Drawing on data recorded in two city markets, this article analyzes the language practices of workers and customers as they go about their daily business, with a particular focus on the ways in which linguistic resources, everyday tasks, and social spaces are intertwined in producing metrolingua francas. The aim of the article is to come to a…

Critical directions in applied linguistics can be understood in various ways. The term "critical" as it has been used in "critical applied linguistics," "critical discourse analysis," "critical literacy" and so forth, is now embedded as part of applied linguistic work, adding an overt focus on questions of power and inequality to discourse…

This paper explores the implications of looking at creativity in terms of repeated sameness rather than observable difference. Drawing on insights from hip-hop culture that focus on sampling as creativity, and looking in particular at philosophies of difference that make iterability and performativity central, this paper opens up a discussion of…

Suggests that while recent sociolinguistic work focusing on crossing, or language boundaries is raising significant questions concerning how we relate language, identity, and popular culture, these insights have largely passed by the sociolinguistics of world English. (Author/VWL)

Christian missionaries have played a crucial role not only in assisting past and current forms of colonialism and neocolonialism, not only in attacking and destroying other ways of being, but also in terms of the language effects their projects have engendered. The choices missionaries have made to use local or European languages have been far…

A discussion of the teaching of English for academic purposes (EAP) focuses on criticism that the content of such courses is thin and that they are offered as a service to other disciplines. It is proposed that the emphasis of EAP instruction be shifted to the role English plays as a medium for conveying meaning to the ways in which English is…