Tom McArthur (1938–2020)

Tom McArthur's contribution to the field was simply enormous, with major and lasting contributions to English linguistics, lexicology, Scottish language studies, and applied language linguistics. Personally, I was an unabashed fan of Tom's work from the early days of English Today onwards, and I still have a number of the magazine-format issues of ET from the early years of the journal on my bookshelves. During the 1980s, I was teaching a number of courses at The University of Hong Kong on the topic of ‘varieties of English’, and many of the articles from ET were popular reading with students coming to grips with such then-innovative notions as ‘language variation’ and ‘world Englishes’. In the following decade, the publication of Tom's monumental Oxford companion to English language was a landmark in world Englishes scholarship, not least as it brought together academic contributors from across the world, including many of the leading authorities on the ‘new Englishes’ of the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. Many of its entries dealt not only with English, but many other languages in addition, including the classical languages of Greek and Latin, as well as the Celtic languages of Ireland and the United Kingdom. I first had the opportunity to meet Tom in the late 1990s in Hong Kong, when at first hand I could see his enthusiasm for English linguistics and English Today journal. Tom's scholarship on English was far from triumphalist, however, and in conversation he often voiced a deeply held concern about the impact of English other languages, including Scots Gaelic and the other languages of Scotland. Tom was very encouraging concerning my own academic work, and I remain to this day very grateful for the advice and help Tom gave me at that time.

David Graddol (1953–2019)

I first had the pleasure of meeting David when I was completing a Master's dissertation in Applied Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh in 1979. At the time, David was already an established lecturer at UK's Open University, and I remember taking the train down from Edinburgh to visit David in Milton Keynes, where he was very generous in discussing his work and providing advice and guidance concerning my own research. After that, it took a couple of decades before David and I met again, but I followed his work at the Open University with great interest, and was continually impressed by the quality of David's work, including the superbly designed Routledge volumes that accompanied the (1996) OU course U210 The English Language: Past, Present and Future. Arguably, David's most influential work was the (1997) The Future of English?, which was a work of immense originality, and one that set the agenda for a good deal of spin-off research and theorizing in the decades that followed. The book contained discussions of such topics as ‘cultural flows’, ‘global inequalities’, ‘global trends’, ‘globalization’, and ‘language hierarchies’ that were completely new and fresh at the time, and in many ways (one might speculate) inspired a great deal of the critical linguistics and mobile sociolinguistics currently fashionable today. This work was later followed by a number of similar studies, including English Next (2006), and English Next India (2010). David and I next met in the mid-2000s, when he came to Sweden to deliver a number lectures at Stockholm University. David was an accomplished public speaker and could captivate a large audience of academics as well as other folk with a style of oratory that appealed to a lay audience as much as experts in the field. In 2012, David was awarded a PhD from Stockholm University for a compilation thesis entitled The Impact of Macro Socioeconomic Trends on the Future of the English Language, which provided further academic recognition of his important contribution to the field.

Tom McArthur and David Graddol shared at least two important characteristics. First they were both independent scholars for much of their lives, eschewing full-time academic posts to pursue non-traditional careers as researchers and scholars. Second, in a similar vein, they were both one-off originals, who made truly innovative contributions to the field. Their distinctive intellectual voices, as well as their enthusiasm and generosity of spirit, are greatly missed by their friends and colleagues.

David Graddol