This study examines English-Korean hybrid neologisms as a dynamic feature of youth language in contemporary Korea. Employing a mixed-methods approach that integrates linguistic analysis with survey data from university students, it investigates how hybrid expressions such as gatsaeng ‘God-life’ and juchabilleon ‘parking villain’ are formed through derivation, compounding, blending, pseudo-affixation, wordplay, and semantic duplication. These hybrids creatively embed English lexical elements within Korean grammatical and discursive structures, reflecting both linguistic innovation and cultural localization. Survey findings reveal that such hybrid expressions are widely used in casual conversation and digital spaces, often without conscious awareness of their hybrid nature – indicating lexical normalization. While participants only moderately associated hybrids with global or cultural identity, they valued them for their brevity, relatability, and ability to foster peer connection in fast-paced, media-rich environments. Some hybrids, such as noepisyeol ‘brain + official’, also function as tools for humor, irony and social critique. Overall, the study argues that English-Korean hybrid vocabulary serves not only as a site of linguistic creativity but also as a sociocultural marker. By blending global English with local communicative practices, Korean youth use hybrid terms to construct identity, reinforce group belonging, and engage with increasingly digitalized cultural spaces. These findings contribute to broader discussions on language change, identity and media influence in non-English-dominant contexts.

This study investigates the role of English in Bali’s tourism‑driven economy, focusing on investment in English learning among Balinese tour guides. It examines the intersection of economic, social, and cultural factors shaping language acquisition, comparing learners of English at the grassroots who rely on formal, informal, or mixed methods of acquisition. Using Darvin and Norton’s (2015) investment model, the study explores how ideology, identity, and capital influence English learning trajectories. Data were collected through questionnaires and semi‑structured interviews with six Balinese tour guides, representing diverse linguistic biographies and learning contexts. Findings reveal that despite systemic barriers, learners of English at the grassroots demonstrate resilience and adaptability by leveraging social and cultural capital. While some depend on informal interactions, others access formal education or combine both approaches to enhance their opportunities. The study underscores the vital role of English as a tool for economic and social mobility in Bali’s international tourism industry, while also investigating the investment elements that shape learners’ trajectories.

Scholarship in World Englishes has been prolific over the past several decades, and today, English is accepted as the world’s ‘hypercentral’ language (de Swann 2002). Despite legitimizing varieties of English used in diverse parts of the world, however, the focus of most World Englishes scholarship has been on educated varieties of English, perpetuating the hegemony of the educated elite. Scholarship on varieties of English used by uneducated/less educated users has been neglected, even in contexts like India, where the number of less educated users of English far exceeds the educated. This paper studies the English used at the grassroots by multilingual Indians in urban India and Oman, a country with a large migrant labor population from India. This qualitative study analyses a small corpus of public and restaurant signs and WhatsApp messages produced by Indians at the grassroots levels in urban India and Oman, and focuses on categorizing the features employed to communicate (successfully). Features are categorized as orthographic, lexical, and grammatical. The study concludes with a discussion on the necessity of including English at the grassroots in World Englishes scholarship to capture the reality of the Englishes used around the world.

This paper explores the complementation of the verb prevent in contemporary English. While the verb is typically followed by from -ing, British English also exhibits a variant without from (e.g. They must carry out a forensic examination of these failings to prevent them happening again [The Daily Mail, 22 December 2020]). In British English, this construction has in fact been reported to be on the increase in recent years. Since previous studies on this topic have tended to rely on a limited number of examples, the present research investigates a larger dataset drawn from the 2010 issues of The Daily Mail (British) and USA Today (American). This study also examines the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus as a supplementary resource. The BAWE corpus is a collection of academic assignments and provides insight into unedited uses of the verb prevent. The findings are as follows: the use of from-less -ing is indeed expanding in contemporary British English; the rate of this expansion differs between newspaper texts and unedited academic writing; and the complementation patterns of prevent are more varied in contemporary English than previously assumed. The discussion concludes by situating these present-day uses within the historical development of this verb.

English–medium instruction (EMI) has become a highly contested topic in discussions on the language of instruction policies in the Global South, raising critical questions about whether it truly delivers on the promises made in policy rhetoric and public discourse. While EMI is often promoted as a pathway to social, educational, and economic success for all, its rapid expansion raises concerns about linguistic inequality, social stratification, and unequal educational access. Through a critical synthesis of recent EMI literature, this paper identifies some persistent misconceptions that underpin the promotion and expansion of EMI in the Global South. These include the presumed neutrality of English, the belief in its automatic pedagogical and economic benefits, and the assumption that EMI leads to equitable access and improved content learning. The paper highlights the ideological and material consequences of EMI, such as epistemic injustice, linguistic hierarchies and social reproduction. In doing so, it calls for a rethinking of EMI beyond instrumentalist and Anglocentric logics and urges the centering of linguistic diversity, multilingual pedagogies and critical policy orientations. The article concludes with implications for future EMI scholarship and practices, particularly in contexts marked by deep social, linguistic and educational inequalities.

