In an era where migration across borders is increasingly the norm, how are our understandings of language and the ways we talk about language being reimagined along the way? This article examines this question by attending to the shifting metadiscourses of "Chinglish," a colloquialism referring to Chinese-English hybridizations.…

Responding to a recent call for interdisciplinary research into 'night studies', the present study attempts to put the nighttime at the centre of the sociolinguistic enquiry, seeking to explore how the nocturnal linguistic landscape (LL) differs from the diurnal LL by drawing on Singapore's Chinatown as the research site. A total of 1091 LL items…

Chinese immersion programs have been increasingly popular in US schools. However, we have insufficient data on young English-speaking children's acquisition of Chinese as a second language in these programs, and specifically on social contextual variables systematically promoting or hindering Chinese language use. Taking a variationist…

This study explores language practices of the Blang people and their perceptions of the changes in language ecology through the lens of chronotopes, hoping to better understand patterns of language shift in the Blang community in China. It takes a qualitative approach and draws on semi-structured interviews and ethnographic observations conducted…

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has generated a spectacular rise in social media communication and an unprecedented avalanche of global conversation. This paper traces the emergence of the racist term "Chinese virus" used by the President of the United States, Donald Trump, on the Western social media platform Twitter and its…

This paper probes alternative meanings and processes for decolonizing English that arise from the particular geopolitical histories and identities of Hong Kong and engagement with political and translingual activism. I illustrate the positioning and tension between English, 'Kongish' (a mix of English and localized linguistic resources in Hong…

Language choices in the economic field of late capitalist societies are shaped by a combination of local, national, and global forces as well as historical, political, and economic factors. This study conducts an analysis of language choices in the linguistic landscape of Macao's heritage tourism (i.e. signposts of tourist attractions) and gaming…

The socio-psychological variables that affect bilinguals' choices of code-switching (CS) and code-mixing (CM) as a verbal strategy make prediction of their occurrence almost impossible. This research investigates the social motivations and socio-pragmatic aspects of Chinese-English CS/CM among Chinese undergraduate students. Using a questionnaire…

The presence of Africans in China has been phenomenal since the late 1990s. In recent years, there has been a dramatic uptick in people from Africa coming to the major cities of China such as Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Macau, Yiwu, Shanghai, and Beijing. They are in the process of building linguistic, cultural, and economic bridges between their source…

Local people's sense of place identity might feel threatened in the midst of rapid social change or at a time of crisis, they come into collective consciousness and are particularly likely to assert and highlight their local place identity. Languages (including scripts) become one way for them to maintain an authentic claim to a place and give it…

This study investigated Chinese parents' experiences of reading English storybooks to their preschool children. While the spread of English as a global language is associated with an increasing emphasis on English education, few studies have examined its impact on the early home literacy practices in non-English speaking countries. With the most…

Variationist researchers are increasingly adopting intersectionality approaches to analyse identity-linked practice. However, the field of sociolinguistic variation is yet to embrace the full ramifications of intersectionality as an analytical framework. The current paper offers a new method for integrating intersectional approaches into…

Children and young people from migrated families often learn host languages faster than their parents might do, and from very young ages they help their parents, families or community members by translating or interpreting, known as child language brokering (CLB). Language brokers need to mediate with different languages in different contexts and…

In Singapore's unique and complex linguistic environment, it is common to have Chinese-language learners from many different backgrounds in the same school classroom, which is why Singapore is nicknamed as a "language laboratory." In this paper, I hope to examine our linguistic environment and response strategies from different angles,…

On the French Guiana-Suriname border, a hybrid space, members of the same population groups engage in circular mobility but little is known about the practices of these transnational communities. We explore how traditional emic social distinctions, modern states' language ideologies and emerging discourses in the urban context shape Maroon's…