This article examines aspects of linguistic behaviour, attitudes and professional practices amongst a group of 47 "expert users" who are translators or interpreters for one, two or three of the following languages: Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian. The official terms for these languages in the respective successor states of Socialist…

Nominal and pronominal address forms, which play a central role in the construction of interpersonal relations (cf. Bargiela et al. 2002; Clyne et al. 2009), have been the focus of attention in different linguistics subfields for several decades now. Less attention, however, has been paid to these forms from a variational pragmatics (Schneider and…

Oscar Wilde is one of the most hilarious playwrights in the history of English literature. And 'The Importance of Being Earnest' is his masterpiece. With Wilde's humorous and witty language as the starting point and aided by the concordancing software WORDSMITH TOOLS, a detailed analysis was carried out on this comedy from lexical level and…

Though generally under-utilised in spoken English, the passive voice plays a crucial role in formal, written English (Biber et al., 1999). An understanding of how the passive voice operates in English writing is therefore a vital skill for EFL learners in secondary and higher education so that they may be able to both understand and produce fluent…

The multilingual surrounding of Spanish Language Teaching (SLT) in India has presented a unique linguistic principle. This principle relies upon the application of English language instructions (as FL1) to combine several methods for teaching-learning Spanish language (as FL2). However, the effectiveness and appropriateness of this linguistic…

World Englishes has become a robust field of inquiry as scholars pursue more nuanced understandings of linguistic localization and multilinguals' negotiations of language differences. Yet research demonstrates that teachers and learners of English as a foreign language continue, albeit in a partially conflicted way, to believe that prestigious…

The changing of the English profile to English as an International Language (EIL) has broadened the definition of competent users of English around the world to include the ability to shuffle between English in local contexts (Canagarajah, 2013). However, Thai EFL learners continue to show an inability to understand and use English in…

One of the fundamental ways in which knowledge develops is through contrast. This applies not only to the development of ideas and theories in argumentative texts, but also to the contrasting of new findings with old in experimental reports. Contrast, then, is central to the development of academic knowledge. A common finding in contrastive…

The research aimed at 1) To investigate students' linguistic features of Englishes found in writing in the Facebook closed group's posts and comments, and 2) To investigate types of characteristics of localised features of Thai in English writing found in students' writing in the Facebook closed group's posts and comments. The participants were…

The aim of this article is to shed light on the particularities of language choice (Spanish, English, and hybridity) and identity performance among urban music (UM) affiliated individuals from Hispanic immigrant backgrounds interacting through Instagram. The participants reside in Da DMV, an emic term used to refer to the Washington DC (DC)…

Prompted by UNESCO initiatives on promoting world literacy (UNESCO, 2005, 2014), many countries, including Thailand, have launched language education policies to push literacy development forward. Accordingly, this study seeks to investigate the policies promoting literacy in Thailand and their implementation at the local level. Language education…

It is now commonly accepted that academic discourses tend to provide venues for participants to interact where the producer needs to display an awareness of the audience, and metadiscourse (MD) is the set of tools enabling the involved parties to establish relationships. MD strategies allow writers to project themselves into their work, signal…

Our language changes very rapidly, accompanying political, social and cultural trends, as well as the evolution of science and technology. The Internet, especially the social media, has accelerated this process of change. This poses a severe challenge for both human beings and natural language processing (NLP) systems, which usually only model a…

Greek historiography of interwar education policy unproblematically accepts the assumption that the bone of contention between the "Liberal demoticists" and the "Conservative purists" was the language issue; particularly whether "demotic" or "katharevousa" should be the language of instruction in schooling.…

Teachers of English in Cameroon are proficient speakers of Cameroon English and their non-native status militates against their usage of Standard British English in the English language classrooms. This makes the attainment of British English thorny and perhaps impossible in Cameroon. Standing on that premise, we were motivated to find out…