ABSTRACT
This motto is the headline in the introduction to an account of New Zealand English (Gordon and Deverson 1998). It is difficult not to agree with this claim in a global sense; hundreds of millions of people use English every day nearly everywhere in the world; it is, for example, the main language of air-traffic control, international business and academic conferences, technology, diplomacy and sport. ‘A massive increase in the number of people learning English has already begun, and it is likely to reach a peak of around 2 billion in the next 10-15 years’ (Graddol 2006:14).
