This exploratory qualitative study investigates the presence and pedagogical function of Tamil in English language classrooms in Tamil Nadu, India. Situated within debates on translanguaging, bilingual education, and the Grammar Translation Method, the paper examines how teachers’ language choices and instructional resources reflect differing learner profiles across curriculum contexts. Data was collected through classroom observations, field notes, teacher discussions, and analysis of instructional materials in three secondary English lessons in a private school: two International General Certificate of Secondary Education (IGCSE) English-medium classrooms and one Tamil-medium state-syllabus classroom. The findings reveal a marked contrast between the two contexts. In the IGCSE classrooms, Tamil was absent from both teacher talk and resources, reflecting teachers’ perceptions of English as the necessary language of exposure and their students’ stronger English proficiency. In the state-syllabus classroom, however, teacher talk was predominantly in Tamil, especially when explaining grammar concepts such as direct and indirect speech, while published resources remained entirely in English. The study argues that translanguaging practices in these classrooms are shaped less by broad policy positions than by teachers’ perceptions of learner needs, students’ home literacy practices, institutional norms, and uneven bilingual proficiency. It proposes a spectrum of translanguaging practices, ranging from separate bilingualism to explicit translanguaging pedagogy, to account for the observed differences. The paper concludes that Tamil can function as a valuable scaffold for English learning when used purposefully, but its role must be understood as context-sensitive rather than universally applicable across Tamil-speaking educational contexts.
Language is a primary barrier to education for refugee and asylum-seeking children attending Alternative Learning Centres (ALCs) in Malaysia. This study examines children’s perspectives on the language policy of an ALC in Kuala Lumpur that emphasizes English for resettlement. Utilizing participatory methods with ten ethnic Chin refugee children (aged 11–16) and supplementary teacher interviews, the research revealed that punitive restrictions on L1 use shaped classroom participation and well-being. The school’s English-only policy contributed to the internalization of monolingual ideologies, causing stress and fear of punishment among the children. For newly arrived learners, these factors potentially led to disengagement. The findings also highlight a misalignment between resettlement-focused school policy and the reality of protracted transit. Many children were born in Malaysia and expressed a desire to use their L1 alongside an interest in learning local languages, particularly Malay. The paper argues for a shift toward flexible multilingual approaches. By allowing children to leverage their L1, ALCs can support academic engagement and L1 maintenance without requiring additional resources, ultimately fostering harmonious bilingualism and enhancing well-being.
This exploratory case study compares the translation output of a Japanese-language academic paper to English from four sources: the original author, Large Language Model (LLM, namely ChatGPT), Neural Machine Translation (NMT) and a professional, focusing on the differences in the output of ChatGPT and NMT. The recent development of these systems as a means of generating human-like translations has received increased scholarly attention comparing their strengths and weaknesses. However, there is a lack of research with respect to their performance with the Japanese-English language pair in the context of academic research publications. Two researchers in the field of Applied Linguistics were provided four samples to quantitatively rate in the categories of Accuracy, Fluency, Terminology and Style, and gave justifications for each score. The results showed that the author’s own translation rated highest, followed by NMT, then ChatGPT and, finally, the professional translation. Raters felt the author’s translation captured the intent behind the original text whilst the latter samples took a direct approach that more strictly adhered to the structure and literal meaning of the original text, which hurt their style and terminology but gave them relatively high accuracy scores. Moreover, raters considered the ChatGPT and NMT samples ill-fitting for the intended context: an academic publication. Regarding ChatGPT and NMT, specifically, both raters considered ChatGPT to provide a stricter, word-by-word translation of the text than that generated by NMT. However, given the influence of prompt design in ChatGPT’s output, it may be possible to provide a more successful translation with a revised input.
This study investigates the sociolinguistic trajectory of the reduplicated pronoun ‘kita-kita’ in Malay language. While traditional prescriptive grammar often considers ‘kita-kita’ as a redundancy or error, its persistent usage in informal social contexts suggest a specialized pragmatic function. By adopting a diachronic discourse perspective, this research reconciles the apparent contradiction between the decline of ‘kita-kita’ following the national standardization post-independence and its contemporary resurgence in digital and vernacular registers. Drawing on a selected corpus of historical texts and modern social media interactions, the analysis reveals that ‘kita-kita’ has transitioned from a standard plural marker to a micro-level social tool used to negotiate “in-group” identity and exclusivity. The findings suggest that the survival intrinsically linked to the multifunctional nature of Malay reduplication, facilitates language sustainability through its adaptability to changing socio-political landscapes. This study contributes to the broader understanding of how non-standard morphological forms persist as markers of social meaning despite formal linguistic pressures.
