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Developments in the Malaysian language situation, accepting Malay, English and Mandarin Chinese as relevant language choices begins to resemble that of Singapore which is discussed in much detail in the next paper. A different form of multilingualism is present in Hong Kong, which after the introduction of the legally binding "One Country, Two Systems" policy was facing a balancing act between Cantonese, English and Mandarin Chinese. In China, the national language policy places Mandarin Chinese at the top of the various dialect chains in the country and through education admonishes the new generation to become bilingual and literate in the national language. [Extracted from the article]

Communication in the current era has morphed into forms that differ markedly to those of old, owing to new mobilities, technologies, modalities, and rewritten historiographies, and to the ways in which we are progressively enacting identity. Nose's understandings of Amele, Finnish, and Tok Pisin contribute well to his argument of how Amele's morphologies position Amele as a unique language. The study follows Nose's extended ethnography of the Amele region and its dialects, during which, Nose explored the communicative intricacies of this highly understudied language. [Extracted from the article]

As a cultural construct, the idol is a consumer product created to "heal" in the age of exhaustion. Layering a "guardian" aspect onto Laura Mulvey's "male gaze," this paper contextualizes the commodification and consumption of innocence. This paper brings the documentary, Tokyo Idols (2017), and the animated film, Perfect Blue (1997), into a conversation to theorize how femininity is constructed and commodified in Japan's pop idol industry. The idol culture consumes innocence only to create more trauma for women by stressing the arbitrary importance of innocence and sacrificing female agency in the process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a sociolinguistic study of the linguistic landscape of signboards in Singapore hawker centres. It examines the language(s) displayed on the signboards of 2,145 stalls in the 20 largest hawker centres in Singapore. Hawker centres in Singapore are open-air eating places patronised by thousands of people each day. With less government intervention in the languages that can be displayed on hawker centre signboards, the signs reflect the languages used and identities adopted by the masses in a multilingual setting. This language ecology enables us to observe how languages interact at individual and societal levels in hawker centres and how linguistic diversity is maintained despite the apparent widespread use of English in Singapore. We examine how besides the monolingual, bilingual and multilingual and hybrid signboards, hawker centres are unique habitats in this language ecology where non-Mandarin dialects are preserved, and traditional Chinese characters are commonly seen, in a globalised Singapore. The hawker centres showcase a linguistic landscape of identity, diversity, and continuity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how ideological orientations shape the programmes and curriculum of Japanese as a heritage language (JHL) schools in England as well as teachers' practices and attitudes in response to social diversity in such settings. This paper is a result of a linguistic ethnography which explores subjective perspectives constructed locally by people in JHL schools. Japanese communities overseas tend to be regarded as homogenous. However, in the contemporary world of mobility, connectivity and diversity they exhibit heterogeneity. This paper argues that JHL schools emerged as a response to educational needs arising from heterogeneity amongst Japanese migrants and that further diversification is occurring within JHL schools. Consequently, these schools and their teachers need ways to manage diversity in the classroom. Translanguaging is examined as a strategy for inclusion and also as a positive ideological orientation towards differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Arabic language is associated with Islam and is the language of the Holy Qur'an, which Muslims believe to be God's words. Due to religious, educational, socio-cultural, and geographic factors, Qur'anic Arabic is revered by many Muslims in the Asian Pacific countries, who use the language to perform religious rituals. Those Muslims use the language as an Islamic lingua franca to communicate with each other. This paper discusses the historical relationship between Islam and Arabic, how this relationship strengthens both of them, and how they both spread across the world, especially to the Asian Pacific countries that have the majority of the world's non-Arab Muslims. It also sheds light upon the ways in which Islam preserves the Arabic language and converts it into a universal language that is used in all of these countries. This leads the discussion of how learning Arabic in Asian Pacific communities strengthens communication not only among Muslims but also within each Muslim to conduct his/her religious deeds, prayers, and behaviors. The paper also attempts to explore the possibility of learning Arabic as a foreign language by some Non-Muslims in those communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following a critical sociolinguistics approach to language maintenance in the diaspora, this paper investigates interplaying linguistic identities and ideologies towards home and host languages among four case-study Pakistanis living in Catalonia, a Catalan/Spanish-speaking European society. By drawing on fieldnotes, interviews, naturally-occurring conversations and visual materials gathered in a Barcelona call shop, it shows how informants invest in Spanish as the 'integration' language, despite being categorised as 'deficient' users of it. They present themselves as 'native' speakers of Urdu, which indexes modern 'Muslimness' and 'Pakistaniness', while Punjabi users, associated with the 'yokels', are silenced. English is ambivalently taken-up as an intra-group sign of educational status and political power and as an anti-Muslim 'coloniser' language. Overall, these stratifying sociolinguistic behaviours reveal how Pakistanis' home/host multilingual resources get re-ideologised through linguistic hierarchisations which foster the maintenance of majority languages only, dismissing minority language speakers, in unchartered transnational