English has been taking its journey in Thailand for at least two centuries. Certainly, in different periods of time, it has played different roles, served different functions and has been used by different groups of people in Thai society. Its long existence in the country has had some influence on the use and attitudes of Thais. In addition, the current status of English as a dominant international language worldwide has a great impact on English usage in Thailand today. This paper describes the past events and the present situation, and closes with a discussion of the future of English in the country.

As the primary foreign language opted for more than half a century in both South and North Korea, the English language has served various purposes in the two Koreas. While English mainly has been the means to idolization of their leaders and communist ideology in North Korea, the language has functioned as a vehicle of globalization in South Korea. This article describes the past, present and future of English in the Korean peninsula, introducing a brief history of the language along with its use, language policies and educational practices as well as some issues and controversies over the English language.

Conversation analysis is considered a rare inquiry in Indonesia, specifically in medical talk. A conversation between doctors and patients in Indonesia usually involves not only two people, but three or more parties. This means the doctor and the patient are not the only participants in the conversation. Therefore, the conversational organization may be different from the usual doctor–patient talk which only involves two people. This study aims to explain the conversational organization of doctor–patient talk in establishing diagnosis using conversational analysis approach. A total of 10 chosen recordings of doctor–patient interaction have been analyzed to elaborate the conversational organization and to explain the four aspects of conversational organization: opening– closing, turn-taking, pauses, and overlaps. The result of conversational organization determines the establishing diagnosis during the whole conversation. While the investigated data are in the Indonesian language, the organizational patterns would have implications for other interactions as well.

This paper is an update of Luke and Richards and Li on the functions and status of English in postcolonial Hong Kong. Two decades after the handover, relatively little has changed except in the education domain. The ‘mother tongue education’ policy implemented from September 1998, whereby primary school-leavers are streamed into Chinese-medium and English-medium secondary schools, was ‘fine-tuned’ in 2009. Chinese-medium schools are given the flexibility to introduce English-medium classes to students under specific conditions. Hong Kong English is one of Edgar Schneider's 17 case studies of the evolutionary dynamics of postcolonial Englishes. The paper reviews a critique of that Dynamic Model based on Stephen Evans’s extensive diachronic evidence of HKE spanning from the 1850s to the 2010s. While ascertaining the heuristic value of Schneider’s analytical framework, Evans’s well-triangulated studies point toward the need for alternative periodization of HKE along the five uni-directional phases of evolutionary development of postcolonial Englishes. Evans’s analysis of Butler’s five criteria for determining the emergence of a localized variety of English will also be discussed.

This paper explores Australian English (AuE), utilising a folk linguistic approach and engaging with its use in novel-writing. It is argued that discussions by contemporary Australian authors about their approaches to writing and voicing characters, and the actual voices authors give to their characters can be used as data to gain new understandings of what language forms have social meanings within AuE. The value of this analytical approach is then illustrated with interview and text extracts from one Australian author, revealing that this type of analysis provides insights into both the folk linguistic understandings of an author and how language variation is employed within the fiction series to index local types. It is concluded that such an approach can be generalised to better understand variation in AuE as accessed by other language-focussed professions and their differing conceptualisations of language, as well as to further understand variation in other varieties of English, and in other languages.

The ASEAN Plus Three Forum is a regional forum that facilitates political, economic and educational cooperation between the 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) that are...

ABSTRACTNative speakers of English naturally differentiate tense–lax vowels (e.g. /i:/ in FEAST vs. /ɪ/ in FIST) in their speech. Can the speakers of Bangla, Hindi and Japanese as a first language (L1) learning and using English as a second language (L2) maintain such contrastive vowel qualities? Hence, this study investigates L1 Bangla speakers’ pronunciation of English tense–lax vowels. Data collected from recordings of a reading passage and a set of sentences by 19 speakers are analysed using Pratt, focusing on the contrast between traditionally paired English monophthongs /i:/ vs. /ɪ/, /u:/ vs. /ʊ/, /ͻ:/ vs. /ɒ/ and /ɑ:/ vs. /ʌ/ in terms of their length and high–low/front–back articulatory qualities. The findings suggest that the participants seem not to distinguish between these paired monophthongs in terms of their high–low/front–back qualities; although they mostly demonstrate maintaining their long–short features. Besides, these paired vowels appear to contrast to some extent on gender variation.

Chinglish may mean different things to different people, but it has often been associated negatively with broken English that arises out of inappropriate direct translations from Chinese into English. In recent years, however, certain Chinglish expressions have developed a range of different functions, particularly in technology-mediated interactions among users of Chinese English, and this innovative usage is referred to as ‘new’ Chinglish. There have also been new Chinglish expressions arising from the changing social, economic and political discourse of China and the Chinese diaspora. The use of ‘new’ Chinglish expressions shows certain degrees of ‘playfulness’ as a common feature, and requires sophisticated linguistic skills in discursive contexts. In this article, we adopt a World Englishes perspective and unpack ‘new’ Chinglish, comparing it with a number of other named colloquial varieties, particularly Singlish, Taglish, Manglish and Japlish, and we argue that certain usages of Chinglish may serve a positive function, so they are worth researching and analysing.

This is a qualitative study of the relationship between consonant modification and pronunciation intelligibility in English as a Lingua Franca interactions in Japan. Some research has claimed that the full articulation of many consonants is critical to the maintenance of mutual intelligibility in English as a Lingua Franca interactions. Utilizing conversation analytic methodology to examine a corpus of segmental repair sequences among English speakers using English as a Lingua Franca at a Japanese university, this study claims that English speakers identify which words are unintelligible, and then modify the distinctive features of problematic consonants into more intelligible variants in order to successfully achieve mutual understanding. This study concludes that intelligible pronunciation is an interactional phenomenon that is dependent more on adjusting pronunciation during interaction and less on approximating the phonological standards of any one variety of English.