Effective communication is an important aspect of quality healthcare delivery, with nurses generally playing a central role communicating between patients, families and medical professionals. Hedging is among the communicative strategies that nurses use to manage interactions in healthcare settings, and yet, there is a lack of research on its use in healthcare communication in the Zimbabwean context. This is especially so in the context of male nurses, who are typically working in traditionally feminised profession and who are Shona speakers. This paper, therefore, aims to (1) examine Shona hedge forms used by Shona-speaking male nurses at a hospital in Zimbabwe in occupational discourse, and (2) To explore their functions within the communicative context of nursing. Three male nurses were purposively selected. Data were audio-recorded over one month, three days a week, totalling 12 recordings per nurse, lasting 5 to 30 minutes each. Discourse analysis was used to identify hedge forms and functions, supplemented by interviews to clarify functions while the Community of Practice framework guided the analysis. The findings indicate that hedges are diverse in Shona male nurses’ discourse. They can be inflectional, lexical, phrasal and also sentential, prominent among these are the inflectional forms. Hedges manifest as modal verbs, cognition verbs, inclusive pronouns, if- clauses, tag questions, politeness markers as well as enclitics. Findings also reveal that hedges are multi-functional and context-dependent. The findings reveal that hedges serve various functions, including expressing uncertainty, showing non-commitment to a proposition, downplaying doubt, and mitigating statements. They are also used to soften orders, commands, directives, instructions, and claims. Additionally, hedges help maintain a collaborative atmosphere, promote solidarity, and convey politeness. These findings have important implications for nursing communication training, the development of communication skills, and the formulation of hospital language policies.
In multilingual and multiethnic Malaysia, Malaysian Mandarin (MalM) is a heterogeneous variety. Due to the linguistic diversity in Malaysia, MalM has drawn scholarly attention to the phonetic variation of this variety. This study investigates the citation tone production in MalM across language and geographical groups. Seventy-one fluent Mandarin speakers were recruited, stratified by their dominant home languages and geographical regions. Findings from the acoustic and statistical analyses suggest a close resemblance of citation tones in MalM and Putonghua, the standard Mandarin used in mainland China, except for T3’s tone contour. Additionally, there are some notable differences correlated with their primary language and their geographical regions in the tonal realizations in T3 and T4. This suggests that the dominant language and geographical background of the speakers possibly influence citation tone production in MalM. Overall, this study identifies that MalM is not a homogeneous variety in the heterogeneous Malaysia and supports the perspective that MalM is a unique variety within the Global Chinese paradigm.
This study investigates how Pakistani MA TESOL students perceive and construct their identities as academic writers in English. Drawing on Ivanič’s (1998) model of writer identity and adopting a narrative inquiry framework, the research focuses on five students’ self-descriptions as they recall their educational and writing experiences, beginning from school and extending into their current postgraduate studies. Their accounts reflect how prior schooling, language background, and classroom experiences influence the autobiographical-self, shaping how they view their abilities and roles as writers. The data further reveal how students engage with academic discourse practices, adopting or challenging conventions to shape a discoursal-self that aligns with expectations while retaining aspects of their personal voice in writing. As their writing skills develop, the participants describe gradual shifts toward a stronger authorial-self, an identity marked by increased confidence, agency, and a sense of ownership. The study shows that second-language academic writing involves ongoing self-positioning and calls for teaching approaches that value students’ linguistic backgrounds and personal learning histories, offering support that encourages confidence and identity development.
This article examines how ChatGPT is reshaping the linguistic and social conditions of contemporary migration by situating its impact within discussions on integration, labor precarity, and the ethics of new technologies. It shows how large language models now participate in communicative tasks that migrants once managed solely through human interaction, including navigating government procedures, consulting medical professionals, and handling routine daily exchanges. These examples reveal how ChatGPT can broaden access to information while also producing errors that may create serious challenges for migrants who depend on reliable guidance. The article further considers how automation in service and clerical roles, many of which employ migrants, heightens existing job vulnerabilities. Ethical concerns such as misinformation, impersonation, bias, and opaque decision processes are treated as structural risks that affect migrants unevenly, especially when time, language resources, or institutional knowledge are limited. The discussion concludes by identifying digital competence as a necessary component of migrant integration, emphasizing the importance of understanding both the capabilities and the boundaries of ChatGPT. Through this perspective, the article contributes to migration linguistics by illustrating how AI systems are becoming part of the communicative environments that migrants must learn to navigate.
