This chapter reviews varieties of British English that have developed in South Asian communities around the United Kingdom. There is no single British Asian English; rather, the term can be used to describe a diverse range of regional sub-varieties. South Asians are the largest ethnic minority in the United Kingdom, with large concentrations in urban areas across England, including London, Birmingham, Leicester and Bradford. In addition to large demographic numbers, a reason for the emergence of distinctive varieties in South Asian communities is the historical presence of English in South Asian countries, reinforcing systematic divergences from British English speech norms. The chapter reviews the history of British South Asian communities in recent decades, and then describes an array of features of these regional varieties: phonetics and phonology, lexicon, and grammar, as well as at the level of discourse and conversational interaction, where systematic signals of identity and ideology can be observed in speech style variation and code-switching.

Due to high turnover, formal international organizations (FIGOs) face challenges in retaining knowledge – particularly about strategic errors in operations. Errors in the arena of crisis management involve high costs, such as civilian casualties. However, scholarship addressing how security FIGOs share knowledge about what went wrong remains limited. This chapter argues that informal networks among political and military elites are critical for knowledge sharing within FIGOs, even in the face of sophisticated formal learning systems. The study draws on interviews with 120 elite officials at NATO and employs process tracing and social network analysis. Findings indicate that knowledge sharing hinges on the actions of a few elites – “knowledge guardians” – who are central to the transnational, informal elite network. Challenging assumptions about the superiority of formal systems, this chapter stresses that informal governance plays a central role in FIGO knowledge retention, which is critical for institutional memory and learning.

Bilinguals change their way of communicating when they are with monolinguals and when they are with bilinguals who share their languages. Whereas they avoid using their other language(s) with monolinguals (they are in a monolingual mode), they may call upon it (or them) when interacting with bilinguals, either by changing over completely to the other language(s) or by bringing elements of the other language(s) into the language they are speaking (they are then in a bilingual mode). The author reviews how he developed the notion of language mode, which, at the cognitive level, implies a change of activation of the languages and processing mechanisms. He summarizes some of the basic elements of language mode as described in a 2001 seminal chapter, discusses how language mode has fared since, and presents additional evidence for it. He then proposes some follow-up comments that deal with the level of activation of the deactivated language(s) in a monolingual mode, the complex nature of the variable that is language mode, and how it compares to the adaptive control hypothesis. He ends with reactions to language mode – many positive and some critical.

This section contains examples of four wills made by members of the laity, both men and women, at the end of the fourteenth and beginning of the fifteenth centuries. This is a genre of which many examples survive in local records and in episcopal registers. Here one can see the kind of things that people would leave to their relatives or to the poor, from domestic articles, often associated with their profession, and clothes, to sums of money.

This section contains excerpts from two sermons, one from the thirteenth century by Thomas of Chobham who wrote a number of sermons, a work on preaching and a work on virtues and vices, and one anonymous sermon in macaronic form, from the fifteenth century, in which Latin and English are blended to create a syntactically homogeneous whole. The purpose of such macaronic sermons is unclear. The third item in this section is a short ghost-story, which appears in a commonplace book, and was possibly used in a sermon to make a point about the importance of the Mass for remission from time in Purgatory.

Duke Humfrey, a younger son of king Henry IV and younger brother of king Henry V, is famous for the library he donated to the University of Oxford and whose name was given to the room above the Divinity School built to house his books. In this everyday document, another CLose Roll, one finds a list of the furniture granted to him by his father when as a young man he was moving to Hadleigh Castle in Essex. This list of armour and domestic items is fascinating for the richly multilingual vocabulary with classical words mixing with late Latin, and with terms derived from Greek and French and English. Some of these words are morphologically integrated into Latin, others are left unintegrated giving a feel of code-switching.

Oral witness is also the basis for the account of what Margery Baxter, charged with heresy at Norwich in 1428, has said and done. Her friends and neighbours are called to witness against her, and through their words we learn not only of the shocking things she has said which confirm her contempt for the Church, but details of the women’s lives.

Æthelweard, the writer of the Chronicle, is mentioned in this Treaty, made between Æthelred the Unready and the Viking leaders in the early 990s after a period of disastrous attacks by the Danes in England. A set of agreed rules as to behaviour between the English and the Vikings is listed. Sigeric, Archbishop of Canterbury is also mentioned. The text contains a number of Old English words and Latin words created from Old English.

