If you visit the homepage of English Today at Cambridge Core (https://multimediafluids.uam.elogim.com/core/journals/english-today), and click on the ‘Most Cited’ and ‘Most Read’ tabs, you'll find that some of the most cited and read articles are about naming the English language, e.g., ‘The many names of English’ by Erling (Reference Erling2005), and ‘English, Chinglish or China English?’ by Eaves (Reference Eaves2011). Erling's (Reference Erling2005) article was a discussion of the variety of labels given to the language in its worldwide role, and Eaves’ (Reference Eaves2011) article was about the legitimacy of a localized variety of English that is unique to China.
At the beginning of Erling's article, the author alluded to an earlier article by McArthur (Reference McArthur2004), which addressed issues surrounding the ‘three key names of English’, back in the early 2000s, namely world English, international English and global English. In that article, McArthur (Reference McArthur2004: 3) pointed out that, although all three names are related to the same vast language or collection of languages, each had a history and perspective of its own, i.e., ‘ . . . world English since the 1920s, international English since the 1930s, both emerging strongly in the 1980s, and global English since the mid-1990s.’
Around two decades ago, McArthur (Reference McArthur2002: 54–56) started looking into the ‘kinds of English emerging in the world at large’ in relation to the ‘occurrence of ‘English’ with innumerable attributives’, involving Euro-English and Nordic English, among many others, and suggested that ‘there seems in principle to be no upper limit to the number of such labels and the realities they represent’. He referred to all these ‘kinds of English’ in the world at large as an ‘English language complex’.
Following up on McArthur's discussions of the labels and names of English, Erling (Reference Erling2005) focused on what she would call ‘perhaps less familiar names for English’ back then, collectively represented in the phrasing of ‘English as . . . ’, e.g., English as an additional language (EAL), English as an international language (EIL), English as a lingua franca (ELF), English as a global language, and English as a world language, in addition to the ‘increasing academic recognition of the once-radical phrase World Englishes’ (Erling, Reference Erling2005: 43). She argued that such proposed names of English ‘place emphasis on functional uses of the language instead of geographical varieties and recognize that English can be used as a language of communication without necessarily being a language of identification.’ (Erling, Reference Erling2005: 40)
Nearly two decades have gone by since McArthur (Reference McArthur2002, Reference McArthur2004) explored various names associated with such an ‘English language complex’. Issues in the current volume of English Today so far this year (i.e., 38.1, 38.2 and 38.3) have explored a wide range of Englishes around the world, from the more general present-day English, to a number of more specific uses of different Englishes around the world. Such uses involve English by Ugandans, Cameroon English, and the menu language in Korean coffee shops. We have also had the opportunity to read articles in English Today about the spread of English in Morocco, EMI language policy in China, English for social mobility in India, as well as English in Azerbaijian, linguistic landscape in South Korea, the Englishisation of personal names in Nigeria, and discourse-pragmatic functions of a specific emotive interjection in Nigerian English.
‘We have never had uniformity and/or neutrality in English, and it would be perverse to expect it to emerge in the rough and tumble of today's eclectic usage’, as rightly pointed out by McArthur (Reference McArthur2004: 15) many years ago. McArthur (Reference McArthur2004: 3) suggested that names such as world or international or global English ‘need to be handled with care’, and Seargeant (Reference Seargeant2010: 99) also suggested from a world Englishes perspective that ‘the act of naming itself can be so theoretically and politically controversial’. So, what's in a name in a world of many-names-of-English? We'd encourage English Today readers to reflect on the underlying issues of the many different names of English around the current real world.
In this issue we are delighted to bring to readers a number of papers that explore the English language from three scholarly traditions. The issue opens with three articles focusing on historically oriented scholarship. Javier Ruano–García explores the contributions of an unpublished glossary to Joseph Wright's foundational English Dialect Dictionary (EDD). Manfred Markus demonstrates the power of the EDD as a research tool in an examination of the word dirt across English historical dialects. Finally, Julia Landmann offers an examination of terms of endearment from the Historical Thesaurus of the OED Online. The next set of three articles all examine different aspects of policy related to the assessment of English in education. Babette Verhoeven discusses the language ideologies that have shaped England's adoption of a new English Language qualification in the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) of the National Curriculum. Quisi Zhang examines China's College English Test (CET) to imagine ways in which the world Englishes perspective can inform the testing of local standards of English. Yuko Goto Butler, Jiyoon Lee and Xiaolin Peng complete this section on English assessment by examining failed policy attempts to require English in college entrance examination in China, Japan and South Korea. Volume 38 closes with a phonetic examination by Nasir A. Syed and Shah Bibi of a possible allophonic split in Pakistan English and the new phoneme that has emerged.
The editors