The study aims at exploring a contested ideology toward heritage language maintenance and social integration based on a one-on-one interview to a Chinese mother in Japan. Through the framework of Family Language Policy, semi-structured interview data were analyzed thematically in terms of language ideology, practice, and maintenance. Findings show that a Chinese mother who raises a daughter in Japan struggles to balance bilingual education between Chinese and Japanese to pass down the former language for heritage maintenance and simultaneously teach the latter language for the successful integration to the destination country. I end this article by providing recommendations for migrant language education in Japan.
Migrant domestic workers are frequently portrayed as vulnerable victims of globalization in both academic and popular media, a depiction that, while underscoring their challenges, risks presenting a one-dimensional view of their agency. This paper examines the lived experiences of Helen, a Filipina domestic worker in Hong Kong, to demonstrate how she actively employs her multilingual resources to navigate and reshape her roles throughout her transnational journey. Through linguistic ethnography based on interviews conducted in 2017 and participant observation, I explore the connections between Helen’s experiences as a migrant worker and her evolving linguistic repertoire. Using the method of ‘linguistic portrait interviewing’ developed by Busch (2012, 2015), Helen’s linguistic portrait reveals how her multilingual skills become assets for asserting agency and establishing her place across social contexts. Her metalinguistic narratives and reflections illustrate how she leverages her linguistic repertoire to enact, maintain, and negotiate multiple social and symbolic roles, highlighting both her resilience and adaptability. This analysis presents Helen’s linguistic repertoire as a dynamic tool for sustaining her transnational experiences, underscoring the nuanced ways migrant domestic workers navigate structural inequalities while drawing upon personal resources to shape their own paths.
This paper is about migrations of communities within, into, and out of Borneo. It seeks to adding a further category, community migration, to the four original categories of labour, family, education, and forced migration proposed by Borlongan (2023). This underpins research within the sociolinguistic frameworks of Language Contact and Ecology of Language, from both historical and contemporary perspectives. The introduction provides historical background about the migration of Austronesian peoples from Taiwan through the Philippines to Borneo and beyond. The main section of the paper covers some more recent migrations within and around Borneo of both coastal Malay/Muslim and interior groups collectively termed “Dayak.” A particular focus is on the Iban community’s migration across Borneo and into Brunei and the linguistic and sociolinguistic consequences of this. The Iban are the largest indigenous ethnic group in the Sarawak region, Malaysia (28.8% of the state’s population, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Sarawak). Other community migrations discussed are those of the Kayan, Bidayuh, Berawan, and Belait/Lemeting groups. A tentative four-way classification of Borneo community migration strategies is proposed: migrate and maintain (e.g., Iban, Malay); migrate and conquer/occupy other communities’ territory => conquered, enslaved group shifts to conquering the group’s language (e.g., Kayan); migrate and diversify/shift (e.g., Bidayuh); and migrate and merge (e.g., Berawan, Belait/Lemeting). The conclusion of the article critically evaluates the notion of community migration, connecting this to Borlongan’s other categories. The relevance of the Language Contact and Ecology of Language frameworks to the study of Migration Linguistics in Borneo is also addressed.
English-speaking migration destination countries have implemented policies that promote pathways for international students to transition into skilled migrants. In 2019, Australia alone recorded total international student enrolment approaching one million, underscoring the economic significance of the sector (Australian Department of Education, Skills and Employment, 2019). This has positioned international education as the destination country’s largest services export. In an increasingly competitive global market, the availability of post-study work opportunities has become a key factor influencing student recruitment and enrollment in educational institutions in destination countries. However, in Australia (Morris et al., 2021) and Canada (Pottie-Sherman et al., 2024), both top destinations for study abroad programs, temporary educational migrants are unfairly blamed and cited as contributors to domestic challenges such as housing shortages and job scarcity for locals, leading destination countries to enforce stricter regulations on these pathways. This study examines the factors that influence students' choices to pursue education in English-speaking countries, the strategies Filipinos use to navigate educational migration pathways, and the impact of language on their study-abroad choices in these destinations.