contexts where these are already 'delanguaged'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Chinese are one of the earliest established immigrant communities in the Netherlands and they are part of the new 'superdiversity' of metropolitan societies around the world, where the relative clarity of previous migration patterns is overlaid by vastly more complex, multilayered and less stable trajectories of movement. Understanding globalization as superdiversity (i.e. as a diversification of diversity instead of a homogenization of global culture in local language and culture practices), this paper aims to disentangle the complexities of being and knowing Chinese in the Netherlands, with respect to internal diversities within Chineseness and its relation to changing Chinese language ideologies. The empirical starting point for this contribution is an ethnographic project among young people of Chinese heritage living in the Netherlands in and around the setting of a complementary Chinese language school in the city of Eindhoven. The paper focuses on the polycentricity of Chinese, the transformations that occur in the linguistic culinary landscape and the discursive identity construction of Chinese-Dutch youth. Using a multi-site ethnographic methodology data are collected through structured observations, interviews with Chinese community members, linguistic landscaping and online ethnography. Overall, the paper argues that an ongoing shift along with demographic, economic and political changes in China has altered migration patterns, language ideologies and linguistic landscapes in the Chinese diaspora in the Netherlands. Young people of Chinese heritage articulate a whole repertoire of inhabited and ascribed identities, and they do so by means of a complex display and deployment of the ensemble of linguistic and communicative resources at their disposal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information related to the use of a new cross-language understanding of the use of "sort of " and will open up new areas for future research. Topics discussed include elevation of the current literature on cross-linguistic and intercultural pragmatics to a higher level, research paper "Sort of in Australian English: The elasticity of a pragmatic marker," by Jean Mulder and collegues and "On the functions of "sort of" in New Zealand TV programs," by Peyman G. P. Sabet.

In this study I examine the interplay of Islam, Arabic and intra-Asian student mobility. Specifically, through semi-structured interviews with three Indonesian male students who are pursuing their Arabic medium of instruction (AMI) degrees in Islamic Sharia at the Islamic University of Madinah in Saudi Arabia, I investigate two central questions: (1) What are the driving forces behind Indonesian Muslim students' mobility to Saudi Arabia for pursuing their degrees in AMI? (2) How do Indonesian Muslim students perceive Arabic in general and AMI programs in particular? The findings reveal that the participants' desire to move and pursue their AMI degrees in Saudi Arabia were charged with different expectations, objectives and agendas. At the heart of these differences lies what I term as the sacralization of language phenomenon among the participants. This very phenomenon refers to the ways in which Arabic (including its practice) is construed by the participants as beneficial in this world and the Hereafter; as a linguistic vehicle for sustaining Islamic identity; and as a tool through which they show their true engagement with and commitment to Islam and Islamic life. I conclude the paper with a call for serious scholarly engagement with the sacralization of language phenomenon in the emerging scholarship of intra-Asian student mobility within the Asian region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will identify the major trends that can be determined from an overall study of recent language policies across Asia. The trends can be seen across three interrelated themes, namely: the promotion and privileging of one language as the national language as part of an attempt to create a nation state, often in polities that are linguistically extremely diverse; a decrease in the promotion of indigenous languages other than the national language and the neglect of these in education in many countries; and the promotion of English as the first foreign language in education systems, often giving other 'foreign' languages a minimal role in education. Possible reasons and motivations for these trends will be discussed and countries where exceptions to these trends can be identified will be illustrated. The aim of the paper will be to discuss these trends and to critically evaluate selected language policies. The paper will conclude with predictions for the future linguistic ecology of the region and for the interrelationships of respective national languages, indigenous languages and English [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As one of the industrial centers of Western China, Xi'an is undergoing a process in which surrounding "urban villages" are incorporated into the urban area. This paper reports on the contact situation between the Xi'an dialect of Beishan Menkou "urban village" and Mandarin Chinese. Data collection started with traditional dialect survey methodology which assumes the dialect to be homogeneous and shared across village members. It requires respondents to read a standard list of Chinese characters. The assumption that the dialect is homogeneous is generally agreed upon for older generations but is doubtful for the younger generation who are exposed to modern education and modern life. We therefore stratified the survey across three generations with six informants, a male and female informants for each generation. The results show that the dialect among the two older generations was still homogeneous and shared, whereas the youngest generations showed influence of Putonghua on the dialect. This resulted in a new dialect variant "Dialect with Putonghua features", which is recognized by urban village members as such. Female respondents generally were conceived of as speaking the New Dialect more clearly than their male counterparts. We also investigated the impact of the dialect on Putonghua and concluded that among the younger generation, a form of "Local Putonghua" developed, whereas the accented forms used by older generations are a variety of intermediate forms of this "Local Putonghua". The paper further provides details of