When it comes to learning an additional language, it is important that teachers prepare students to communicate with different speakers, respecting and understanding the different English-accented speeches around the world. This article helps English teachers from different parts of the world embrace language variation in their lessons,…

Purpose: Insights from linguistic variation research illustrate a linguistically diverse population, in which even speakers who can be classified as speaking a "mainstream" variety have grammatical knowledge of vernacular or "nonmainstream" features. However, there is a gap in our knowledge regarding how vernacular features are…

We propose a novel method for repurposing online course discussion posts to explore educators' language ideologies. Drawing on asynchronous discussion posts from a subset of 30 educators enrolled in an online, masters-level, sociolinguistics-for-educators course at a US Southwest university, we "smooth" posts into a dialogue resembling a…

Picturebooks are powerful educational tools, both for their content and their contributions to the literacy development of children. In New Zealand bilingual picturebooks featuring Te Reo Maori and New Zealand English have increased in number since the 1980s when Te Reo Maori gained official status and revitalisation efforts burgeoned. More…

Developing sociolinguistic competence in Arabic can be a complex process given how Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Colloquial Arabic (CA) are used within a changing sociolinguistic environment in Arabic-speaking communities. Findings from empirical research suggest that second language (L2) Arabic learners who receive multidialectal training in…

This study is concerned with comparing the pronunciation in Southern Welsh, a Celtic language, and Cockney, an English dialect, regarding the place of articulation. The study uses a comparative method to shed light on the similarities and differences between the two accents. The data were collected from YouTube videos of speakers of Southern Welsh…

This study tests the Competing Systems Hypothesis (CSH) as applied to adult second language acquisition of aspect in Spanish. The CSH purports that differences among tutored and untutored learners result from competition between one system of underlying grammatical knowledge and another of learned metalinguistic knowledge in tutored learners…

This study evaluates attitudes toward nonnative Englishes among students, faculty, and staff at a STEM-focused U.S. university. The study utilizes the verbal-guise technique: Participants listened to and rated three summaries of the same short story as told by native speakers of U.S. English, Chinese, and Arabic. This adapted verbal-guise…

Unmooring language is a proposal for a language-based social justice concept that aims to go beyond national and local epistemologies of language in place. This article contributes to current discussions in critical sociolinguistics about how to conceptualize language bearing in mind the primacy of mobility and fluidity. Drawing on folk…

The ability to encode (spell) is an integral writing skill needed to communicate effectively. The ability to spell, also, enhances decoding as spelling and decoding are reciprocal skills that rely on knowledge of the same subskills. Spelling can also be particularly difficult for students with literacy and phonological-processing difficulties such…

This paper analyses "Kongish Daily," a Facebook page that trans-scripts local news in Hong Kong into a creative and dynamic mix of Cantonese in traditional Chinese characters, Romanisation and made-up characters, simplified Chinese, pinyin, English, Hong Kong English, other phonetic symbols, emoji and other signs and images. We trace the…

In this article, the author historicizes the argument about Black Language in the classroom to contextualize the contemporary linguistic inequities that Black students experience in English Language Arts (ELA) classroom. Next, the author describes "anti-black linguistic racism" and interrogates the notion of academic language. Following…

Our research focuses on the creation and reinforcement of overgeneralized and inaccurate depictions of language behavior on the Internet. Misrepresentation of language behavior spreads easily by exposure to unchallenged depictions. We posit that such stereotypes have already influenced our students, consumers of the Internet, by introducing,…

In addition to the examination of non-linguists' evaluations of different speech varieties, in recent years sociolinguists and sociophoneticians have afforded greater attention towards the ways in which naïve listeners perceive, process, and encode spoken language variation, including the identification of language varieties as regionally or…

The #RhodesMustFall (RMF) protests at South African universities (2015--2018) were the publicly visible manifestation of deep epistemic problems in the higher education (HE) sector, particularly around questions of whose knowledges are validated and whether these are reflective of students' lived realities. This exploratory research attempted a…