This chapter considers the impact of Greek on Latin Literature. Unlike the expectations of modern post-colonial theory, the imperial Romans were captured by Greek culture. Latin literature’s relation to Greek becomes a key moment in the cultural self-definition of Rome. This cultural history is explored first through Cato the Elder as a figure who publicly was scornful of the impact of Greek culture on Rome, and who became thus for later Romans an icon of conservative opposition to cultural change. The chapter then considers how much Latin Greek writers might be presumed to know and, conversely, how Romans explicitly paraded their adaption and adaption of Greek material and Greek language in their writings. Third, the chapter considers the politics of code-switching between Greek and Latin. Fourth, the chapter looks at how this cultural conflict becomes a matter of Christian ideology as part of a politics of translation between Hebrew, Greek and Latin: what changes when God’s word is transformed between languages? Finally, the chapter asks what is known by Latin literature that Greek does not know (and vice versa)? What boundaries should we place between Greek and Latin literature?

For bilinguals, the use and knowledge of one language affects how they process the other. Various cross-linguistic influences (CLI) can be observed in both language production and comprehension across all domains of linguistics. We start by broadly exploring the concept of transfer, both negative and positive, and forward and reverse. In doing so, we identify various classifications of CLI. Following this, we review key studies on phonological, lexical, morphological, and syntactic transfer along with other types such as discursive, pragmatic, and sociolinguistic. We find that there are a number of factors that can determine the degree to which transfer emerges or whether it happens at all. We then review studies investigating the ability to switch between the two language systems. In doing so, we look at theoretical models that explain what facilitates language switching and what empirical studies tell us about the neural and electrophysiological activity that arises in language switching. Finally, we discuss dreaming and bilingualism and argue that dreaming in an L2, contrary to popular belief, does not necessarily imply fluency in that language.

This chapter explores topics related to key questions about leadership in global settings, including: the meaning of leadership; how Eastern and Western leadership traditions differ; the meaning of global leadership; a look at two leadership models; the role of gender in leader behavior and success; and evaluating global leadership outcomes and effectiveness

Drawing on the work of Jones and Shorter-Gooden (2003), we review the concept of “shifting” as it relates to Black women and the contexts in which they live and move. We discuss the ways that Black women may shift in the context of their workplace, intimate, and familial relationships. We highlight how shifting can be unavoidable and automatic for Black women, which can also leave them feeling inauthentic. We share the emotional toll that shifting can take on Black women. This chapter includes specific recommendations to increase Black female clients’ awareness of shifting with strategies to help them settle into authenticity and self-acceptance.

Multilingualism played an important role in the development of Standard English, but previous generations of scholars downplayed the multilingual element in its history to the extent of ignoring late medieval institutional code-switching altogether. In the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, code-switched record-keeping was routine practice, from prestigious institutions to private individuals, although no history of English mentions it and very little of it is published. In this chapter, I firstly establish my claim that multilingualism led to Standard English by showing that Standard English is the descendant of coalesced supralocal Englishes that adopted both the written conventions of Anglo-Norman and much of its content-word stock when code-switching practices were reversed. What this means is that instead of a Medieval Latin grammatical matrix containing Anglo-Norman and English words, fifteenth century scribes switched to an English grammatical matrix containing code-switched Anglo-Norman and English words. Standard English was the eventual outcome of this reversal. I then track the “monolingual origin” story, still repeated in textbooks today – namely, the story that Standard English supposedly developed mainly from the dialect of the “East Midlands”, or “Central Midlands”, or “Chancery English”, or a mixture of the above, depending on the textbook. I show that the “monolingual origin” story goes back to the early 1870s and consider the reasons for why the monolingual-source explanation prevailed for so long.

The chapter ’Meow and More’ lead us to the sociolinguistic concepts of code, code-switching, bilingualism, and multilingualism. It describes transnational communication, polylanguaging, translanguaging, and networked multilingualism by using cat-related examples, going over the technological aspects of computer-mediated communication to show how technology affects multilingual online discourse. The chapter also illustrates how we use language to construct our identity in the cat-related digital spaces.

Revolutionary developments along the El Paso and Ciudad Juárez border during the turn of the twentieth century created a cultural renaissance that resulted in scores of literary works, memoirs, films, and other artistic productions that rearticulated the experiences of living in a liminal border zone. This chapter explores serialized literature published by El Paso Spanish-language newspapers during the Mexican Revolution, including Tomóchic (1896) by Lauro Aguirre and Teresa Urrea, Los de abajo (1915) by Mariano Azuela, Memorias de mi viaje (1914) by Olga Beatriz Torres, The Wise Man of the Land of Moctezuma (ca. 1925) by Victor L. Ochoa, and the bilingual film by Félix and Edmundo Padilla, La Venganza de Pancho Villa (ca. 1930). I argue that the literature and film produced in these two cities along the international dividing line reveal the liminality of frontera itself produced much of the affective charge of fronterizo cultural productions.