Colloquial Singapore English (CSE, commonly known as Singlish) is a linguistic variety used in Singapore, a Southeast Asian nation home to three major ethnic groups: the Chinese (74.35% of the citizen and permanent resident population), the Malays (13.43%), and the Indians (9%) (Singapore Department of Statistics, 2019). It is one of the best known post-colonial varieties of English and has been documented since the emergence of the field of world Englishes (e.g., Greenbaum, 1988; Richards & Tay, 1977). Linguistically, the grammar and lexicon of CSE are systematically imported from other non-English languages used in the island nation (Leimgruber, 2011). From a creolist perspective, it can be viewed as an English-lexifier creole that contains influences from Sinitic languages such as Hokkien, Cantonese and Mandarin, as well as Malay, Tamil and other varieties in the Singapore language ecology (McWhorter, 2007; Platt, 1975). Several distinct features across various levels of language have been investigated in CSE, including phonetics (Starr & Balasubramaniam, 2019), morphosyntax (Bao, 2010; Bao & Wee, 1999), semantics (Hiramoto & Sato, 2012), and pragmatics (Hiramoto, 2012; Leimgruber, 2016; Lim, 2007).

Cyprus is an island in the Mediterranean Sea where English has the status of the most popular and important foreign language (Tsiplakou, 2009; Fotiou, 2015) and the majority of its inhabitants are literate in English. While a former British colony, it is generally absent from discussions of places where English has had some special relevance due to historical, political, social and economic reasons. For example, while other small countries with a history of British rule, such as Malta and Seychelles, are part of Crystal's (2003: 62–5) list of English speakers in territories where English has had special relevance, Cyprus is absent from that list. This paper aims to fill this gap in the literature by providing an overview of the use of English in various domains, i.e. workplace, education, linguistic landscape, the media, and communication between Greek Cypriots, along with a brief historical background. The latter aims to illustrate how Cyprus was different from many British colonies and how this has affected the status of this language in this setting both now and during the colonization period.

Personal names are an important part of people's social identity, and they function socially as labels that both identify and distinguish an individual from others (Watzlawik et al., 2012). Cheang (2008) suggests that personal names can be a vehicle of self-presentation/self-promotion (cf. Goffman, 1980), not just a passive label, if the names are selected by the name bearers themselves. Although self-naming is also observed with a small minority of people who have changed their names given by their parents or close relations, the most common cases of self-presentation/self-promotion seem to be entertainers’ adopted stage names.

In the past two decades, South Korean universities’ ‘top-down’ implementation of English-medium instruction (EMI) policy has been critiqued for inadequately addressing the linguistic challenges students and instructors face (Kim, 2017). Research suggests that rapid implementation of such policy is primarily motivated by the pursuit of internationalisation, where global ranking takes precedence over the appropriateness of the policy (D. W. Cho, 2012) resulting in issues of injustices (Williams & Stelma, 2022). As a result, of these injustices, taking EMI courses is not a popular choice amongst South Korean higher education students.

Owing to the extensive spread of English around the globe, English words have penetrated the lexicon of many languages. Modern Greek has been no exception as various English loanwords are used daily by its native speakers. The present paper discusses the use of English loanwords on the Greek web and more specifically in three online women's magazines. The focus, however, is not on all types of borrowings, but solely on what Myers–Scotton (2002: 239) calls core borrowings, which are defined as ‘words that more or less duplicate already existing words in the L1’. Essentially, core borrowings do not serve genuine communicative needs as they do not fill any lexical gaps in the speakers’ native language (Bybee, 2015). Nonetheless, they are borrowed as a result of the cultural pressure exerted by the more prestigious and dominant donor language (Myers–Scotton, 2006). On the other hand, cultural borrowings are words used for new objects and concepts for which there is no equivalent in the recipient language. It should also be noted that the loanwords examined in this paper have not been morphologically or orthographically assimilated into the Modern Greek language, but maintain their distinctive foreign features.

The popularity of the online social media in China promotes a dynamic digital drive for both global and glocalised communications, facilitating the emergence of more connected intercultural language practices unimaginable in the past. Social media also creates a vast community where pervasive translanguaging practices take place daily. Translanguaging hybrids coined by Chinese university students on WeChat are exactly a case in point. WeChat is a free platform launched in 2011 by Tencent. Well established in China and the world over, Tencent provides multimodal instant messaging services. Open to world cultures, these students show ingenuity in translanguaging linguistic play in their daily text messages; meanwhile, their creative coinage of translanguaging hybrids influences the entire WeChat community. Written language in the WeChat community, often amounting to a new form of speech, deserves serious scholarly inquiry.

The linguistic landscape of any country reveals a lot about the linguistic identity of its citizens, especially if it is a bottom-up linguistic landscape. In Algeria, which is a multi-cultural and multi-lingual context, the linguistic landscape witnessed a remarkable shift in linguistic preferences that is represented in bottom-up signs. This shift is characterized by the addition of a new linguistic entity, English, to the Algerian linguistic landscape. In Algerian society, it is easily observed that English is not commonly present in the top-down signs assigned by the Algerian government, which contrasts with the signs of private businesses such as fashion shops, restaurants, and coffee shops. In fact, English has been found in Algerian signs since the 1990s when foreign energy companies like British Petroleum (BP) arrived and introduced the language in the country (Euromonitor, 2012), but it has become prevalent in the bottom-up signs of private businesses, which were previously dominated by other languages, i.e., Arabic and French. For those who are unfamiliar with the Algerian context, Arabic and Berber (or Tamazight) are the official languages of the country while French and English are the foreign languages. French is the first foreign language, while English is the second foreign language. Despite this clear linguistic planning, there has been unclear planning of the linguistic landscape on the part of the Algerian government, mostly in top-down signs. For instance, the government uses monolingual and bilingual signs that disregard English in the majority of signs. The monolingual signs are either Arabic or French. Berber is used in monolingual signs only in cities of Berber ethnicity. On the other hand, the bilingual signs are mostly written in Arabic and French or Arabic and Berber, the latter signs being found only in Berber-ethnicity cities such as Bejaia, Khenchela, Batna, and Tizi Ouzou. Overall, the government and Algerian citizens have rather different linguistic landscape practices since Algerians opt for integrating English, the language of globalization, presenting it in different bottom-up signs alongside other languages.

Expressing gratitude and patronage in the form of dedication or acknowledgment can be traced back to the 16th century (Görlach, 2004). In the present time, writing an acknowledgment section has become a common practice in scholarly works, such as books, dissertations, theses, and journal articles. Research on acknowledgments as a text type, however, is relatively new. In his pioneering work, Hyland (2003) dubbed dissertation acknowledgments ‘a Cinderella genre’ because it is often regarded as a taken-for-granted component in a dissertation and has not received due academic attention. Unlike other conventional academic genres that aim to establish claims and reputation, dissertation acknowledgments reflect the reciprocal gift-giving among scholars, constituting ‘the most explicitly interpersonal genre of the academy’ (Hyland, 2004: 323). In addition to expressing gratitude to others, writers also use the acknowledgments section to build interpersonal relationships with their academic colleagues and/or professional communities (Chan, 2015). In this study, we adopt computerized text analysis to further explore how language patterns mark the interpersonal features in English dissertation acknowledgments.