This paper deals with problems stemming from linguistic variation in children's literature in a pluricentric language such as Spanish. Specifically, a paradigmatic case of the tensions will be studied, namely a collection of children's books about the Canary Islands, "Leyendas Canarias" (2012-2021). The sociolinguistic setting is the…

On a 2022 fieldtrip to Ecuador, we encountered a large community of Media Lengua speakers in the province of Cotopaxi where the language was thought to be dormant. This is the same region where Pieter Muysken had first documented this 'mixed language' in the 1970s. However, subsequent fieldwork thereabout by several linguists had failed to turn up…

This essay explores the teaching and learning of Black British literature in UK secondary schools with reference to texts that now appear on GCSE English Literature specifications. It seeks to reveal some of the issues that may arise when teaching texts that deal with race and racism while emphasising the role of racial literacy in facilitating…

The development of a considerable body of literature on British Sign Language (BSL) now permits analyzing and describing the sociolinguistic history of the language. An impressive amount of sociolinguistic information on BSL pertaining to the United Kingdom (UK) provides rich material for such analysis, but, until now, very little BSL research has…

We introduce the Corpus of Spoken Yiddish in Europe (CSYE), an Open Access digital language archive based on several hundred testimony interviews with Holocaust survivors from the USC Shoah Foundation. The testimonies are a uniquely rich source of information on all aspects of European Yiddish: its regional dialects, grammatical structures,…

Measuring lexical diversity in texts that have different lengths is problematic because length has a significant effect on the number of types a text contains, thus hampering any comparison. Treffers-Daller et al. (2018) recommended a simple solution, namely counting the number of types in a section of a given length that was extracted from the…

Language naming systems are local ways of organising diversity, yet the language names used by linguists are sometimes incommensurable with the lived social reality of speakers. The process of assigning language names is not neutral, trivial or objective: it is a highly political process driven and shaped by understandings of group identity,…

Art serves as a powerful medium of expression for young students, especially for bi/multilingual children. Beyond mere artistic endeavors, their drawings vividly reflect their perceptions and provide insightful glimpses into their cultural backgrounds, linguistic diversity, and the intricate interplay of languages and identities. This article…

Babu English is arguably one of the most popular varieties of Indian English and ironically the least studied too. An attempt to define the variety lands one in a mushy land of definitions that are untenable. It has been described variously by different scholars while German linguist Schuchardt classifies it as a pidgin, Kachru defines it as a…

English language learners should become successful intercultural speakers and global citizens promoting qualities that go beyond national boundaries. Supposed to be globally appropriate, global course books from Global North publishing houses reproduce coloniality and are neither neutral nor free of nationalism. Local(ised) teaching materials…

That a certain class of verb commonly known as 'statives' is undergoing change in terms of the way in which certain verbs of this type are being used in everyday speech is nothing new to the field of linguistics. Much has been written about it, and the author of this paper alone has been preoccupied with the subject for many years now. However,…

This article investigates contemporary uses of the Sakha language algys (blessing poems) and reveals the "old" and "new" types of language materiality present in this genre of ritual poetry. Focusing primarily on one example of algys shared online in 2018, I discuss how performing algys has always involved close interconnection…

In this paper we analyze the semantic and pragmatic properties of a colloquial interrogative construction attested in European Spanish, which we label invariable "qué" questions (IQQs). In doing so, we contribute to the better understanding of a relatively understudied phenomenon in Spanish, given that IQQs have been mainly approached…

In countries such as Australia, the bi/multilingual student demographic is increasing. Bi/multilingual students are commonly learning alongside monolingual students and also Indigenous and first- and second-generation immigrant students who have a great range of exposure to heritage languages. In this article, we explore how literacies and…

In this paper, I examine the changing currency of languages in the context of migration and mobility based on case studies of Filipino migrants in Australia. Drawing on two sociolinguistic studies conducted with and for Filipino migrants, I highlight how the "monolingual mindset" (Clyne, 2008) reinforced by the "White-English…