Despite the range of varieties of Han Chinese, Mandarin is the most widely studied variety in research on Chinese as a heritage language (CHL) around the world. To better understand the role of other varieties of Han Chinese in addition to Mandarin, this article presents a synthesis of research on the learning of Chinese varieties in formal and…

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,…

Name sign systems have been described in many deaf communities around the world. The most frequent name sign types are associated with an individual's appearance, for example, a signers' hairstyle, clothes, and physical features such as height, weight, etc. However, a recent study that examined name signs in Swedish Sign Language, for example,…

This study primarily focuses on the situation of Hungarians in minority situations in relation to language varieties, i.e. it interprets the various language policy issues primarily in the context of the Hungarian-speaking community, rather than in the context of Hungary, where the place, role and relationship between standard and non-standard…

This article sheds light on the linguistic and extralinguistic conditions that determine the likelihood of L1 grammatical attrition in late sequential bilinguals. We explore whether aspectual interpretations associated with the present tense may be a vulnerable area for the native grammar of 30 late Spanish-English bilinguals who have settled in…

One key tenet of Global Englishes for Language Teaching (GELT) is that the native English speaker should no longer serve as the role model for second language (L2) English users. Such a view does not discount that some degree of linguistic knowledge is necessary for successful global communication. However, GELT scholarship has remained relatively…

American Norwegian (AmNo), a moribund heritage variety of Norwegian spoken predominantly in the Upper Midwest of the US, licenses "wh"-infinitives (i.e. indirect questions), which are structures that are not acceptable in either standard Norwegian Bokmål or Norwegian dialects. Adopting a spanning-account of syntax (Blix, 2021; Julien,…

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…

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,…

Phonetic imitation is a ubiquitous process in speech production. Speakers have a strong tendency to imitate their interlocutors both in a native and a non-native language. It is especially important in acquiring non-native speech, because it allows forming new sound categories. In the current study we investigated whether and to what extent Polish…

Multi-word expressions are formulaic language universals with arbitrary and idiosyncratic collocations. Their usage and mastery are required of learners of a second language in achieving naturalness. However, despite the importance of multi-word expressions to mastering a second language, their syntactic architecture and colligational…

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…

Language development can be framed as the process of learning how to mean (Halliday, 1975). From this perspective, the role of communicative function is central to the language-learning process with development being guided by interaction with experienced others. In the current study, we present a detailed analysis of the communicative functions…

Studies on Brunei Malay have made inconsistent findings: while some have asserted that this variety is thriving and is in no way endangered, others have found that its use is now waning. As the dynamics of family speech can inform what is happening linguistically at the community level, this study seeks to investigate the family language policies…