Even after achieving a high level of English proficiency, our accents – along with involuntary code-switching, pronunciation of English words as they are pronounced in our native tongue, and more – may still give us away as EFLs. Accent is the most immediately noticeable feature of EFL speakers. After moving to North America, I was faced with a conflict: Should I preserve my foreign accent and embrace it as part of my identity or try to pass as an American? While the perception that all accents are valid is true, it is also – to some extent – naïve. It not only ignores the desire to assimilate into American culture but also minimizes the impact of implicit biases, which can go as far as labeling people with foreign accents as less competent. Another practical reason to develop a North American accent is to adjust to personal assistants such as Siri and Alexa that often fail to understand foreign accents. At the same time as the world is becoming more progressive and inclusive, language technology sometimes inadvertently pushes us a step back.

The chapter explores complex ascriptions of linguistic prestige in Belize’s multilingual and postcolonial context. The observations made challenge traditional binary models of overt and covert prestige. English, the former colonizer’s language, holds formal prestige linked to its global status, economic utility, and educational norms. However, this prestige coexists with linguistic insecurity, as many Belizeans combine local and exogenous norms. Conversely, Kriol carries polycentric prestige rooted in national identity, creativity, and resistance to colonial hegemony. It indexes reputation rather than respectability, aligning with Afro-European traditions and anti-standard ideologies. Despite its rise in public and formal domains, Kriol remains ideologically linked to informality, creativity, and resistance. The chapter also highlights the emic construction of ‘code-switching’, valued as the ability to distinguish English from Kriol, reflecting education and social status. This linguistic liquidity – marked by overlapping functions, fluid boundaries, and contradictory discourses – reflects the complex interaction of different forms of prestige in Belize.

We take a look at fundamental principles that operate when social and/or regional varieties of English are in contact with each other or with other languages. We take a historical look at English and explore various contact settings which have shaped its development, from contact with Old Norse, Latin and Norman French to the present day. We discuss patterns of bilingualism and multilingualism, that is when speakers use two or more languages in their everyday lives. As the product of migration and colonization, different kinds of English have emerged in different locations around the world. We learn how new dialects emerge as a product of new-dialect formation and how contact-derived varieties such as pidgins and creoles develop under conditions of language contact, with emphasis on different theories of origins. Finally, we discuss the so-called Global Englishes which have emerged as a product of second-language learning around the world.

This paper presents a comparative evaluation of Word Grammar (WG), the Minimalist Programme (MP), and the Matrix Language Frame model (MLF) regarding their predictions of possible combinations in a corpus of German–English mixed determiner–noun constructions. WG achieves the highest accuracy score. The comparison furthermore revealed a difference in accuracy of the predictions between the three models and a significant difference between WG and the MP. The analysis suggests that these differences depend on assumptions made by the models and the mechanisms they employ. The difference in accuracy between the models, for example, can be attributed to the MLF being concerned with agreement in language membership between the verb and the subject DP/NP of the clause. The significant difference between WG and the MP can be attributed to the distinct roles features play in the two syntactic theories and how agreement is handled. Based on the results, we draw up a list of characteristics of feature accounts that are empirically most adequate for the mixed determiner–noun constructions investigated and conclude that the syntactic theory that incorporates most of them is WG (Hudson 2007, 2010).

Discussion and edition of love letters (apparently the product of an actual love affair) written in verse and preserved among family archives in a MS Roll

The interaction between bilingual phonetic systems is dynamic, shaped by both long-term and short-term factors. Short-term factors, the focus of this chapter, refer to immediate changes in the linguistic situation. This chapter discusses two short-term sources of potential phonetic interference: code-switching and bilingual language mode. A growing body of research on the phonetics of code-switching has shown that code-switching may result in phonetic interference between the L1 and the L2, although outcomes may vary across speakers and features. Language mode describes a bilingual’s position along a continuum, from operation in a monolingual mode, in which only one language is active, to bilingual mode with equal activation of both languages. Recent work has demonstrated that language mode may modulate cross-linguistic phonetic interference, with greater interference found during bilingual mode. Finally, this chapter discusses two variables responsible for modulating and constraining phonetic interference in cases of dual language activation that have emerged in the literature – the nature of the phonetic feature and bilingual language dominance.

