Terms of address are universally seen as a tool used to build social relations between speakers and hearers. Terms of address ‘help establish or maintain social bonds, strengthen solidarity and control social distance’ (Gu, 1990: 249), although ways of addressing vary from culture to culture. Therefore, the proper choice of address terms is a prerequisite for a successful interaction. Inappropriate use of address terms may lead to misunderstandings and hinder communication.

Characterized by a politically censorious and highly regulated society, Singapore is widely considered to be one of the most sophisticated authoritarian systems in history (Lee, 2005). As in many other public and private domains, the government, well known for its paternalistic attitude (Schiffman, 2003), usually practices an active interventional policy on linguistic life, which is extensively explored in language planning and policy study. However, in a few areas where less official intervention is exercised, the linguistic reality has received relatively scant attention. This study sets out to examine to what extent grassroots individuals can use shop signs to express their personal inclinations regarding language use, which may partly demonstrate the virtual vitality of various languages in the multilingual society.

This paper stems from the ongoing debate on the changing role and status of English in different parts of the world, with a special interest in the socio-historical background of a post-Soviet country. The international status of English has given rise to different reactions among speakers, ranging from attraction to resentment (cf. Onysko, 2009: 34). These reactions are expressed in public online discourse, which provides a rich resource of empirical evidence to study public attitudes and language ideologies. Digital media offers an especially important strategic site to disseminate ideologies and shape public opinions. This paper analyses the spectrum of discourses operating within Lithuanian digital media to perpetuate attitudes towards English and the values associated with it.

There have been growing concerns in recent years about the status of English in China, the most populous country that boasts the largest number of English speakers and learners (Bolton & Graddol, 2012; Wang, 2015). Such concerns are closely associated with the rising importance of the Chinese language worldwide, which seems to signal that ‘English is no longer so important’ (Wei & Feng, 2015: 59). The Chinese government has become much more active in promoting Chinese as an international language through the establishment of Confucius Institutes worldwide. The concerns about the status of English have also been related to the growing assertiveness of China's nationalism. In September 2013, a former spokesman of the Ministry of Education appealed to the public to emancipate children from English and save the Chinese language (Zheng, 2014). In October 2013, the Beijing Municipal Commission of Education announced that the weighting of the English section in the Beijing version of Gaokao, the national university matriculation examination, would be reduced to 100 from 150, starting from 2016. In the meantime, the weighting of Chinese will be increased to 180 (Wei & Feng, 2015). In March 2016, the Beijing Education Examination Authority finalized the decision and set the weighting of Chinese and English in Gaokao to 150 in 2016 (Beijing Education Examination Authority, 2016). In addition to Gaokao, critics have openly challenged whether satisfactory College English Test (CET®) results should be used as a prerequisite for degree conferment in many Chinese universities (Xie, 2014).

Structural simplicity/complexity is an important variable with which New Englishes and native varieties are identified and conceptualised, but predicting such variation in complexity has received little attention in the literature. New Englishes, especially the outer circle varieties such as Nigerian or Indian English, differ in form and function from the inner circle varieties, such as British or American English, but the extent of such variation varies greatly and merits further investigation. According to Gorlach (1998), we should expect New Englishes to demonstrate simplification at the levels of morphology, lexis, and syntax. This has indeed been shown to be the case in some varieties, but it has also been shown that this variation differs according to different linguistic and non-linguistic factors. Most recently, Schilk and Schaub (2016) have shown how noun phrase (NP) structure can reveal the underlying structural simpification predicted in the New Englishes varieties. Brunner (2014) examined NP complexity across three New Englishes (British, Singaporean, and Kenyan English), explicating how grammars of the indigeneous languages in Singapore and Kenya influence NP simplicity/complexity.

If we believe social media, newspapers, and even some of our best friends and colleagues, the war over standard usage is on. As with many wars, the opposing sides seem to be entrenched in differing ideological positions and many of the battles seem to take place over the most unstable, smallest bits of territory - such as the Oxford comma, singular they, or split infinitives. In this ongoing war, possessive apostrophes have attracted particularly aggressive forays. For example, when some English cities proposed removing apostrophes from street signs, various news outlets published headlines such as, ‘It's a catastrophe for the apostrophe in Britain’ (NBC, 31 January, 2009), ‘Dropped apostrophes spark grammar war in Britain’ (New York Times, 16 March, 2013), and ‘“It's pandering to the lowest common denominator”: Anger as Cambridge bans apostrophe from street names’ (Daily Mail, 18 January, 2014). Explaining Birmingham's ban, one city councillor was not that much less sensational, stating that apostrophes ‘denote possessions that are no longer accurate, and are not needed’ and that ‘they confuse people. If I want to go to a restaurant, I don't want to have an A-level (high school diploma) in English to find it’ (NBC).

The most widely accepted origin of the word ‘Pidgin’ is that it is a Chinese pronunciation of the English word business (etymonline.com). Pidgin English in mainland China has another popular localised nickname, i.e. yangjingbang 洋泾浜 English, a trade jargon term often used in Shanghai. However, this popular Pidgin English has been played down in linguistic research in mainland China because of the assumption of colonial connotations (Jin, 2011). Although it did not thrive or even survive in mainland China, Pidgin English has influenced to no small degree both contemporary culture and language in Shanghai, as well as other Chinese varieties.

As a global language, English is taken up and used in local contexts in ways that cannot be accounted for by limited World Englishes (WE) paradigm. This can be illustrated through an analysis of the performative agency of individuals’ language usage in specific contact contexts. After a brief overview of the WE paradigm, this article offers a consideration of the Malaysian linguistic context and Malaysian English from a ‘post-WE’ perspective. The conclusion is that, rather than think of the respective WE and post-WE approaches as opposed to one another, it is more useful to characterize them as distinctive theoretical prisms that illuminate divergent issues.