With this issue, Asian Englishes commemorates its 20th year in publication. I want to express my gratitude to Professors Nobuyuki Honna and Yuko Takeshita for the founding and stewardship of the journal in its first 15 years, as well as to our fine staff of editors and advisors, and the commitment of publishers ALC and now Taylor & Francis, who have all helped the journal continue to thrive and grow.
To celebrate this anniversary, we have invited papers from renowned scholars in 11 different nations in Asia, which will be spread over this and the following issue, vol. 20, number 2. In the present collection, we have papers by David C.S. Li on Hong Kong (a contributor to our very first volume in 1998), Fan (Gabriel) Fang on the increasingly important context of China, Nobuyuki Hino on Japan, Ee Ling Low and Anne Pakir on Singapore, and Jean Mulder and Cara Penry Williamson on Australia. This will be followed in the July issue with papers by Kyunsook Paik on Korea, Isabel P. Martin on the Philippines, Sarah Hopkyns, Wafa Zohgbor and Peter Hassall on the United Arab Emirates, Stefanie Pillai on Malaysia, and Ngoc Doan, Toan Pham, Min Pham and Kham Tran on Vietnam.
All of the papers focus on the past and current status of English in particular locales, in some cases looking at the language in a certain domains such as literature, and implications for the future use of English. We hope these papers will give our readers a clear sense of the current sociolinguistic status and role(s) of English across Asia, and provide food for thought for future research directions.
We also present herein two papers from our normal submissions, which are growing in number and quality. One is a stimulating discussion of a self-help English language learning comic book in Japan, by Misako Tajima, and the other presents the current state of English in Iran, by Nourollah Zarrinabadi. We will also include several regular submissions in the second issue for 2018, and the final issue for the year, vol. 20, number 3, will return to ‘business as usual’.
Asia is a broad and diverse part of the world, and even covering 11 different settings, there are countries such as India, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Indonesia, Brunei and Myanmar that we have not touched on, but are sure to appear in upcoming volumes. We look forward to your submissions on these and other contexts.
Editor in Chief, Asian Englishes
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3030-2304