Australian Aboriginal English (henceforth ‘AE’) is an enregistered contact-based variety spoken by over 80 per cent of First Nations people in Australia. AE has been observed to differ systematically from standardised Australian English across levels of linguistic structure, and is usually placed on a continuum ranging from ‘light’ (acrolectal) varieties to ‘heavy’ (basilectal) varieties. The ‘light’ varieties are closest to standardised Australian English; the ‘heavy’ varieties are sometimes closer to Kriol, an English-lexified creole language spoken across northern Australia. Across the continuum, AE is distinctive for its group focus and its cultural connection with storytelling. This chapter outlines some of the distinctive linguistic features of AE, embracing a culturally appropriate methodology in which a corpus of data from group sessions has been collected under First Nations leadership. The recordings capture speakers in their home settings mostly in ‘Nyungar country’, in the Southwest of Western Australia, and are based on ‘yarning’, a First Nations cultural form of storytelling and conversation. We discuss the ways that the yarns collected in our corpus have allowed us to hear the voices of those seldom included in linguistic research and how hearing these yarns is allowing us to tell a different story.

This chapter explores two subfields of nineteenth-century horticultural practice – plant miniaturization and plant assimilation – to demonstrate indirect approaches to addressing botanical agency. Given differences of lifespan, size, cognition, and communication, as well as the distance of time, Victorian writing requires this indirect approach. In the case of plant miniaturization (bonsai), described admiringly in British travel narratives but bemoaned by champions of native plant life from William Wordsworth to H. Rider Haggard, writerly attention or disregard to plant suffering illuminates broader concerns of plant emotion and subjectivity. In the case of plant assimilation or its amplified parallel, plant invasiveness, human framings of plant reproduction point out the cultural constraints on plant life. When named plants reproduce across the page as well as through the garden bed, their taxonomic and vernacular incursions into nineteenth-century poetry and prose show a further assertion of expanded plant influence on the Victorian reading mind.

This chapter revisits the construction of the Bethe wave function for the Lieb–Liniger model with spin degrees of freedom, which has traditionally followed a two-step approach: independent determination of coordinate and spin wave functions, later combined to enforce correct particle statistics. While this procedure is effective under the assumption that the hamiltonian is spin-independent, it becomes inadequate when spin-dependent interactions are present. Two key challenges arise: the need for a complete wave function without splitting it into separate coordinate and spin components, and the treatment of integrable systems with spin-dependent hamiltonians. To address these, the chapter introduces an efficient algebraic method based on the Faddeev–Zamolodchikov algebra, which provides a unified framework for handling coordinate and spin variables in integrable models with factorized scattering. This algebraic approach enables direct construction of the full wave function, offering a natural extension to systems involving both bosonic and fermionic degrees of freedom. The resulting spin chain representation of the transfer matrix not only simplifies the analysis but also yields a deeper understanding of the underlying algebraic structure governing these quantum systems.

The verses of the Quran that enjoin pardah are translated as follows:

Maconchy made one of the most significant contributions to the string quartet by a British twentieth-century composer and always regarded her thirteen quartets as being the pulsing heart of her ‘impassioned argument’ artistry. Why was Maconchy so drawn to the string quartet, and in what ways did she stretch the medium to new heights?

Rhiannon Mathias reveals how Maconchy’s early encounters with the music of Vaughan Williams, Bartók and Janáček helped her to forge her own original and distinctive compositional voice and examines the new frontiers that she explored in her string quartets.

The current chapter describes the history and development of English in (what is today) Kenya and Tanzania from the earliest linguistic influences of colonial powers to the latest nation-specific developments in language policy and lexicon. Colonial history and national language policy in Tanzania and Kenya have resulted in Kiswahili becoming the national lingua franca, though to different degrees, and have so far impeded the development of a national variety of English in the general triglossic ecology of local languages, Kiswahili, and English. The African language substratum, almost completely Bantu in Tanzania but one-third Nilo-Saharan in Kenya, influences forms of English. In general, regional, national and subnational usage features can be distinguished, i.e. many (sub-)national features in pronunciation, some national and cultural features in the lexicon, and mainly regional (or universal L2 features) in grammar. Recent developments can be illustrated by examples from digital sources, especially online newspapers and social media.

The city-state of Singapore is officially quadrilingual (Malay, Mandarin, Tamil and English) and home to a diverse population. Colonised by Britain in 1819, English has since had a special place on the island. Initially confined to the elite, it soon became a desired commodity, learnt and acquired by different groups at different times, always in conjunction with the other languages with which it co-exists. As Singapore embarked on its path towards independence, English became a compulsory subject in education, and, in 1987, was made the sole medium of instruction. These developments resulted in large-scale language shift, with English now the majority language in Singaporean homes (2020 census). The local vernacular Singlish has its origin in this high-contact situation. It features influences primarily from Malay and southern Chinese. While it is regarded by policy-makers as undesirable, Singlish enjoys some acceptance in the population, not least as a marker of local identity.

English has become an important part of the linguistic repertoire of black South Africans. Education was important to nineteenth and twentieth century access to the language, first in mission schools and later under the apartheid government. In the post-apartheid phase, extensive diversification in experience yields native, cross-over and traditional Black South African English (BSAE) varieties of South African English (SAE). The phonology of traditional BSAE is characterised by the neutralisation of the tense/lax vowel contrast, the rarity of vowel reduction to schwa in unstressed syllables, a tendency towards syllable-timing, stress shifts to the penult and weight sensitivity to the final syllable, as well as the more extensive use of tone contrasts. Distinctive grammatical patterns include the use of the progressive aspect in an extended range of contexts to mean ongoing duration without a temporal limit, copy pronouns, the higher frequency of modal adverbials and some innovative collocations like can be able to. Lexical and semantic innovation occurs through loanwords reflecting ongoing social change in especially culture and politics, on top of older geographical borrowings, alongside semantic extension to capture locally relevant meanings beyond the conventional range of the same expressions in other varieties.

In Chapter 3, notions of kinship and family come to the fore. Once belonging had been articulated by the settlement laws, and moreover was seen to have been invested not only in individuals but in families, the question soon arose: who counted as ‘family’ for the purposes of the law? For example, when and under what circumstances would the status of ‘child’ expire? What would be the effects of marriage and remarriage? A study of legal sources helps distil the changing regulations – another unintended consequence of the settlement laws which affected millions, and echoes today. A case study concerning one woman illustrates the effects of the settlement laws on kinship and community relations. Local and regional samples suggest how the law was implemented in near and distant localities.