Who speaks Standard English? Do all the people on our cover use it, only some of them, or only one of them? Are these even reasonable questions to ask in 1985? What is the standard language and what are language standards anyway, towards the end of the 20th century?

Many youngsters grow up across the United States using ‘Nonstandard English’. How can the educational system help them and their families come to terms with the standard language without doing social damage in the name of educational necessity?

Teaching English as a foreign or second language is big business these days. The British Broadcasting Corporation is in the forefront, teaching English to millions throughout the world. Its English by Radio and Television Department is almost literally ‘the world's largest English-teaching classroom’. How has this come about, and what do its courses look and sound like?

The second part of a four part gazetteer of the basic geopolitical vocabulary of the English language, dealing with the facts, fancies, fallacies, ambiguities and subtle implications in such words. For convenience of presentation the material is not in strict aphabetical order.

Kaleidoscope is a showcase for special varieties of English. Each issue of ET displays one or more samples, along with notes and illustrations to clarify certain words and usages or to add more information about them. Usually, we cover one ethnic or cultural variety, where English is in contact with an entirely different language, and one social, occupational or technical variety, where the special usages relate to a particular interest group. In this issue, the cultural variety is Standard English used for the discussion of cattle-breeding in Africa, and the technical variety is the language of video games.

Research into social roles and conversational gambits is steadily building up a picture of how people behave while talking. Interruptions, pauses, shifts in topic all reflect cultural and social attitudes and can express patterns of dominance, while the picture also includes such linguistic novelties as ‘diffident declaratives’ and ‘genderlects’.

Lee W Huebner, Publisher of the International Herald Tribune, answers some questions about his Paris-based newspaper's aims, history, organization, distribution and style, as well as its claim to be ‘the global newspaper’ for a select cosmopolitan clientele.

What do we understand nowadays by the phrase ‘American literature’? What factors have shaped it and made it distinctive and autonomous, and what relation does it now bear to the traditional conception of ‘English literature’?

Dr Johnson said it all: ‘Dictionaries are like watches; the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite right.’ What was true in the middle of the 18th century is still true, but where in the good doctor's spectrum does the new and weighty 1,876-page Longman tome lie – nearer the better-than-none or close to the never-quite-good-enough?