the changes taking place in the New Dialect in terms of tones, initials and finals, vocabulary and grammar. Words in local Putonghua were also listed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports results from a reinvestigation of multilingualism in postcolonial Palau, conducted twenty years after the first study. The first-ever ethnographic language survey conducted in 1997–1998 highlighted the diglossic nature of Palau where English replaced Japanese as the 'high' language, while indigenous Palauan remained as the 'low' spoken language. It indicated three possible future scenarios: (a) shift from multilingualism to bilingualism after the older Japanese-speaking generation passes away; (b) stability of diglossia with a clear social division between an English-speaking elite and a predominantly Palauan-speaking non-elite; (c) movement towards an English-speaking nation with Palauan being abandoned. The restudy conducted in 2017–2018 provides real-time evidence to assess the direction and progress of change, whilst the ethnographic analysis of recent changes in language policies and the linguistic analysis of teenagers' narratives reveal the unpopularity of Palauan as a written language and the emergence of their own variety of English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout antiquity, the Chittagong Hill Tract was a sparsely populated region. This population increased with the immigration of different speech communities, thus changing its linguistic mosaic, and creating conditions for language contact between vernacular Bangla and between its ancestral Indo-Aryan variety Pali, the superstrate, and the Tibeto-Burman variety, the substratum. In the changing language contact situation, language contact involved various phenomena, such as language maintenance, the creation of new contact languages, i.e. pidgins and creoles as well as the acquisition and integration into a dominant L2. Through this language contact, the processes of language contact have had particular linguistic, social, and political outcomes that have shaped the region. The linguistic outcomes include lexical borrowing, calquing, and structural convergence, as well as the creation of a new contact language combining both the Indo-Aryan vernacular and Tibeto-Burman vernacular. This paper discusses these outcomes, and describes that changes in the social and political makeup of the region have ultimately led to language change. The study argues that linguistic change appears at present in several ways: The lexical makeup, phraseology and syntactic structure of Indo-Aryan varieties spoken by the Tibeto-Burman speech communities; pidgins including Chakma and Tanchangya which have emerged from contact between the Indo-Aryan variety and the Arakanese vernacular; a Tibeto-Burman pidgin which has emerged from contact between the superstrata Marma and the substrates Chak, Khumi, and Kheyang, which are spoken by the Marma, Chak, Khumi, and Kheyang ethnicities. Ultimately, the study presents that these social and linguistic outcomes have manifested themselves in the form of bilingualism and so code-mixing, and where the political outcomes of language contact have forged the political makeup of the Chittagong Hill Tract to bring the region to become one part of the larger political superstructure of Bangladesh. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study explores the intersections of gender and ethnicity as a point of inquiry in the emerging roles of Meranao women who work in the field of leadership. Drawing on qualitative interviews with seven Meranao women leaders in Lanao del Norte and Lanao del Sur, in The Philippines, this paper examines the multilayered issues and challenges these women face in their roles as leaders, as they leap into higher decision-making positions. I articulate the ideologies that shape their leadership experiences and their performative repertoires, and examine the ways in which they are able to perform their leadership roles given their opportunities and constraints. Finally, the study describes the agentic pathways the women traverse to effect leadership in Meranao politics and socio political development. Results show that intersectional approaches to investigating leadership, taking into account interconnected and overlapping factors of gender and ethnicity, can not only reveal the issues and challenges women leaders face, but also the individual agencies and strategies they use to overcome such constraints. The intersectionality approach challenges essentialist framings of leadership, and emphasizes an individual's social location, as reflected in the intersecting identities of these Meranao women. This intersectionality, as I reveal, allows for the emergence of a negotiated form of leadership among women, which requires a delicate balance between meeting social expectations as women and fulfilling roles as leaders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ket is the sole surviving member of the Yeniseian language family, spoken in the central part of North Asia. This large territory is also home to other language families: Samoyedic, Ob-Ugric, Tungusic, and Turkic. Apart from Yeniseian, which are strikingly unique, all language groups in the area conform to a common typological profile. Subsequent to contact over several hundred years, many of the core grammatical features that distinguish Yeniseian from the other language families have undergone a 'typological accommodation,' a phenomenon most prominent in Modern Ket, to mimic the dominant language type in the area. The present article aims to provide an overview of some ways in which typological accommodation has affected the phonemic tones and nominal and verbal morphology in Modern Ket, and to show that this peculiar phenomenon is also attested at the syntactic level in formation of adverbial and relative clauses. As such, the paper presents that the phonemic and morphological structures of Modern Ket uniquely position the language for discourse and communication. Here, its speakers deploy these communicative devices, specifically designed followed extended contact with other languages, as representative of their language community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wayang Kulit performance, the art of shadow puppetry, has long embodied and conveyed political and secular voice throughout South and Southeast Asia, significant for the maintenance of cultural heritage. Throughout Malaysia's modern history, Wayang as a dominant