Editorial: globalization—language and dialects

This issue has two excellent papers. The first, Testing and verification in service-oriented architecture: A survey, by Bozkurt, Harman and Hassoun, is another detailed survey from the Centre for Research in Evolution, Search and Testing at University College London. The authors do a wonderful job summarizing testing research on service-oriented architecture, covering no less than 262 papers. (Recommended by Atif Memon.) The second, Parallel mutation testing, by Mateo and Usaola, presents new ideas that dramatically increase the speed at which we can perform mutation analysis. The paper presents a new tool, Bacterio, and results from three studies on five algorithms to execute mutants in parallel. (Recommended by Byoungju Choi.) Note that because of previous papers co-authored with the authors of these papers, Co-EiC Rob Hierons was not involved with the handling of the survey paper, and Offutt was not involved with the mutation paper. I wrote about The Globalization of Software Engineering in my last editorial [1]. One of the most obvious aspects of this trend, of course, is language. For software engineers to interact on a global scale, we must be able to communicate. And currently, the primary international language is English. Why English? In his very long history of civil wars among English-speaking people, Philips [2] put forth a compelling argument for how English became our 21st century international language. In brief, British/American colonists beat French hunters and trappers in the 1750s (called the French/Indian war in the USA and the Seven Years war in Europe), English speakers went on to settle the North American continent in the 1800s, the Allies won World War I and the USA finished World War II with less damage than the other combatants. International air flight then became the first global business where everybody (primarily pilots and air traffic controllers) had to be able to communicate in real time, without translators. then, English-language television and movies spread throughout the world, and finally, the World Wide Web gave everybody the ability to talk with everybody else ... if we could share a language. That’s an interesting theory, but what really counts is that at this point in history, we use English for global scientific communication. Although the hundreds of exceptions and odd quirks (articles, nouns and pronouns with gender, ‘their / there / they’re’, ‘though / through / tough’) often make us grumble ‘why English?’, my linguistic friends tell me English has certain advantages. It has a huge vocabulary, which allows us to be very precise and exact. It is also structured to discourage ambiguity and is not well suited to metaphors. Although this makes poetry hard, English works well for law and science. What does this have to do with the globalization of software engineering? We are building a global community of scholars and practitioners. Most people who join this community have advanced education (at least college degrees and often PhDs), thus most join the community with at least moderate fluency in English. But if our papers have too many language problems, readers either do not understand or find the papers too painful to read. Additionally, speaking is different from writing, and scientists with limited speaking abilities have trouble interacting at conferences. Of course, the tail also wags the dog. As English has gone global, it has changed. British use many words that are rare or unknown in North America. And it’s very common to mix English with other languages; we’ve all heard of ‘Hinglish’, ‘Spanglish’ and ‘Chinglish’. Linguists also hypothesize the emergence of new dialects of English. The most widely known dialects are probably ‘standard British English’ (such as on BBC) and ‘standard American English’ (such as on CNN). Indian English is another, or possibly several others. I grew up speaking Appalachian English (‘How you’ns doin’?’ ‘We hain’t bad.’) [3]. Newly emerging dialects may include Northern European English (often English words with Germanic sentence constructs) and