This article investigates why moments of semiotic silence, or minimal engagement, occur in Facebook practices among Filipino migrant workers engaged in grassroots organizations working for migrants’ rights. We investigate how members and leaders of these organizations subjectively and intersubjectively assess moments of semiotic silence through their discourses. Taking a sociolinguistically grounded chronotopic approach, we show how they make sense of these moments by invoking a multiplicity of space-times related to sociopolitical constraints, their working situation, communication with family, and the organizing of migrants. This study provides empirical data, highlighting the importance of identity, materiality, and media ideology in understanding grassroots social media practices and political engagement. On this basis, we come to understand a broader range of ways in which migrant workers use or do not use social media in relation to community involvement and public discourse. (Social media engagement, grassroots organizing, chronotope, identity construction, media ideology, materiality, migrants’ rights)

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.

The article examines ideologies behind linguistic conversion—a widespread transition to Ukrainian from Russian—which intensified in Ukraine after the onset of Russian aggression in 2014, and particularly after the 2022 full-scale invasion. Employing ‘new speakerness’ as a theoretical lens, the study draws on biographical interviews with twenty-one new full-time Ukrainian speakers recruited among participants in informal language-learning initiatives in Ukraine. The primary focus is on the ways in which the new speakers legitimise their ownership of the Ukrainian language: how they imagine their positions in the socially constructed traditional hierarchies of Ukrainian speakers, based on the mastery of the standard language, and what new ideologies arise out of their challenges. The findings reveal that, in most of the cases, traditional hierarchies are deconstructed as new ideologies prioritising fluency and elevating translingual practice emerge in the linguistic safe spaces of grassroots language courses and community clubs. (New speakers, language ideologies, linguistic conversion, suržyk, linguistic safe spaces, Russo-Ukrainian war)

Research on the associations between refugee children’s socioemotional development and bilingual outcomes is limited, although this population has unique migration experiences that could affect such development. This study examined Syrian refugee children’s socioemotional development, including well-being difficulties and acculturation, 4.5 years after their resettlement in Canada (N = 112; mean age = 11.97). It also investigated how socioemotional development was associated with refugee children’s bilingual outcomes in English and Arabic. The findings suggested that, although the children were developing an integration orientation of acculturation, a large proportion of them reported well-being difficulties. Socioemotional development had both direct and mediated associations with bilingual outcomes: children’s identification with Syrian culture influenced English outcomes positively, and their enjoyment of Arabic language activities influenced Arabic outcomes positively. Children’s enjoyment of Arabic language activities was related to less sibling interaction in English, which, in turn, was negatively associated with English outcomes. Somewhat similarly, identification with Canadian culture was related to less parent interaction in Arabic, which was negatively associated with Arabic outcomes. Well-being difficulties were negatively associated with outcomes in both languages. We conclude that refugee children are faced with unique challenges in their socioemotional development, which in turn influences their bilingual outcomes.

The C2 dominance effect in cluster simplification, in which the second consonant is preserved over the first (V1C1C2V2 → V1C2V2), has been attributed to the perceptual salience of prevocalic consonants. However, this P-map account fails in classic Optimality Theory when syncope feeds cluster simplification (V1C1V0C2V2 → V1C1C2V2 → V1C2V2), as the input and output contexts do not differentiate C1 from C2. This article proposes a solution to this problem using correspondence constraints that reference acoustic transitions from and to vowels. Since syncope removes the targeted vowel and its associated transitions, Ident [transition] constraints cannot refer to the eliminated transitions. Specifically, the transition from C2 is protected by the relevant Ident [release transition] constraint, while C1’s transition is not. Thus, under the ranking of Ident [release transition] over Ident [closure transition], C1, despite being underlyingly prevocalic, remains subject to the C2 dominance effect and is targeted for deletion. This proposal also addresses interactions between syncope and other cluster reduction processes, such as major place assimilation and debuccalisation.

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.

Research on the effects of textually enhanced (TE) subtitles on vocabulary acquisition through audiovisual input has yielded mixed results, primarily focusing on short viewing interventions. This study investigates the impact of TE on vocabulary meaning recall among 22 international students with limited knowledge of L3 Dutch. Participants watched an entire season of a comedy TV series in L2 English, accompanied by L3 Dutch subtitles as it would be broadcast on television. Using a within-subjects design, we assessed learning outcomes for 16 enhanced target words, 16 unenhanced target words, and 16 filler words absent from the subtitles. Two eye-tracking sessions were employed to measure participants’ attention to both enhanced and unenhanced target words during the first and last episodes, addressing the limitations of previous studies that only included a single eye-tracking session and could not capture shifts in processing at pre- and posttest. The findings reveal that TE significantly increases fixations on enhanced words compared to unenhanced ones, with this difference remaining significant over the duration of the intervention, resulting in greater learning gains. Overall, the results highlight the potential of TE to facilitate vocabulary acquisition through subtitled audiovisual input.

In the current study, Hebrew norms were collected for a set of 320 colored realistic pictures. Interestingly, participants were adult speakers of Hebrew as a first-language (L1) or as a second-language (L2, native Arabic speakers). Thus, both L1 and L2 norming were compiled. For each picture, participants typed its name, and then rated its visual complexity, familiarity, and typicality on scales of 1–7. To establish the predictive utility of the norms, we examined timed picture-naming performance on a subset of 135 items of the normed pictures. Two groups of participants with Hebrew as an L1 (native Hebrew speakers) or as an L2 (native Arabic speakers), were asked to name each picture as quickly and accurately as possible and their reaction times (RT) and accuracy were recorded. Results showed that norms collected from L1 speakers significantly predicted L1 participants’ picture naming RT and accuracy while controlling for objective lexical characteristics (frequency and length), validating the usefulness of the norms. Critically, these same norms were inefficient in predicting L2 picture naming performance. However, norms collected from L2 speakers were significant predictors of L2 picture naming performance. The study, therefore, carries important general implications for L2 production research based on picture naming tasks.

Previous work had shown that multilingual preschool children are better at interpreting deictic gestures than their monolingual peers. The present study examines whether this multilingual effect persists beyond preschool age and whether it extends to iconic (i.e., representing the referent) and conventional (i.e., holding an arbitrary meaning) gestures. A total of N = 105 children (aged 3 to 8), varying in their balance of exposure to more than one language since birth, completed a gamified gesture comprehension task. The three gesture types were presented in four communicative conditions, namely (1) alone, with (2) reinforcing or (3) supplementing speech, compared to (4) speech produced alone. Analyses revealed that children with greater balance in their multilingual exposure understood significantly more speechless iconic gestures than children with less balanced multilingual exposure. Findings align with previous work and theoretical frameworks, indicating that multilingual exposure enhances children’s sensitivity to non-verbal communicative cues.