medium of education has mediated shifts in language ideologies and socialization, to the extent where changes to the Wayang correlate highly with changes to the Malay language. In the 1980s, the Malaysian government sought to attack and hence curtail Wayang performance, and to obscure its lineage, claiming that the Wayang defiles Islam and Malaysia as an Islamic state. The government sought to discontinue the Wayang, or at least to alter it significantly, and to persecute its adherents. With its attempts to mobilize the economy through neoliberal politics and the adoption of new non-poetic language registers, the Malaysian government altered Malaysian vernacular, cultural practices, and ideologies. Yet, little scholarly work, particularly through an Anthropological lens, has discussed the correlations and influences to these shifts. This paper addresses the significance of Wayang Kulit to the Malay language, that is, its contiguity with standardized language and vernacular, its semiotic complexities during performance and in larger society, and its junctures with Malaysian politics. The study unearths changes in the Wayang, its stylizations, symbolisms and performativities, in the latter 20th century, where these changes have aligned with cultural and language shifts, yet which the government has legitimated as pro Islamic and neoliberal. The data set includes a multi year ethnography of the Wayang, and a corpus of discussions, documentations, and scripts of Wayang performances and narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by Wang about the different representations of a news event and two diachronic studies by Huuang and Chen, and Feng and Wu about how sociopolitical changes lead to discursive changes in the Chinese media.

The article discusses university and college students in China who are studying the English language and how this investment in the English language and linguistics in general affects their social and cognitive perspectives. With the passing of the World Trade Organization (WTO) agreement, China has a significant number of students studying the English language. This article considers the sociocultural benefits and costs of this concentration on the English language.

Based on the data drawn from an intensive ethnographic study on young adults in Bangladesh conducted in the virtual space, specifically Facebook (FB) and analysis of those data through a transglossic framework, the paper shows that the meaning-making processes in lingua franca (LF) encounters can be appropriately deciphered when their language is considered in terms of translocalisation, transculturation, transmodality, and transtextualisation. The data also demonstrate that the young adults deliberately flout the linguistic features of English with their Bangladeshi counterparts, while they prefer to approximate a native form of English with other native and non-native speakers of English. Even though their English is variable and emergent in the potential LF context of the virtual space, their conscious choice of approximating a near-native form indicates that they are keenly aware of the ideologies related to ELF and associated with ELF identity attributes. The paper confirms the necessity of reconceptualisation of ELF, considering the idiosyncrasies of young adults' language practices; and identifies the paradoxes of sociolinguistic profiling of South Asian speakers, based on dichotomous and binary phenomena, such as ELF and non-ELF speakers, EFL (English as a Foreign Language) vs. ESL (English as a Second Language) speakers, or members of the Inner Circle vs. Outer Circle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the reality of 'Japanese communities' in London and the interrelation between language and identity. First, we trace the history of the Japanese community to around the beginning of the Meiji Era (1868–1912), when Japan emerged from national isolation. We then focus on one of the 'communities' established around the start of the 21st century by work-related and independent relocation. We present the life stories of two women who independently resided in London and shed light on the fluid nature of language maintenance and negotiation of identities. Through the close analysis of these personal experiences, we elucidate the complex reality of individuals who may be otherwise collectively understood as members of Japanese communities. These stories highlight the heterogeneity of the Japanese individuals in London, and therefore lead us to question the discursively constructed images of the 'Japanese communities'- and the nature and importance of 'language maintenance'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that transnational new media space is an important developmental context for migrant youth who have multiple social networks across geographical and cultural locations. Informed by the ecological model of development and literacy studies, this paper examines Korean migrant adolescents’ sense of self and belonging in relation to the three intertwined identity categories – nationality, race, and ethnicity; and the role of new media in youth’s identity negotiation and representation. Using an ethnographic case study design, this paper analyzes adolescents’ identity work reflected in their verbal interviews and multimodal new media literacy practices. Findings suggest that despite the complexity of youths’ identity as seen in their shifting meaning of being Korean across national, ethno-cultural, and racial contexts, youths actively reconstructed and shared a fuller range of their identity constructs drawing on the resources and linguistic tools in transnational new media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of relationships is one that is central to numerous subfields within communication, including interpersonal, organizational, and public relations. This conceptual paper investigates the notion of relationships and proposes a framework to understand and explicate corporate-community relationships (CCRs), a specific type of organization-public relationships (OPRs). In developing this framework, we draw upon existing literature and our experiences in Liberia related to natural resource management (NRM) as part of a multi-year collaborative peacebuilding initiative. We advance a framework of CCRs that (a) helps develop further empirical research and knowledge about these relationships and (b) contributes to the practice of more transformative relationships between Western and