At the end of the 16th century, there was little reason to guess that English would emerge four centuries later as the most widely dispersed language in the world.

What separates the two major varieties of the language, apart from a great deal of water? An American domiciled in Britain looks at both the obvious and the not-quite-so-obvious in what unites and divides them.

In the reign of Queen Elizabeth – the first, that is, from 1558 to 1603 – the number of English speakers in the world is thought to have been between 5 and 7 million. At the beginning of the reign of the second Queen Elizabeth in 1952, the figure had increased almost fiftyfold. In 1962, Randolph Quirk estimated in The Use of English that 250 millions had English as a mother tongue, with a further 100 million using it as a second or foreign language.

Many people ask this question – out of curiosity, fascination or rage against change. Can we hope to know the answer? Two specialists in the language as it is used today – one in Britain, one in the United States, risk some comments and prognoses.

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?

What are the processes of change at work on British English? A veteran in the business of words takes a look at what the 20th century has been doing to the language of Dickens and Disraeli.

The first 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 alphabetical order.

Supermicros, video nasties, robotics, geostationary satellites, kilobytes and megatrends…Modern technology is a turmoil of ideas generated by, and generating, new techniques, new equipment and – inevitably – new language