This chapter introduces the concepts such as nomadic knowledging and nomadic languaging through ethnographic encounters with Mongolian nomadic herdsmen. Centred on the practice of the nomadic reminiscing circle, it explores how nomadic communities integrate additional languages such as English within their land-based epistemologies, while safeguarding cultural and linguistic boundaries. These practices embody both fluidity and rootedness, playfulness, and precarity, reflecting the adaptability and resilience of nomadic life. By examining how English is accepted only when mediated by humility and respect, the chapter highlights the relational ethics underlying nomadic engagements with language. It argues that applied linguistics must learn from nomadic perspectives, which emphasise mobility, contextual responsiveness, and land-connected ways of knowing, thereby offering new pathways for rethinking language in global and local contexts.

This chapter applies concepts defined and argued for throughout the book to the area of L2 teaching/pedagogy. It is shown that Second Language Learning/Teaching that is informed by linguistic findings would be beneficial to the students and would promote easier, faster, and less stressful learning experiences.

Chapter 6 focuses on patterns of offensive language with a particular focus on specific words and multi-word units that characterise the discourse of offensive language. The chapter aims to enhance the classification of offensive words, refine models of offensive language, and deepen our understanding through keyword analysis. The findings reveal a wide range of explicit and taboo words, including racial slurs and derogatory terms, alongside emphatic markers, which intensify emotional statements. In our discussion of explicit language, we will critically examine the role of context in interpreting offensive language. We discuss the explicitly offensive language within the concept of ‘insults’, dividing them into two primary types: hard and soft. Although both types serve to denigrate, they differ in linguistic intensity and explicitness.

This chapter further explores the concept of chunking, showing that rules that describe various syntactic patterns are not linear in nature. The special focus is on the phenomenon of binding, especially reflexives, which are used as a litmus test at various level of language. It is shown that concepts of subject and object, although important to describing syntax, are not enough to describe the distribution of reflexives.

This chapter compares human language to animal (non-human) communication. It is shown that animal communicative signals are holistic and cannot be broken down into re-arrangeable subunits corresponding to human words in sentences. It is also shown that animal communicative signals can be analyzed in a way parallel to how linguists analyze previously undescribed or unknown human languages.

This introduction explores the growing presence of offensive language on social media platforms like TikTok, YouTube and Instagram, where anonymity often encourages more aggressive behaviour. It discusses the difficulty in distinguishing between what is ‘merely offensive’ and what crosses into illegal or grossly offensive territory, highlighting how this is a complex issue spanning multiple disciplines. The chapter highlights the importance of linguistic insights in understanding offensive language, especially given the limitations of automatic detection systems and the inherently subjective nature of offence. It also provides an overview of the chapters that follow.

This chapter brings the book to a close by advancing an understanding of languaging as a relational, embodied, and political practice. Rather than treating language as a neutral vehicle for transmitting information, the chapter emphasises how languaging is deeply entwined with questions of identity, belonging, and power. It is shown to be simultaneously playful and precarious, resistant and creative, continually challenging static and purified notions of language. The chapter further develops the notion of pedagogical languaging as a way of reframing education in response to the radical cultural and communicative reconfigurations of the twenty-first century. Pedagogy, it argues, must move beyond the delivery of standardised curricula to become the intentional design of spaces where learners mobilise their full semiotic repertoires such as linguistic, embodied, cultural, and digital in dynamic, relational, and multimodal meaning-making.

This chapter explores the interplay of playfulness and precarity in AI-mediated languaging. Drawing on examples from social media users experimenting with generative AI, the chapter illustrates how AI reshapes communication, linguistic practices, and social interaction. These playful engagements demonstrate AI’s capacity to expand linguistic creativity and produce novel forms of meaning, while simultaneously revealing its fragility and the ethical tensions inherent in its use. By exposing the cultural assumptions, power relations, and value judgments embedded in AI systems, such moments highlight the non-neutral and unpredictable nature of AI technologies. The chapter argues that while AI opens up new possibilities for expression, it also demands critical reflection on issues of power, identity, and social norms. Ultimately, these examples highlight the ‘dis’engagement with AI’s potentiality while recognising and addressing the risks it poses to language and society.