Asian multinational corporations (MNCs) and local communities in West Africa and beyond. This framework puts forth our conceptualization of CCRs as (a) constituted by the communicative, (b) dynamic, constantly influenced by macro and micro factors, and (c) complex. Drawing on our framework, we also advance some guiding questions for a research agenda in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the collaborative practices of an English as an additional language (EAL) teacher and a content area teacher in meeting the needs of refugee students in a secondary science classroom. The study is based in Victoria, Australia. Drawing on a sociocultural perspective on mediated teacher work, the study gathered qualitative data primarily through two group interviews with the teachers in the middle and at the end of the school term. A secondary source of data includes relevant documents namely teaching materials, students' work, and teachers' notes. Content analysis of data shows two broad collaborative practices, including joint lesson planning and resources development and joint teaching. These collaborative practices were found to create structured mediational spaces that enabled them to effectively work together to meet the needs of refugee EAL students in their class. The study generates implications for content and EAL teachers in collaboratively addressing the needs of refugees in mainstream classrooms and for school leadership in supporting EAL and content teachers in this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the attributes of questions asked during televised political interviews in Japan. It details the type, style, and mode of questions posed during broadcast programs to national- and local-level politicians, and nonpoliticians, including experts in different areas. Based on data gathered during 2012-2013 from three interview programs, the paper provides criteria for identifying questions and distinguishing them from other expressions, differentiates the diverse types of questions, and proposes new criteria to analyze interviewers' questions. Furthermore, the paper replicates and modifies the "Theory of Equivocation" to examine how Japanese interviewees cope with the communicative problems posed to them during televised political interviews and the effects of these questions on the interviewees' replies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considerable depth and breadth of research on Chinese English has been undertaken over the last three to four decades, contributing to the epistemological advancement of a number of academic disciplines, including world Englishes, Intercultural Communication, and Cultural Linguistics. Researching Chinese English involves engaging in ongoing theoretical developments in relevant disciplines that primarily focus on language and cultural studies, and the globalization and nativization of English in China. In this paper, we explore a Cultural Linguistics approach to researching Chinese English, and use cultural conceptualizations, including cultural schema, cultural category, and cultural metaphor, as the analytical framework with which to analyze a range of empirical linguistic data, including interviews, newspaper articles, textbooks, literary works by authors writing in Chinese English, and online media articles about China. We also draw out implications from researching Chinese cultural conceptualizations for intercultural communication involving Chinese speakers of English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a corpus of 200 articles from the People's Daily and the People's Daily Overseas Edition collected from 2010 to 2012, we examined the representation of English, applying framing theory (Chong & Druckman, 2007). The results indicate four dominant frames shared by both newspapers: exclusion/ oppression, warfare/protection, yardstick/benchmark, and bridge/needs. Both papers perceive the English language as a resource while constructing a Chinese identity fundamentally in competition with a Western identity reinforced by the English language. However, while both papers project the image of China as a unified, benign country proud of its linguistic and cultural heritage, the Overseas Edition seems more conscious in representing China as a motherland in need of protection from the threatening socio-cultural force of English. The article seeks to contribute to the growing body of research on language and identity in China, English and globalization, and the perception of English in the expanding circle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Documentary film has established itself as an important spatial extension of this nation's historicity. This paper explores the terrains of this critical transformational space which in recent years, has been dominated arguably increasingly, by a cohort of 'socialist' filmmakers. That such an 'alternative/independent' group of documakers - a label it is often associated with - edges over the 'mainstream' ones in terms of its worthiness, timeliness and relevance of an issue, debate or perspective, is a claim or perception that needs to be qualified in this paper. Notable documakers gave in-depth interviews on their creative works and issues of nation building both in shaping the trajectory of 'alternative' documentary, hence, sustaining a potentially transformative public sphere. This paper will engage in analyzing critical and defining documentary works as its mode of inquiry followed by the discourses gleaned from the interviews. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses how 'noting' has been conceptualized in the Language Management Framework originating in the work of Neustupný and Jernudd. It deals with the influence of the cognitivist concept of 'noticing' as used in the theories of Second Language Acquisition and instead proposes to assume the discursive approach of 'noting' inspired by Discursive Psychology and Conversation Analysis. It pays attention to the formulations and concrete words which people use to express that they 'noted' a phenomenon (be it linguistic, communicative or socio-cultural). Finally, it addresses micro-macro-linkage in the framework, namely, how 'noting' of everyday speakers connects to management acts performed by experts in institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses Language Management Theory (LMT) to explore situations in which non-native speakers of a language explicitly reveal that they have noted a potential linguistic