first trees being in full bloom. A country that has cherished the latter more than any other is Japan, where viewing the cherry trees blossom has been turned into a national festival. The delicate pinkish petals fall to earth like snow, and finding the perfect day and spot to celebrate this sight, often with a party, is a tradition originally established by the Japanese emperors in the 9 century (McClellan, 2005). Today, this is supported by websites featuring cherry blossom flowering forecast maps that predict how the bloom will spread throughout the country (for example, Japan Meteorological Corporation, 2023). Of course, Japanese has a word to describe this pastime. Hanami does not only have a pleasant sound – its characters, the kanji, represent this activity beautifully, too: the word is a combination of two characters, one for ‘flower’ (hana花), composed out of strokes for ‘grass’ and ‘change’, and a second from ‘to watch’ (miru見る), which combines ‘eye’ and ‘legs’. Japanese also has words related to hanami that are English, or at least somewhat English. Burūshīto (‘to blue sheet’) refers to the act of reserving a spot on one of the many popular lawns where the Japanese gather in crowds to watch the blossoms by placing a blue sheet early in the day until the group arrives after work. In fact, Japanese has many such pseudo-anglicisms, called wasei-eigo ‘Japan-made English’ in Japanese, that draw on originally English word stock but are difficult, if not impossible, to understand if one relies on English only for their interpretation. Their creation really took off after WW2 (Miller, 1997, Irwin, 2011) and the process is highly productive today. Further examples include wanpīsu (‘one piece’, referring to a woman’s dress), naitā (‘nighter’, a night baseball game) or the better known sararīman (‘salary man’, an office worker). While studies looking into English spoken by multilingual individuals and in multilingual speech communities all around the world have long come to appreciate such creative language use as one form of identity construction, it has also been referred to with somewhat derogatorily connotated expressions, such as Chinglish (for uses of English by speakers of Chinese), Denglish (with speakers of German), Taglish (with speakers of Tagalog). In Uganda, this has even led to the rather unfortunate label Uglish. For the Japanese, however, it appears that just as much as watching nature change they cherish changing English word stock into creative neologisms. At the end of 2022, it was one of these wasei-eigo that dictionary publisher Sanseidō chose as their word of the year. Taipa is a compound made out of two clippings, both of which are also adapted to the Japanese syllabary katakana: tai from time and pa from performance. It descri
{"title":"Editorial","authors":"Christiane Meierkord","doi":"10.1017/S0266078423000093","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266078423000093","url":null,"abstract":"At the time of writing, spring has arrived in the countries of the Northern hemisphere. As every year, it brings nature back to life with lawns turning green, spring flowers raising their heads and the first trees being in full bloom. A country that has cherished the latter more than any other is Japan, where viewing the cherry trees blossom has been turned into a national festival. The delicate pinkish petals fall to earth like snow, and finding the perfect day and spot to celebrate this sight, often with a party, is a tradition originally established by the Japanese emperors in the 9 century (McClellan, 2005). Today, this is supported by websites featuring cherry blossom flowering forecast maps that predict how the bloom will spread throughout the country (for example, Japan Meteorological Corporation, 2023). Of course, Japanese has a word to describe this pastime. Hanami does not only have a pleasant sound – its characters, the kanji, represent this activity beautifully, too: the word is a combination of two characters, one for ‘flower’ (hana花), composed out of strokes for ‘grass’ and ‘change’, and a second from ‘to watch’ (miru見る), which combines ‘eye’ and ‘legs’. Japanese also has words related to hanami that are English, or at least somewhat English. Burūshīto (‘to blue sheet’) refers to the act of reserving a spot on one of the many popular lawns where the Japanese gather in crowds to watch the blossoms by placing a blue sheet early in the day until the group arrives after work. In fact, Japanese has many such pseudo-anglicisms, called wasei-eigo ‘Japan-made English’ in Japanese, that draw on originally English word stock but are difficult, if not impossible, to understand if one relies on English only for their interpretation. Their creation really took off after WW2 (Miller, 1997, Irwin, 2011) and the process is highly productive today. Further examples include wanpīsu (‘one piece’, referring to a woman’s dress), naitā (‘nighter’, a night baseball game) or the better known sararīman (‘salary man’, an office worker). While studies looking into English spoken by multilingual individuals and in multilingual speech communities all around the world have long come to appreciate such creative language use as one form of identity construction, it has also been referred to with somewhat derogatorily connotated expressions, such as Chinglish (for uses of English by speakers of Chinese), Denglish (with speakers of German), Taglish (with speakers of Tagalog). In Uganda, this has even led to the rather unfortunate label Uglish. For the Japanese, however, it appears that just as much as watching nature change they cherish changing English word stock into creative neologisms. At the end of 2022, it was one of these wasei-eigo that dictionary publisher Sanseidō chose as their word of the year. Taipa is a compound made out of two clippings, both of which are also adapted to the Japanese syllabary katakana: tai from time and pa from performance. It descri","PeriodicalId":51710,"journal":{"name":"English Today","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46017755","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-23DOI: 10.1017/s0266078423000081
Olha Bohuslavska, Elena Ciprianová
Over the last few decades English has become an integral part of urban signage while taking different forms and performing a variety of functions. Numerous studies of linguistic landscapes, such as Gorter (2006), Huebner (2006), Cenoz and Gorter (2009), Lanza and Woldemariam (2009), Bolton (2012), and Tupas and Rubdy (2015) have demonstrated that the investigation of linguistic landscapes in multilingual settings can increase our understanding of the close relationship between English and globalization. Slovakia being no exception, the widespread use of English is observed on a large amount of public and private signs in the country's urban environment. Since Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, frequently becomes a meeting point for diverse languages and cultures, this study focuses on the phenomenon of glocalization and investigates the ways in which the English utilized in the signage mirrors the interaction between the global and the local. The results based on the corpus of 464 signs collected in the city centre indicate not only the substantial extent to which English penetrates the Slovak urban space but also shed some new light on how English, mainly through carrying its symbolic value, contributes to the construction of social reality and participates in the processes of glocalization.
{"title":"English in the Slovak glocalized urban space","authors":"Olha Bohuslavska, Elena Ciprianová","doi":"10.1017/s0266078423000081","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0266078423000081","url":null,"abstract":"Over the last few decades English has become an integral part of urban signage while taking different forms and performing a variety of functions. Numerous studies of linguistic landscapes, such as Gorter (2006), Huebner (2006), Cenoz and Gorter (2009), Lanza and Woldemariam (2009), Bolton (2012), and Tupas and Rubdy (2015) have demonstrated that the investigation of linguistic landscapes in multilingual settings can increase our understanding of the close relationship between English and globalization. Slovakia being no exception, the widespread use of English is observed on a large amount of public and private signs in the country's urban environment. Since Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, frequently becomes a meeting point for diverse languages and cultures, this study focuses on the phenomenon of glocalization and investigates the ways in which the English utilized in the signage mirrors the interaction between the global and the local. The results based on the corpus of 464 signs collected in the city centre indicate not only the substantial extent to which English penetrates the Slovak urban space but also shed some new light on how English, mainly through carrying its symbolic value, contributes to the construction of social reality and participates in the processes of glocalization.","PeriodicalId":51710,"journal":{"name":"English Today","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48517019","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-14DOI: 10.1017/s0266078423000020
Y. Wu, Q. Sun
The contemporary expansion of English is becoming remarkably rapid and exceptionally global (Ostler, 2011). In present-day China, English has gained unprecedented popularity, fueled by the nation's current political and social development (Bolton & Graddol, 2012). There is a notable trend of bilingual education using English as a medium of instruction in Chinese schools (Wei, 2013). Therefore, an increasing number of Chinese are enthusiastic about learning and using English in communication. With the active participation of youths, ‘Internet English’ has been used widely in social networking spaces. The practice of ‘English mixing’ in various Chinese homegrown social networking sites has become the most remarkable intranational use of English in today's mainland China (Zhang, 2012). Interestingly, youngsters1 often create novel meanings when using languages on the Internet as ‘teenagers are well-known for introducing innovations into language, and indeed are generally regarded as prime agents of language change’ (Palacios Martínez, 2018: 363). Many linguistic studies have dealt with the mechanisms of the evolution of word meanings in past decades (Kachru, 1983; Qin & Guo, 2020; Tan, 2009; Yang, 2005). Much evidence indicates that meanings and usages of words are variable and composite, and may turn out differently depending on how words are used in contexts.