This chapter focuses on the acquisition of segmental phonology in simultaneous bilingual children, highlighting the factors that help explain variability in the pathways toward the construction of language-specific phonological systems. A review of the literature is offered which groups studies by age of participants, a strategy that captures the dynamic nature of the segmental learning processes. It also reveals differences in the methodological approaches for assessing bilingual children’s phonological learning, from the production of their first words to more mature levels of phonological knowledge. As a general view, segmental acquisition seems to be characterized by differentiated but interconnected systems, including realignments along this extended developmental process. However, more nuanced approaches are needed, especially related to the perception–production connection and input quality factors, to reach a more comprehensive view of the acquisition of segmental phonology in young simultaneous bilinguals.

This chapter reviews varieties of British English that have developed in South Asian communities around the United Kingdom. There is no single British Asian English; rather, the term can be used to describe a diverse range of regional sub-varieties. South Asians are the largest ethnic minority in the United Kingdom, with large concentrations in urban areas across England, including London, Birmingham, Leicester and Bradford. In addition to large demographic numbers, a reason for the emergence of distinctive varieties in South Asian communities is the historical presence of English in South Asian countries, reinforcing systematic divergences from British English speech norms. The chapter reviews the history of British South Asian communities in recent decades, and then describes an array of features of these regional varieties: phonetics and phonology, lexicon, and grammar, as well as at the level of discourse and conversational interaction, where systematic signals of identity and ideology can be observed in speech style variation and code-switching.

Due to high turnover, formal international organizations (FIGOs) face challenges in retaining knowledge – particularly about strategic errors in operations. Errors in the arena of crisis management involve high costs, such as civilian casualties. However, scholarship addressing how security FIGOs share knowledge about what went wrong remains limited. This chapter argues that informal networks among political and military elites are critical for knowledge sharing within FIGOs, even in the face of sophisticated formal learning systems. The study draws on interviews with 120 elite officials at NATO and employs process tracing and social network analysis. Findings indicate that knowledge sharing hinges on the actions of a few elites – “knowledge guardians” – who are central to the transnational, informal elite network. Challenging assumptions about the superiority of formal systems, this chapter stresses that informal governance plays a central role in FIGO knowledge retention, which is critical for institutional memory and learning.

Bilinguals change their way of communicating when they are with monolinguals and when they are with bilinguals who share their languages. Whereas they avoid using their other language(s) with monolinguals (they are in a monolingual mode), they may call upon it (or them) when interacting with bilinguals, either by changing over completely to the other language(s) or by bringing elements of the other language(s) into the language they are speaking (they are then in a bilingual mode). The author reviews how he developed the notion of language mode, which, at the cognitive level, implies a change of activation of the languages and processing mechanisms. He summarizes some of the basic elements of language mode as described in a 2001 seminal chapter, discusses how language mode has fared since, and presents additional evidence for it. He then proposes some follow-up comments that deal with the level of activation of the deactivated language(s) in a monolingual mode, the complex nature of the variable that is language mode, and how it compares to the adaptive control hypothesis. He ends with reactions to language mode – many positive and some critical.

This section contains examples of four wills made by members of the laity, both men and women, at the end of the fourteenth and beginning of the fifteenth centuries. This is a genre of which many examples survive in local records and in episcopal registers. Here one can see the kind of things that people would leave to their relatives or to the poor, from domestic articles, often associated with their profession, and clothes, to sums of money.

This section contains excerpts from two sermons, one from the thirteenth century by Thomas of Chobham who wrote a number of sermons, a work on preaching and a work on virtues and vices, and one anonymous sermon in macaronic form, from the fifteenth century, in which Latin and English are blended to create a syntactically homogeneous whole. The purpose of such macaronic sermons is unclear. The third item in this section is a short ghost-story, which appears in a commonplace book, and was possibly used in a sermon to make a point about the importance of the Mass for remission from time in Purgatory.