deviation. This can be paraphrased as the concept of 'checking', identifiable through the use of question intonation for the trouble source item, phrases such as 'is that right?', or the offering of alternative words or forms. This process is explored in Czech conversations between native speakers and American missionaries. In the analysis, two major points are made: 1) There is a limit to the types of deviations which are noted in this way, as checking is mainly done in cases of potential lexical and morphological deviations, and 2) In order for this strategy to be realized, there must be an appropriate categorial context for its execution, particularly in regard to the categories that speakers assign (or do not assign) to one another situationally, such as 'non-native speaker' or 'language expert'. In this way, simple management can be directly connected to organized management in that missionaries learning a foreign language are instructed to utilize their interlocutors as 'language experts'. The paper also considers methodological tools for LMT analysts to uncover the fact that noting has occurred. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including papers analyzing language management by students or users of an additional language, an article that focuses on Internet-based communication, and a report on the 2011 language management symposium held at Waseda University in Japan.

This paper reports on a case study of Japanese exchange students that investigated the ways such students note and evaluate various types of contact between native and host academic cultures while participating in new communities of practice at an Australian university. In this study, language management theory (Jernudd & Neustupný, 1987; Neustupný, 1985, 1994, 2004) was employed in conjunction with Lave and Wenger's (1991) concept of legitimate peripheral participation in order to investigate the sociocultural influence on cognitive processes of language management. The findings illustrate that not only norm deviations but also the phenomena relating to norm universality and compatibility generated processes of noting and evaluation. This study also provides an insight into mechanisms of self- and other-noting, as well as negative evaluations of norm deviations, and sheds light on positive evaluations of common disciplinary knowledge and cross-cultural situational similarities. Based on the findings, this paper indicates that noting and evaluation in language management processes should be considered in relation to students' social positionings, their power relations with other community members, their perceptions of self, and the context where the management occurs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented for this issue which includes articles about communication in medicine, the physician-patient relationship, and patient participation.

This paper reports on the organization of Malaysia's linguistic landscape and the implications of this situation for contacts between providers of medical service and patients. The main purpose of this study is to clarify the position of Chinese private clinics in Malaysian society and to better understand language use between Chinese medical personnel and Chinese patients. The fieldwork focused on clinics in the Klang Valley, Malaysia and was carried out between December 2016 and March 2017. The results reveal the complex linguistic situation in the medical domain reflecting the general hierarchical social structure in Malaysia. Chinese patients have different wishes as regards their preferred language environment in these clinics, but generally prefer to use Mandarin Chinese for interaction with doctors. Medical staff also tend to prefer the use of Mandarin Chinese but also understand the need for dialect based interactions to create a feeling of harmony and belonging. The data are used to clarify existing problems in doctor-patient interaction and contribute to the debate of communication discordance in the healthcare domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports the results of direct observations of language use and sociolinguistic interviews in Xi'an city, Shaanxi province, China. The data were collected in the autumn of 2018. Direct observations were done in four vegetable and fruit markets providing a data set of 1,708 cases. A sample of market customers was also interviewed resulting in 168 interviews. The interview data made clear that in migrant families, home-town dialects are well maintained, but that for interactions in the city, PTH is preferred as it is for work-related interactions. The observation data showed that ninety percent of interactions between customers and salespeople were performed in either the Xi'an dialect or PTH. These two varieties were used in various combinations confirming wide-spread use of multilingual exchanges. These exchanges are further specified as speech-community-internal interactions, home-dialect exchanges and lingua franca exchanges. Community integration of migrants is clarified through the concept of the discourse communities. The latter structure the modern Xi'an speech community and connect to the national level PTH Koine Community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bilingualism has always been emphasized in Singapore's education system. Since 1959, Singapore government leaders have repeatedly stressed that bilingualism is the cornerstone of Singapore's language policy. Scholars researching language policy and planning in Singapore have also assumed that Singapore has always maintained a consistent stand on bilingualism. This paper cites the case of Chinese language (Mandarin) education as evidence to show how "bilingual" education has undergone significant changes in Singapore by tracing the historical changes and examining how bilingual education has evolved since its implementation. The findings show that the once-compulsory bilingual requirements gave way to differentiated ones in the history of Singapore's bilingual policy. This finding will help researchers have a better understanding of Singapore's "bilingual education" today and its position compared to other bilingual education systems in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In addition to its role in news dispersal, the newspaper has been cited for its potential in both education and identity creation and confirmation. This paper will examine the Newspaper in Education columns in a rural Japanese setting, revealing how these columns, while