Long an immigrant society, whether Hong Kong welcomes ethnic minorities remains debatable. Combining Wesselmann and colleagues’ (2016) social exclusion framework, raciolinguistics, and interview data, this study investigates the social exclusion experience of Hong Kong's African economic and student migrants. The findings show that African immigrants who lack linguistic capacity are ostracised in different areas of life. Impolite language usage stigmatises them as poor and ghost-like and stereotypes them as refugees. Taking a raciolinguistic perspective, however, this study finds that race, rather than language, is the root cause of social exclusion. Lastly, the study shows that African migrants manifest agency in ameliorating marginalisation through various activities, revealing the bidirectional nature of social exclusion. Overall, this study empirically enriches the current understanding of Africans’ social exclusion experiences in Hong Kong through the lens of language. It theoretically contributes to the current discussion on raciolinguistics by extending it to the Asian context. (Social exclusion, Hong Kong, African immigrants, verbal rejection, non-verbal rejection, racism, raciolinguistics)*

This essay is a response to Mukti Mangharam’s book Freedom Inc: Gendered Capitalism in New Indian Literature and Culture. The essay commends Mangharam’s intervention in reading the gender, caste, and class implications of neoliberalism embraced by the Indian government and people. Drawing upon Mangharam’s main arguments, this essay extends her analysis to examining the role of the Indian diaspora in promoting Freedom Inc’s narrative, the increased marginalization and precarity faced by Muslims within this new India, and the insidious ways in which Freedom Inc coopts narratives that critique it.

Whereas sinology, or the study of Chinese literature in English, has often been identifiable by a Chinese culturism, or belief in Chinese civilization as a coherent whole united by its writing system, this review article looks at five books that could be described as participating in a “translational turn” in Chinese literary studies. Yet even as they make powerful arguments against the fundamental unity and cohesiveness of a diachronic Chinese cultural-political identity in their translingual and translational approaches to scholarship, the books—Carla Nappi’s Translating Early Modern China (2021), Haun Saussy’s The Making of Barbarians (2022), Tze-Yin Teo’s If Babel Had A Form (2022), Yunte Huang’s Chinese Whispers (2022), and Nan Z. Da’s Intransitive Encounter (2018)—risk taking for granted the longevity of China’s participation in globalization and its economic integration with the United States. In light of current changes to the relationship between China, the US, and the world order, this review article reads these books while attempting to think through the gains and pitfalls of the translational turn in Chinese literary studies.

Research on digital multimodal composing (DMC) in second language (L2) classrooms has proliferated considerably in recent years, to a large extent in response to the changing digital and multimodal communication landscape. This article offers a research agenda on DMC in L2 classrooms. We begin with a theoretically oriented overview of DMC scholarship. We then examine seven research themes for future research inquiry, from which we draw seven research tasks. The seven themes are: (1) the effectiveness of DMC for L2 writing development; (2) DMC task design; (3) L2 teacher education/training for implementing DMC; (4) feedback practice for DMC; (5) DMC assessment; (6) collaborative DMC as a translanguaging space; and (7) the deployment of DMC for critical digital literacies. Throughout the article, we refer to interdisciplinary scholarship and methods from multimodality, L2 writing, composition studies, new literacy studies, language teacher education, and computer-assisted language learning. The seven research tasks represent what we see as the essential next steps for understanding DMC, which is a young domain that has great potential to advance L2 language and literacy education in the digital age.

The desire-satisfactionist defense of the existence of posthumous harm faces the problem of changing desires. The problem is that, in some cases where desires change before the time of their objects, the principle underlying the desire-satisfactionist defense of posthumous harm yields implausible results. In his prominent desire-satisfactionist defense of posthumous harm, David Boonin proposes a solution to this problem. First, I argue that there are two relevantly different versions of the problem of changing desires, and that Boonin's proposed solution addresses only one of them. Second, I argue that modifying the underlying principle is a better approach to overcoming the problem of changing desires since it addresses both versions of the problem. I defend this approach against objections by showing that the problems raised are problems for the principle as a general theory of harm, not for the principle as part of the desire-satisfactionist defense of posthumous harm.

