The distinction between natural sign languages and sign-supported speech is a controversial topic and difficult to assess purely on structural terms because of language contact. Here, we consider British Sign Language (BSL) and Sign Supported English (SSE) with reference to Irvine and Gal's (2000. Language ideology and linguistic differentiation.…

For newly met acquaintances, deployment of a single lexical term, an emblem such as "tech" or "finance," signals where one stands in the professional universe and points to any manner of traits and characteristics or a certain type of person. This positioning and evaluation has pivotal real-world implications for occupational…

Research has suggested that Swedish higher education institutions' (HEIs') language policies may exclude some academic staff from work-related activities due to (dual) monolingual ideologies requiring one language at a time. This study, based on the analysis of twenty-one language policy texts, investigates HEIs' policies using a lens of inclusion…

Through the analysis of materials such as online articles, blogs, and radio broadcasts, this paper investigates linguistic purism toward Russian and English loanwords in the understudied context of post-Soviet Armenia. Our analysis finds that public commentators categorize potential loanwords as "borrowings" ([foreign characters…

Multilingualism serves an important function in the characterization of an audiovisual product; thus, its representation in translations demands scientific attention. The task of rendering multilingualism in translation becomes more complicated when no or limited access to the original audio content is possible. This being so, this study…

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, extensive lockdowns interrupted daily routines, including childcare. We asked whether these interruptions, and the inevitable changes in the people with whom children spent their waking hours, caused changes in the languages that children heard. We retrospectively queried parents of young children (0-4 years) in the…

Public intellectual life is an area of inquiry that has not received a great deal of attention within the field of sociolinguistics. This article investigates the performative dimension of public intellectual engagement in the area of language and gender and, more specifically, how epistemic authority about gender-neutral language is constructed…

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,…

This paper highlights a current phenomenon reported from preschools placed in multilingual areas in Sweden, namely that some preschoolers with mutually different language backgrounds sometimes use English as lingua franca instead of Swedish during play. The data stems from a study of language environments in Swedish preschools situated in both…

Historically, fictional productions which use sign language have often begun with scripts that use the written version of a spoken language. This can be a challenge for deaf actors as they must translate the written word to a performed sign language text. Here, we explore script development in "Small World," a television comedy which…

This paper examines the determinant factors motivating language choice in churches in coastal Accra, an area characterized by a high degree of urbanization and multilingualism. As this region is also ethnically Gã, we survey the attitudes of Gã congregants to the use of other languages in their churches, bearing in mind the pressure faced by Gã…

In today's global world, many people can move across borders as travelling has become much easier in many ways. However, the securitization of borders has not been relaxed, implying that multilingual police-civilian interactions are becoming more 'commonplace'. Within the framework of conversation analysis, this article presents a novel study on…

In our article, we investigate the complex dynamics of linguistic understandings and mis- or non-understanding within multilingual contexts. Through the lens of sociolinguistic exploration, we navigate the multifaceted landscapes of language use, applying a multi-perspective approach and the triangulation method to explore the depths of linguistic…

While language dominance has been crucial in the study of bilingualism, recent research has called for more detailed measures to systematically account for the observation that bilinguals use different languages in different domains, a phenomenon formalized in the Complementary Principle. Few studies have systematically measured these…

Translanguaging has been documented to be frequently adopted in day-to-day online interaction. To date, except for Ren and Guo's (2022. Translanguaging in self-praise on Chinese social media. "Applied Linguistics Review" 169. 1-22) pioneering study examining translanguaging practices in online self-praise, there has been scanty focus on…