framed toward education, also address local identity creation through what is termed `locally scholastic' content. The Newspaper in Education (NIE) practice is dated in America to the 1930s and in Japan to 1988. This paper will briefly outline the NIE concept and general NIE activities in Japan before hypothesizing the role of NIE in local identity creation and presenting a case study of NIE columns from two newspapers in Aomori Prefecture, Japan - one prefecture-wide and the other a local newspaper - over the period from January to May, 2002. The examination used a team of native-speaker readers in order to establish the readability and balance of `scholastic' versus `local' content and orientation of the columns. This paper ultimately contextualizes how the NIE columns of these two newspapers contribute to both education and local identity creation in this rural Japan setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on the results of a qualitative study that explored the experiences of a group of student-teachers (STs) in Indonesia as they undertook a microteaching course as part of their undergraduate teacher training program. Grounded in the notions of 'teacher identity as the process of becoming' (Britzman, 2003) and 'identity in practice' (Varghese et al., 2005), the present paper examines how participation in a microteaching course that oriented STs to ELF pedagogy affected the formation of teacher identities amongst one group of STs in Indonesia. Data were gathered from three post-mini lesson interviews with individual STs and STs' mini lessons. The findings show a positive relationship between ELF pedagogy, STs' perception of their teacher role and their identity construction. Many STs' identity construction appears to be informed by their concerns of the hegemonic presence of English in the local community and their role primarily as a revival of Indonesian cultures. Although the majority of STs showed a general agreement towards the need to construct a teacher identity independent of native-speaker norms, a few STs continued to believe the importance of teachers to speak Standard English due to its marketability potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines a group of Hong Kong university students' experiences and identities in English as a lingua franca (ELF) communication. As part of a larger research study, this paper analyzes narratives written by eighteen English majors at a Hong Kong university on their experiences of communicating through ELF. The findings show that these students had generally positive experiences and reported achieving mutual understanding through ELF by employing various communicative strategies. The analysis also points to the complexity of the students' identity formation in ELF communication. As a result of their perceptions of the unequal power relations between native and non-native speakers of English, these students were found to perceive themselves in an inferior position when interacting with native speakers of English in ELF communication. Moreover, the students were found to reveal ambivalence in the perceptions of their identities in ELF communication, owing to their struggle over the competing desires of appropriating a native-speaker accent commonly associated with prestige and retaining some traces of their own accent in an attempt to maintain their lingua-cultural identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much research has been done addressing the issue of language and dialect and has attracted much interest in the Sinophone world. In this paper, the issue is approached from the perspective of Speech Community Theory (SCT) with discussion of the identification of Chinese varieties. There are mainly two approaches in previous research: linguistic and sociolinguistic. In the linguistic approach, the classification of languages and dialects is through comparison of linguistic descriptions and intelligibility. In the sociolinguistic approach, actual language use and attitudes of the speakers are investigated and ethnic and political factors are considered. The two approaches tend to result in different classifications. The purely linguistic classification tends to be narrower than the classification invoking attitudinal, cultural and political factors, resulting in a larger number of languages than the sociolinguistic approach. The different approaches are traced to divergent understandings of what a language is. A language is often understood purely as a tool of communication or, alternatively, it is regarded primarily as an identity device. Applying SCT, we analyze the connection between communication and identity formation, taking the example of Cantonese speakers. That case shows a correlation of linguistic contact with linguistic identity among native speakers. Consequently, the relevance of cultural and socio-political factors is explained through their impact on communication rather than directly on a linguistic identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports the results of direct observations of language use in two shopping areas in Shanghai, Nanjing East Road and Xujiahui. The data reported in this paper were collected in 2007. In Nanjing East Road, four traditional stores provided a base line for the use of Shanghainese. That base line (60 percent) was compared to a hierarchy of department stores in Xujiahui. The results showed that the store that best matched the base-line data attracted customers representing upper-working class / lower middle class customers. The remaining two stores attracted middle class and upper class customers. In the latter setting, it was found that a certain segment of the customers switched from Shanghainese to Putonghua for the business transaction, an effect we associated with the presence of young urban professionals of all backgrounds. The implications of these findings are discussed in the context of speech community theory, and network density, which allows predictions of changes taking place within the dominant language of the Shanghainese speech community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports the language behavior of a sample of Jilin University students. The data were collected in 2008, and a total of 2682 questionnaires were processed. The sample was detailed as to place-of-origin, year of study, college, and gender, and addressed language behavior and language attitude. Students originated from three areas: the Northeast, the Mandarin dialect area, and