A wide range of Arabic language variation in form, code choice and orthographic script was wielded by Lebanese political protestors in their graffiti and political placards in Beirut in 2015. That summer, civil protests spilled out into the streets to critique the government inaction over waste management and overall corruption. I will focus on…

Spanish is the most common language for which students pursue a minor or fulfill language requirements in higher education (e.g., Looney and Lusin 2018) in the United States. In this context, it is not uncommon to find second language (L2) learners and heritage speakers (HSs) of the language enrolled in the same classes. Regardless of the type of…

This paper addresses the role of bottom-up prescriptive pressures in language policy debates and their interplay with institution-driven, top-down influences. I approach this issue through an analysis of social media data concerning debates surrounding recent orthographic reform in France. Building on Heyd's (Lang Soc 43: 489-514, 2014) discussion…

This paper analyses "Kongish Daily," a Facebook page that trans-scripts local news in Hong Kong into a creative and dynamic mix of Cantonese in traditional Chinese characters, Romanisation and made-up characters, simplified Chinese, pinyin, English, Hong Kong English, other phonetic symbols, emoji and other signs and images. We trace the…

This article discusses a relatively under-explored phenomenon that we call Tranßcripting -- writing, designing and digitally generating new scripts with elements from different scriptal and semiotic systems. The data are drawn from examples of such scripts created by multilingual Chinese users in everyday online social interaction. We analyse the…

Singlish -- "the name given to the colloquial variety of English spoken in Singapore" [Wee, Lionel. 2014. "Linguistic Chutzpah and the Speak Good Singlish Movement." "World Englishes" 33 (1): 85-99], incorporating Chinese dialect (particularly Hokkien) and Malay lexical and grammatical elements -- has for some time…