The use of English in advertising across non-English-speaking countries is pervasive, often seen as a strategy to evoke prestige, modernity, and global appeal. However, its effectiveness may depend on factors such as text length, linguistic complexity, and local language use, which remain underexplored. This study investigates how Spanish and…

Researching in heterogeneous communities can present challenges for the most experienced of researchers, especially in the context of ethnographic work, where the dynamism and unpredictability of a research setting can make it difficult to anticipate the languages spoken. Drawing on data from multilingual health consultations, I reflect on…

The impact of neoliberalism on language education has recently attracted scholars' attention. Linguistic entrepreneurship is a conceptual lens through which neoliberal implications for language learning and use can be investigated. This commentary offers comments on common threads of themes running through the four articles in this special issue.…

The decolonization of knowledge is increasingly high on the agenda of applied and sociolinguistics. This article contributes to this agenda by examining how peripheral multilingual scholars confront their linguistic and epistemic exclusion from global knowledge production. Based on the product of such a challenge -- a Chinese-centric special issue…

As a result of globalisation and the European integration process, identity concepts of young Europeans are becoming more and more diverse and possibly heterogeneous. The factors that influence the development of identity formation and impact on identity constructions are complex--but language seems to be of central importance. It is generally…

The global spread of English has made it the dominant language in academic publishing (Hyland, Ken. 2015. "Academic Publishing: Issues and Challenges in the Construction of Knowledge." Oxford: Oxford University Press). Influenced by enterprise culture, scholars from peripheral non-Western countries face mounting pressure to publish in…

The goal of this paper was to address the question, "Have the austerity measures enacted due to the global economic crisis impacted student enrollments at the University of Puerto Rico Mayagüez?" as Rodríguez (2011. "Social protest and the future of Higher Education in Puerto Rico." "Academe" 97(4).…

This paper reports on an experimental study investigating alternative communication modes to English as a Lingua Franca. The purpose was to examine the effectiveness of different modes of communication and to gain insight in communication strategies used by interlocutors to solve referential conflicts. Findings show that ELF may not necessarily be…

Research on the role of language in multilingual workplaces, where English is often adopted as a lingua franca (ELF), shows that language practices influence socialization and interpersonal communication, frequently creating issues such as asymmetrical sharing of information, language clusters, or thin communication. Similarly to other…

The role of English as a global language and its consequences for the internationalization of higher education are matters that have increasingly drawn the attention of researchers from different fields of language and communication. In this paper, an overview of the situation in Estonia is presented. The Estonian context has not previously been…