Services related to paid domestic work in private households are an important global labor market for migrant women. The Philippines is one of the largest exporters of work-force for the international domestic work sector. In this context, the linguistic legacy of American colonization becomes a key factor: English is an official language of the Philippines alongside Filipino. In addition, several varieties of Philippine English are widespread. Against this backdrop, Filipino and Filipina workers are positioned as competent, Anglophone workers in low-wage sectors such as the global domestic work market. Based on these attributions, they are also commodified as workers who can easily learn other languages and who are versatile and compatible with all linguistic and cultural spaces – worldwide. This paper sheds light on the multilingual repertoires of Filipina domestic workers in the Spanish capital, Madrid. The study is grounded in the paradigms of critical ethnographic sociolinguistics, migration linguistics and multilingualism research. The underlying data are based on narratives of Filipinas who migrated to Spain between 1971 and 2017. The findings reveal complex tensions around English. On the one hand, English is often perceived as prestigious and therefore valuable linguistic capital that can lead to social mobility. On the other hand, English is not seen as a panacea for securing employment beyond domestic work. Extrapolating from these findings, the overall picture that emerges is that English is deeply embedded in structurally determined social inequalities, which can be observed both in the country of origin and in the destination society.

Employing the ‘observation and collection’ method, this paper tracks some of the changes to the recent British English lexicon that have occurred through the use of syntactic category change. These involve primarily nominalization and verbification. Many of the examples discussed in the main body of the text and extended in the annex are of a contemporary nature.

South Korea’s enduring obsession with English education has recently taken a new form in chil-se-ko-si, a Korean term referring to competitive English entrance exams for six- and seven-year-olds. This phenomenon reflects a broader shift toward performance-driven, high-stakes instruction in early childhood, shaped by policy gaps, market expansion, and parental anxiety. This article examines how chil-se-ko-si has become a mechanism of social sorting. It further explores whether such trends remain justifiable in an era increasingly mediated by generative AI. Drawing on a critical policy review that integrates media discourse, government data, and a national survey (Shin et al. 2023), the analysis is grounded in critical discourse analysis and Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic capital. Findings show that early English education is less about language acquisition and more about signaling class status, imposing emotional and financial burdens on families while reinforcing social hierarchies. Medical and educational experts express concern about the developmental and psychological costs of such early academic pressure. As AI tools begin to reshape how English is accessed and used, the persistence of chil-se-ko-si raises urgent questions about what it means to prepare children for the future. The article calls for early English education to be reoriented toward developmental appropriateness, equity, and contextual relevance in a rapidly evolving, technology-mediated world.

Recent years have seen an increase in forced migration from the Global South, e.g., Congolese refugees with long transits in Uganda, to countries in the Global North, like Norway. Many of these newly-arrived Congolese refugees in Norway have English in their linguistic repertoires after decades-long transits in Uganda. English can thus be used as a lingua franca in Norway while they are learning Norwegian, as many Norwegians also have English in their repertoires. However, the ways these refugees have learnt English differ starkly from the ways most Norwegians have learnt English. While most Norwegians have mainly learnt English formally, i.e. in school, these Congolese refugees have mainly learnt English informally, i.e. outside language classrooms. The present article explores specific examples of how these refugees have learnt English. Some have, for example, learnt English through lingua franca interaction with other refugees with whom they do not share any other languages than English; others have initiated English language awareness in the wild themselves through, for example, talking explicitly about the English language with motorcycle riders in Uganda; and others have listened to English-speaking radio programmes in order to learn English faster. I argue that many of these ways of learning English informally can be referred to as “grassroots learning” of English, since English learning is initiated by the refugees themselves. These findings from empirical research among newly-arrived Congolese refugees in Norway may contribute to developing our understandings of informal English language learning, as well as making sure forced migrants’ voices are heard.

