This study focuses on the residential neighbourhoods of Johor Bahru city, the administrative and business centre of the Johor Bahru region and the Malaysian state of Johor. Johor Bahru is a border town, located in the very south of peninsular Malaysia, less than one mile away from Singapore. According to City Population (2018), the Johor Bahru region has a multi-ethnic population of almost 1.4 million, comprised of native ‘Bumiputera’ (52%), Chinese (37.4%), Indian (9.9%) and ‘other’ (0.6%) citizens. Hutchinson and Bhattacharya (2019: 1) describe economic links with Singapore as ‘long standing, far-reaching, spanning trade in goods and services, as well as foreign direct investment (FDI) and movement of people’; both countries are one another's ‘second most important trading partner, in both cases surpassed only by China and outranking traditional commercial allies such as the United States and Japan’.

In Vietnam, English has been held in high regard since the country embarked on its economic reform known as Doi Moi (Renewal) in 1986 (Ngo, 2018a; Nguyen, 2016). Yet, over the past decades, the country's English teaching sector has consistently been underperforming (Le, in press; Ngo, 2018a, 2018b; Nguyen, 2016; Nguyen & Nguyen, 2019).

The present study explores spelling variations of translingual words of Korean origin which are used in the English context across the globe. Four sets of English-language databases including the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the CNN website, Google Search and Google Trends were employed to locate and examine examples of such words. Variations in the spelling of Korean-origin words listed in the OED and on the CNN website were examined and compared with examples from the official Romanization of the Korean language published by the National Institute of Korean Language (NIKL). The popularity and frequency of use of these words was investigated using Google Search and Google Trends. The findings suggest that there are several English spelling variations of Korean-origin words and that amongst such variations, the OED spelling variation is the most overwhelmingly popular version used by Google and by the CNN website. This finding is discussed in the context of spreading popularity of Korean pop culture.

The purpose of this study is to identify the perceptions of 80 Korean university students majoring in English about sociocultural elements embedded in the Korean language and KVE. A secondary objective is to enhance students’ awareness of the connection between culture and language and some of the unique sociocultural characteristics of these two languages. To this end, all participants took part in a 3-part classroom activity in which they examined pairs of KVE and Korean sentences, translated both KVE and Korean sentences, and took part in small focus group discussions. Specifically, the study has two research questions:

1. 1) What sociocultural aspects of KVE and Korean did the participants identify?

2. 2) What reasons did participants identify for these sociocultural aspects?

Korean parents are strongly committed to investing time, effort, and money into improving their children's English competence in order to maximize their human capital in the era of globalization, a phenomenon often referred to as ‘English fever’ (Park, 2009). However, because of the Korean socio-economic structure, there is considerable disparity among families in the financial investment they can afford. Therefore, in the educational privileges and especially English learning support that Korean children receive is an inequity often overlooked by the majority of Koreans. One response to this issue is the newly emerging movement among Korean mothers called ‘maternal English education’ (eommapyo yeongeo), which has become a widely used term throughout the country.

Store image is an important factor in the consumer's decision-making process (Nevin & Houston, 1980). As a cue to a store's image, a store sign and its visual design and content form (which may include the name of the store or brand) serve as vital elements that can immediately attract potential customers. In particular, a store's name can be used as an extrinsic signal to suggest and maintain quality perceptions. With a well chosen, memorable name, retailers can establish trust and a loyal following, which in turn means repeated business. For those who understand how store signs can influence patronage decisions and improve competitiveness in the marketplace, therefore, much effort is exerted to create advertising and marketing strategies designed to attract and retain customers.

Linguistic landscape (LL) research has been subject to a great deal of attention since the publication of the well-known research paper by Landry and Bourhis (1997), whose most quoted definition of LL covers diverse linguistic tokens, including but not restricted to government-related inscriptions, street-name signs, commercial signs, and noticeboards. There is an increasing number of contributions on the use of English in many LLs worldwide. However, there are relatively few LL publications on the use of English in the LL in Arabic-speaking countries (but see Al–Naimat & Alomoush, 2018; Alomoush, 2019). The vast majority of previous LL studies in non-Arabic contexts (e.g. Backhaus, 2007; Griffin, 2004; Hasanova, 2010; Jaworksi & Thurlow, 2010; Lanza & Woldemariam, 2014; Ross, 1997; Schlick, 2003) focus on analysing language on fixed or relatively stable signs, such as shop names.

When delivering a speech at a meeting of the Writers’ Congress, Ernest Hemingway said as a fiction writer:

A growing number of countries internationalise their curriculum by switching to English-medium Instruction (EMI). This strategy is particularly popular in China, where more and more universities offer English-medium courses to raise their international profile (Macaro et al., 2018). Sociolinguistic accounts have been reported on how EMI is perceived and enacted in China as a whole (Hu & Lei, 2014; Fang, 2018), or in particular disciplines, such as the humanities, business (Botha, 2014), medicine and surgery (Botha, 2016). However, relatively little attention has been given to EMI in China's music education, where English is used differently from the educational settings previously studied. In music education, instructors invariably use both verbal and non-verbal communication to explain and demonstrate a musical technique (Long et al., 2012).

In Issue 135 (Volume 34, Number 3, September 2018) of English Today there was an article by Blasius Achiri-Taboh entitled ‘English spelling: Adding /ʃən/ (or /ʒən/) to base-words and changing from -tion to -sion.’ The author's stated aim was to provide help for deciding the forms of these words and whether -tion or -sion was the correct ending. All the words he cited were ones that can be traced back to Latin or French. That is to say, they are Latinate words that became part of the English language either in a French form as a result of the Norman invasion in the 11th century or later as a modification of a classical form in the Renaissance period. This historical fact was not mentioned in the article. I acknowledge that the purpose of the article was to give guidelines for spelling, particularly perhaps for non-native speakers, and that it might be going too far to suggest that, if you wanted to be able to spell these words correctly, you could learn Latin and maybe French too, but it seemed to me that the author's assertions misrepresented the nature of those English words. I should like therefore to discuss certain points of the article, in the order they were presented.

The English language is a global lingua franca that has itself been experiencing rapid change. This change can be attributed mainly to easy access to the internet worldwide and the popular use of social media. Frequent and common online communication amongst multilingual speakers mediated in English has naturally generated a diverse semiotic repertoire. As a result, new words are constantly and rapidly evolving on online platforms across language boundaries where there is little linguistic authority in place. The forms of many new words in English are becoming more hybridised and complex than ever before and the origins of these words are often difficult to trace because of their simultaneous and multitrajectory pathways.

As is well known, English spelling is a major problem even to native speakers. In Achiri-Taboh (2018a), I present arguments for a synchronic base-word-based rule for the spelling of shun-words, given the notoriously troubling variation in the spelling of their ending as underlined here in words like fraction, dictation, equation, and persuasion (with a t-form) and extension, collision, and expression (with an s-form). My (2018a) rule is summarized as follows:

1. (1) The Base-Word-Based (BWB) rule for spelling ‘shun’:

   Use -tion everywhere except when X (X = any of the 7 conditions)