This paper examines the different expressions of nationalism and cosmopolitanism in Waguih Ghali’s semi-autobiographical Beer in the Snooker Club (1964). It defines two different forms of cosmopolitanism in the novel (colonial versus imperial) and their influence on the identity of the main characters. The paper also examines the obsession with defining ‘Egyptianess’ in the novel in the wake of Egyptian nationalism during Nasser’s regime. The paper argues that cosmopolitanism and nationalism are two opposite ideologies that hold each other in balance but when the balance tips off in favour of one pole, an immoderate ideology raises its ugly head: racial or class-based nationalism, on the one hand, or colonial hegemony, on the other. Finally, the paper concludes that Ghali favours imperial cosmopolitanism which boasts of multiple communities that interact together and still preserve their uniqueness and specificities.

Despite the significance of intersex constituencies for explaining the social nature of sex and gender, intersex linguistic and social practices remain a yet unexplored frontier within sociolinguistics. This article examines fundamental frequency (F0) and vowel formant (F1–F3) production by participants with Turner Syndrome (TS), one of the most common intersex chromosomal conditions, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This analysis demonstrates significant differences in fundamental frequency and F3 among different participant groups. I argue that height, growth hormone, and chromosomes are fundamental in constructing womanhood for TS women. Along with relevant ethnographic data, these results call for a re-examination of the body within linguistic and anthropological understandings of ‘womanhood’ and ‘femaleness’. This article highlights the ways these biological factors intersect with gendered perceptions of age and maturity, which can have real-world effects on linguistic practice and the social life of intersex individuals. (Brazilian Portuguese, fundamental frequency, gender, intersex, Turner Syndrome, vowel formants, critical intersex studies)*

English morphosyntactic agreement, such as determiner–noun agreement in These cabs broke down and noun–verb agreement in The cabs break down, has a few interesting properties that enable us to investigate whether agreement has a psycholinguistic function, that is, whether it helps the listener process linguistic information expressed by a speaker. The present project relies on these properties in a perception experiment, examines the two aforementioned types of English agreement, and aims at analyzing whether and how native English listeners benefit from agreement. The two types of agreement were contrasted with cases without any overtly agreeing elements (e.g. The cabs broke down). Native speakers of English with normal hearing heard short English sentences in quiet and in more or less intense white noise and were requested to indicate whether the second word of the sentence (e.g. These cabs broke down) was a singular or plural noun. Accuracy was entered as the response variable in the binomial logistic regression model. Results showed that overt determiner–noun agreement clearly increased response accuracy, while noun–verb agreement had at best marginal effects. The findings are interpreted against the background of functional aspects of linguistic structures in English, in the context of unfavorable listening conditions in particular.

This article asks whether the abandonment of drifting fish aggregating devices (dFADs) is illegal under international marine pollution law. To answer this question, it provides a brief overview of the general international legal framework for the protection of the marine environment as well as specific legal regimes, namely the London Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes and Other Matter (LC), its 1996 Protocol (LP), and Annex V of the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships (MARPOL). The article concludes that the abandonment of dFADs contravenes the LC/LP and/or, depending on the preferred interpretation, MARPOL Annex V. The decision as to which of the two regimes is applicable depends on whether dFAD abandonment can be classified as ‘incidental to, or derived from the normal operations of vessels … and their equipment’ or not. The negligent loss of dFADs always violates MARPOL Annex V. The article also shows that certain state practice and opinio juris suggests a parallel applicability of the two regimes with respect to deliberate dFAD abandonment. While such a development would ensure more comprehensive coverage of the relevant standards and prohibitions, a clear regulatory decision as to which of the two regimes is the correct one would be preferable from an implementation and enforcement perspective.