This paper gives an account of the impact of spaces of linguistic non-understanding and spaces of linguistic partial understanding in the first author's linguistic ethnographic doctoral study of lawyer-client communication within UK immigration legal advice meetings. The paper uses the researching multilingually framework as a lens for exploring…

This paper reports on a study of Chinese parents' involvement in their children's heritage language (HL) development during the COVID-19 lockdowns in the UK. Involving seven transnational families, we examined the roles parents played during the online learning sessions and the factors shaping their involvement. Employing a netnographic approach,…

Researching in heterogeneous communities can present challenges for the most experienced of researchers, especially in the context of ethnographic work, where the dynamism and unpredictability of a research setting can make it difficult to anticipate the languages spoken. Drawing on data from multilingual health consultations, I reflect on…

This study discusses the impact of spatial, temporal and virtual mobility on how mobile individuals talk about language in their world, and how they use language offline and online to communicate over time and across space. We introduce the notion of "chronotopic translanguaging" to highlight the significance of merging time and place in…

This conceptual paper advances the notion of "English as corporate language" in the multilingual reality of multinational companies (MNC) with novel insights from the English as lingua franca (ELF) paradigm of sociolinguistics. Inspired by Goffman, Erving. 1959. "The presentation of self in everyday life." New York: Doubleday.…

In multinational corporate companies, multilingualism is often a daily reality for employees and the negotiation of language practices for work and social purposes, a routine. Despite the role of English as a lingua franca, the linguistic ecology of modern workplaces is dynamic, rich and diverse. While English is often used for communication…

Topic management by non-native speakers (NNSs) during informal conversations has received comparatively little attention from researchers, and receives surprisingly little attention in second language learning and teaching. This article reports on one of the topic management strategies employed by international students during informal, social…

Children of binational couples are often raised in the community of one of the parents and, thus, have limited exposure to the language of the other parent. This study focuses on a British/Moroccan family in the UK, where English is the dominant home language and Moroccan Arabic is the "other" language. Analysis of "live"…

The study analyses teenagers' e-mail requests during academic cyber-consultation, exploring how the performance of request modifiers is influenced by participants' perceptions of the degree of imposition of the speech act and social distance with the recipient. A total of 295 e-mail requests, 145 produced by British English speakers (BES) and 150…

The present study analyses bilingual conversations taking place in binational families living in the UK. The focus is on two Polish/English stepfamilies, where the Polish mothers' concern with preserving and developing their children's linguistic and cultural identity collides with the English partner's limited knowledge of Polish. While the paper…

The aim of the study is to identify and interpret the exact aspects of Greek interlanguage modification which present deviations from native usage. As such, it is an investigation of Greek ESL university students' request modification and a comparison to British English native speakers. More specifically, it concentrates on the mitigating function…