This paper analyses linguistic information regarding signage developed by Ugandan English speakers at the grassroots level, as a category of non-elite users of English. It specifically examines linguistic signs displayed at small‑scale informal businesses, focusing on the source of the signs and the language(s) used in terms of features and the justifications for the choice of the language(s). The results show three types of signs: those written in English (which are predominant), those that blend English and Acholi, and those written in Acholi. Where English is involved, the findings reveal that the choice was mainly based on attracting a wider readership and thus clientele, as well as the fact that English is the functional official language in Uganda. It was also observed that both standard and nonstandard English were used. The source of the signs was reported to be grassroots users of English but sometimes artists and/or acrolectal users of English were involved in writing/drawing the signs.

Despite comments in the ELT literature on the importance of word-stress for comprehensibility in English, there are many places where native speakers of English appear to pay it little attention, showing systematic variation as well as errors. At the very least, there is a paradox here, in that learners are told to get a feature right that native speakers feel free to ignore. More detailed consideration, though, shows that matters are not as simple as this implies. In this paper, several types of stress variation in English are exemplified, and it is also shown that in everyday usage native English speakers are flexible in what they will accept where stress is concerned. This raises questions about the best model for teaching stress in English as a second or foreign language. A simple right/wrong dichotomy is unlikely to reflect native usage.

This study examines how English is semiotically represented in video games, an under–explored but promising virtualscape. Drawing on the concept of semiotic landscape, this study critically explores how English and other semiotic resources work together to create social meanings and what are the ideological forces governing the process of semiotic appropriation. Data were collected from the in–game English representation and other semiotic resources from two female–oriented Chinese video games. It is found that English embodies cosmopolitan and poetic dispositions in the romanticized virtual space. Such dispositions are made relevant to the globally consuming elite class who are assumed not only to have access to the world consumption opportunities but also to show literary appreciation with a sense of distinction. The paper highlights the implications of these findings for understanding romance–mediated English as classed and gendered ideologies in the context of the increasing popularity of female–oriented game sphere.

While the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) for languages was originally developed for the European context, its influence has extended to other regions. The present paper highlights this growing influence by reporting on revisions to grammar in South Korea’s National English Curriculum based on CEFR criteria and the related CEFR-based English Grammar Profile resource. Specifically focusing on Appendix 4 of the 2015 curriculum, which consists of example sentences of language forms for communication (e.g. Kate is from London), the revising process based on CEFR and the English Grammar Profile involved two steps: 1) adding grammatical categories for the example sentences, and 2) reorganizing the school level where the grammatical categories are recommended to be taught. The resulting changes were implemented in the 2022 Korean National English Curriculum, which began being applied nationwide to English education in 2024.

This paper investigates the nonstandard use of first‑person singular pronouns (myself and I) in coordinate constructions, such as John and I or John and myself. Native English speakers frequently disregard prescriptive grammar rules by using subject or reflexive forms in place of object forms in sentences like Give those papers to John and I. The frequency of such nonstandard usage raises questions, such as when and why speakers substitute nominative or reflexive pronouns for object pronouns in coordinate constructions, and what evidence exists for the existence of fixed constructions like X and I or X and myself. To address these questions, the study analyzes data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Findings provide strong evidence for the existence of an X and I construction in that the nonstandard form is common after the coordinator but not before. Evidence for an X and myself construction is weaker, since untriggered reflexives also appear outside coordinate constructions. First‑person singular forms are more likely to appear in hypercorrect and untriggered forms that other pronouns. The research suggests that X and I may be stored in a chunk, possibly due to overgeneralizations resulting from prescriptive corrections during language acquisition.

In the introduction for their recent state-of-the-art volume on English at the grassroots, Meierkord and Schneider (2021) point out the recurrent problem of Creolistic study not being fully incorporated into the World Englishes paradigm, arguing, like Mufwene (1997; 2001) and others, that English-based Creoles are best viewed as varieties of English ‘and, as such, require their integration into existing models and theories, too’ (11). Further work which seeks to overtly integrate Creole varieties within studies of English at the grassroots – the ‘new player in the World Englishes paradigm’ (Buschfeld 2001, 25) – has not been quickly forthcoming, though, with most of the work in the field focusing on ‘typical’ multilingual settings. In an attempt to remedy this, the current paper discusses the language situation in Trinidad, the last island in the Caribbean’s Lesser Antilles. In Trinidad, Trinidadian English Creole (TEC) and Trinidadian English (TE) interact in a complex where English might be best viewed as a second dialect (ESD), rather than in one of the prototypical ENL, ESL, or EFL situations of acquisition or use (cf. Deuber 2014). After an exploration of the limited research that has been done on language use and social class in Trinidad, this paper compares those previous findings on morphosyntactic features with new data from short semi-structured interviews conducted with speakers who can be described as grassroots.