Separated by a Common Language

The scene behind the KFC near my Barbadian hotelis rather unlike the scene behind the KFC near my Brighton homeAs I mentioned in the last post, and as I have been wont to mention at any opportunity, I got to go to Barbados recently. It was my first t...

I'm just back from a FABULOUS time at the Dictionary Society of North America conference. Fabulous not just because it was hosted by the University of the West Indies in Barbados (wheeeeee!), but because dictionary people are just the best people. No...

Before our irregularly scheduled blogpost, a couple of announcements:First, I'm on a (BrE) one-off Radio 4 program(me) tomorrow morning (10:30): Americanize! Why the Americanisation of English is a good thing, presented by Susie Dent. It should be av...

If you have any interest in the doctor-patient relationship, I very much recommend Dariusz Galasiński's blog. He writes thought-provokingly about various things that he and I have in common: being immigrant linguist patients or linguist immigrant pa...

We've been having some problems with people starting to (jocular Linguist English) peeve about unrelated topics in the comments section. This has upset some readers (and also me, but I'm hardened by 11 years of blogging). More importantly it is again...

 Please reserve the comments section for topics related to this post. Lately, I've been super-aware of people saying that British English "slavishly" copies American English. Like this: the UK slavishly adopts Americanisms !! (from an...

This is one of those posts where I'm going to let someone else do most of the writing. I got this message from Justin a couple of weeks ago:I’m from Malaysia, where BrE dominates in schools but AmE is prominent in pop culture (so too CanE and AusE...