Southeastern China. Most students came from township environments and grew up there. The NE is relatively more urbanized as the result of early industrialization, but the Southeast, as regards family income, was the richer area. The study relates the reported language behavior to urban status, education and income level of parents, as well as to level of PTH pronunciation. It also addressed students' attitude toward Putonghua dominance, and code-switching. Code-switching with English words also was studied. Generally, proportionally more students with backgrounds in major urban centers (provincial cities and municipalities) claim Putonghua as first and best language than students originating from townships. Larger numbers of students with the latter background, however, show increased proficiency in Putonghua. Language use data, finally, make clear that in all three areas, the local and regional dialects are the majority means of communication, whereas the use of Putonghua increases across generations from grandparents to same generation kin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Those who do understand Arabic scripture are looked at in awe by many non-Arabic speakers, particularly if Arabic is their second language. If English is the lingua franca for business, science, and technology, Arabic is the undisputed lingua franca for Muslims. Non-Arabic speaking Muslims must use Arabic to perform daily rituals, even if they do not fully understand the literal meaning of most of the Arabic recitations involved. [Extracted from the article]

Nowadays, international communication using English as the medium is a common occurrence. To communicate effectively, English as a second language (ESL) speakers need to possess relevant communicative skills including understanding and being familiar with inner circle accents. This paper seeks to find out ESL learners' evaluative reactions to four inner circle accents, representing British, American, Australian and New Zealand English varieties, through an accent perception and a survey task conducted on Malaysian undergraduates at a public university in Malaysia. The participants responded to descriptors on speaker attributes categorized into three dimensions: competence, social appeal and accent preference while or after listening to a recorded passage read in one of the four accents by male and female speakers. The learners showed a tendency to prefer certain accents more than others. In general, the best rated accent was the British accent for the male speakers and the American accent for the female speakers. The New Zealand accent was rated the lowest among the male speakers and one of the lowest among the female speakers. The study also found that speaker's competence, speaker's social appeal and accent preference were positively correlated. These findings highlight the importance of listening practices and exposure to various English accents in ESL classrooms to prepare students for international and intercultural communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media as a new tool for political communication influences current developments in political campaigning. In combination with mainstream media, social media is increasingly used for purposes such as political marketing, mobilisation of voters, and public debate. This paper discusses how social media helped the Malaysian main opposition coalition, Alliance of Hope (PH), to topple the ruling party, National Front (BN), which had ruled Malaysia for the last 61 years. Literature on new media rarely shows positive relationships between new media usage and voting decisions. At most, social media plays a crucial role in extending the dissemination of information to voters. However, PH had to rely solely on social media for their political marketing in reaching out to both urban and rural constituencies, as the coalition was denied access to the government-controlled mainstream media. With data-based information, PH was able to segment voters and focus on marginalised constituencies, young voters, middle-class urban voters, and rural constituencies, which were the ruling party's main fortress, contributing to 57% of the vote. One of the misconceptions many politicians and political parties have is that merely using social media will win them the election. Ultimately, what mattered more in this case was whether political parties could register the currents of change percolating within an evolving Malaysian society and address voter grievances accordingly, something that BN, even with control over mainstream media and superior usage of social media, did not do. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Media credibility, as a construct that has been mainly developed in the western context, hasn't been examined thoroughly and tested in Asia cultural and social context. This research discusses and verifies media credibility as a multi-dimensional construct, with the support of empirical data. It discusses the impact of privately-owned news websites, e.g. Sina, on state-owned television stations, e.g. CCTV, with a focus on media credibility in the context of China. The data supports that media credibility includes both professional and political dimensions. The dimension of political orientation is a unique one developed directly in the context of China with empirical data support. This paper also explores contributing factors that impact media credibility in the Chinese context, and finds positive impact of privately-owned website use on media credibility of state-owned television. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many studies concerning culture and rhetoric have been restricted to the binary distinction of cultures or to etic perspectives by using western theories as framework to point out the weakness of Chinese rhetoric. Taking comparative rhetoric and emic approaches, this paper focuses on logical appeal and ethical appeal to discuss the cultural values reflected in the hotel discourses. In this study content analysis was used to encode the English and Chinese hotel introductions; quantitative method was used for data comparison and an interview for investigating the persuasiveness of the Chinese rhetorical strategies. The relation between cultural values and persuasive strategies was explored. It is concluded that cultural specificity at deep level is still an indispensable factor determining rhetorical strategies despite the globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]