{"title":"‘I am very emo’","authors":"Y. Wu, Q. Sun","doi":"10.1017/s0266078423000020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0266078423000020","url":null,"abstract":"The contemporary expansion of English is becoming remarkably rapid and exceptionally global (Ostler, 2011). In present-day China, English has gained unprecedented popularity, fueled by the nation's current political and social development (Bolton & Graddol, 2012). There is a notable trend of bilingual education using English as a medium of instruction in Chinese schools (Wei, 2013). Therefore, an increasing number of Chinese are enthusiastic about learning and using English in communication. With the active participation of youths, ‘Internet English’ has been used widely in social networking spaces. The practice of ‘English mixing’ in various Chinese homegrown social networking sites has become the most remarkable intranational use of English in today's mainland China (Zhang, 2012). Interestingly, youngsters1 often create novel meanings when using languages on the Internet as ‘teenagers are well-known for introducing innovations into language, and indeed are generally regarded as prime agents of language change’ (Palacios Martínez, 2018: 363). Many linguistic studies have dealt with the mechanisms of the evolution of word meanings in past decades (Kachru, 1983; Qin & Guo, 2020; Tan, 2009; Yang, 2005). Much evidence indicates that meanings and usages of words are variable and composite, and may turn out differently depending on how words are used in contexts.","PeriodicalId":51710,"journal":{"name":"English Today","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45359537","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-13DOI: 10.1017/s0266078423000032
Wen Li, Ang Chen
{"title":"A Critical Analysis of Language Attitudes and Ideologies - Elizabeth Peterson, Making Sense of ‘Bad English’: An Introduction to Language Attitudes and Ideologies London and New York: Routledge, 2020. Pp. xix+161. Paperback £34.99, ISBN 978-1-138-23747-6","authors":"Wen Li, Ang Chen","doi":"10.1017/s0266078423000032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0266078423000032","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51710,"journal":{"name":"English Today","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47601822","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-09DOI: 10.1017/S0266078423000044
Ying‐Ying Tan
When it comes to Englishes in Singapore, two terms come to the fore: Singapore English, and Singlish. As part of the methodology and motivation for this paper, I compiled 500 published works on Englishes in Singapore ranging from the 1970s to 2021. These published works include monographs, edited volumes, chapters in edited volumes, and articles in major peer-reviewed journals. 85% of the 500 publications used the term Singapore English, 27% of them had Singlish, and only a mere six publications (around 1%) used the term Singaporean English. One would expect that for a term that speaks of and to the being of the nation, the term Singaporean English would certainly be used with far more frequency. This is especially so when there is in fact nothing morphologically awkward in attaching the suffix -ean to ‘Singapore’. There are immensely more examples of Englishes around the world that have the suffix (or its near equivalent) than those without (American, Tanzanian, South African Englishes are just some of numerous examples); and the two well known Englishes that remain suffix-free are New Zealand English and Hong Kong English, which we can explain by way of a morphological misfit: the -er suffix does sound rather awkward. Since Singapore does not have this problem, why then does Singapore English resist the suffix -ean?
{"title":"The curious case of nomenclatures","authors":"Ying‐Ying Tan","doi":"10.1017/S0266078423000044","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266078423000044","url":null,"abstract":"When it comes to Englishes in Singapore, two terms come to the fore: Singapore English, and Singlish. As part of the methodology and motivation for this paper, I compiled 500 published works on Englishes in Singapore ranging from the 1970s to 2021. These published works include monographs, edited volumes, chapters in edited volumes, and articles in major peer-reviewed journals. 85% of the 500 publications used the term Singapore English, 27% of them had Singlish, and only a mere six publications (around 1%) used the term Singaporean English. One would expect that for a term that speaks of and to the being of the nation, the term Singaporean English would certainly be used with far more frequency. This is especially so when there is in fact nothing morphologically awkward in attaching the suffix -ean to ‘Singapore’. There are immensely more examples of Englishes around the world that have the suffix (or its near equivalent) than those without (American, Tanzanian, South African Englishes are just some of numerous examples); and the two well known Englishes that remain suffix-free are New Zealand English and Hong Kong English, which we can explain by way of a morphological misfit: the -er suffix does sound rather awkward. Since Singapore does not have this problem, why then does Singapore English resist the suffix -ean?","PeriodicalId":51710,"journal":{"name":"English Today","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48324137","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-23DOI: 10.1017/s0266078423000019
Dylan G. Williams
In the past two decades, South Korean universities’ ‘top-down’ implementation of English-medium instruction (EMI) policy has been critiqued for inadequately addressing the linguistic challenges students and instructors face (Kim, 2017). Research suggests that rapid implementation of such policy is primarily motivated by the pursuit of internationalisation, where global ranking takes precedence over the appropriateness of the policy (D. W. Cho, 2012) resulting in issues of injustices (Williams & Stelma, 2022). As a result, of these injustices, taking EMI courses is not a popular choice amongst South Korean higher education students.
{"title":"South Korean higher education English-medium instruction (EMI) policy","authors":"Dylan G. Williams","doi":"10.1017/s0266078423000019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0266078423000019","url":null,"abstract":"In the past two decades, South Korean universities’ ‘top-down’ implementation of English-medium instruction (EMI) policy has been critiqued for inadequately addressing the linguistic challenges students and instructors face (Kim, 2017). Research suggests that rapid implementation of such policy is primarily motivated by the pursuit of internationalisation, where global ranking takes precedence over the appropriateness of the policy (D. W. Cho, 2012) resulting in issues of injustices (Williams & Stelma, 2022). As a result, of these injustices, taking EMI courses is not a popular choice amongst South Korean higher education students.","PeriodicalId":51710,"journal":{"name":"English Today","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47476395","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-20DOI: 10.1017/S0266078422000281
J. Kiaer, Niamh Calway, Hyejeong Ahn
The English language freely borrows words from many languages; this is a process which has been well documented by several studies, particularly in the field of contact linguistics. However, an investigation into the massive influence that the widespread, popular, and global use of the Internet has had on the development of language calls for consistent and frequent empirical enquiry. The rapid growth in the number and diversity of Internet users from various cultural and linguistic backgrounds, and the increasing popularity and influence of Asian cultures and languages on the English language, is currently occurring at an unprecedented level. This study employs several data collection methods to demonstrate the arbitrary transnational journey of a few selected culinary terms that showcase the flexible adaptation and creation processes through which these new additions to the English language have passed. We do this by using two common culinary terms, both of which have been adapted to describe Asian dishes, as an example.
{"title":"Translingual journey of English words and methodological suggestions","authors":"J. Kiaer, Niamh Calway, Hyejeong Ahn","doi":"10.1017/S0266078422000281","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266078422000281","url":null,"abstract":"The English language freely borrows words from many languages; this is a process which has been well documented by several studies, particularly in the field of contact linguistics. However, an investigation into the massive influence that the widespread, popular, and global use of the Internet has had on the development of language calls for consistent and frequent empirical enquiry. The rapid growth in the number and diversity of Internet users from various cultural and linguistic backgrounds, and the increasing popularity and influence of Asian cultures and languages on the English language, is currently occurring at an unprecedented level. This study employs several data collection methods to demonstrate the arbitrary transnational journey of a few selected culinary terms that showcase the flexible adaptation and creation processes through which these new additions to the English language have passed. We do this by using two common culinary terms, both of which have been adapted to describe Asian dishes, as an example.","PeriodicalId":51710,"journal":{"name":"English Today","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49652084","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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