In this article, we study digitally mediated interaction of migrant workers in Norway. More specifically, we are interested in how Lithuanian migrant workers’ ideologies of language and dominant language ideologies in their surroundings affect their sense of belonging and their interactional identities in digitally mediated interaction within a particular multilingual workplace. For this purpose, we present two cases, Raimonda and Egle. Raimonda is a company owner who accepts dominant language ideologies of “correctness” and has built her business on them, mobilizing her bilingualism as a central resource. Egle is a receptionist and union representative who to a greater extent shows resistance towards this correctness ideology. Both women play an important language brokering role in their work. Drawing on the analytical lens of positionality, we analyse interview data and excerpts of their interaction together with their mediagrams. The aim is to understand how they tackle language ideologies in their work life, on a personal and on an interactional level, and we therefore discuss their identity construction and negotiation in terms of occupational identity and shifting micro-interactional identities within both online and offline spaces.
Airport spaces are typically characterized by surveillance, security, screening, and social sorting. Transitional and liminal in nature, these mega-infrastructures are witnesses to millions of passengers (travellers, labour migrants, and refugees) as they traverse these halls and gateways toward leisure, livelihood, and even safety. While passenger and aircraft statistics are fundamental to airport studies, scholars are focusing on a vital aspect that makes airports efficient transport infrastructures of the modern world: mobility. In this paper, I investigate aeromobility, a multi-layered term pertaining to “mobility-systems, norms, embodied practices, and lifestyle discourses” that intersect with socio-cultural implications occurring within aviation spaces and air transportation in general (Zuskáčová, 2020). Particularly, I examine digital contents created and published by Filipino labour migrants focusing on their lived experiences and narratives inside international airports. Through the use of precautionary language, content creators utilize a specific language of precarity that assures other Filipino migrant workers a safer and more secure experience while traversing airport spaces. Ultimately, I argue that this deployment of precarious language eventually fosters solidarity and movement towards reclaiming their identities as part of the global workforce.
This study examines the language practices of prospective Filipino migrant workers who temporarily relocate to Metro Manila to complete pre-departure activities to secure a job opportunity abroad. Using self-reported language logs, the study documents 450 communicative events across familial, professional, and social domains. Findings show that Tagalog is the most frequently used language, functioning as both a practical lingua franca and a culturally anchored medium in the metropolis. Local languages remain vital within familial and interpersonal interactions, reinforcing regional identity despite urban pressures. English meanwhile is used predominantly in formal and professional transactions, while Taglish (Tagalog-English) serves as a flexible hybrid language that bridges communicative demands across contexts. Overall, the study highlights how in-migrants negotiate linguistic adaptation and cultural continuity, offering insight into the complex dynamics of language shift during internal migration in the Philippines.
Through one-on-one in-depth interviews and focus group discussions, this study examines the language-related concerns and issues encountered by Uyghur international students, a Muslim minority from northwest China, at various stages of their migration journey, including pre-departure preparations, life and academic experiences in Japan, and future prospects. Through narrative and thematic analysis, we examine how their ethnic identity and linguistic strategies shape their academic experiences, social interactions, and daily lives. Our findings reveal that due to diverse educational backgrounds, these students demonstrate varying proficiency in Japanese, English, Chinese, and Uyghur, leading them to develop unique coping mechanisms using available linguistic resources. To cope with these language challenges and difficulties, they actively develop unique strategies by leveraging the linguistic resources available to them. To enhance the study-abroad experience for all international students, we argue that Japan should clarify study pathways at language schools, reduce initial adjustment burdens, and provide comprehensive information on higher education to facilitate a smoother academic transition. Moreover, structured language exchange programs and government-supported initiatives could help students integrate more effectively into society. For tightly connected ethnic groups like the Uyghurs, platforms that foster community-building and mutual support can be particularly beneficial. Ultimately, to promote the internationalization of higher education and address future talent shortages, Japan should strengthen language support services, improve accessibility to information, and foster an inclusive social environment to ensure that students from diverse backgrounds can thrive and contribute meaningfully to society.
Differences in regional dialects in the production of consonants and vowels can influence the pronunciation of Standard Malay. This study aims to acoustically characterise the pronunciation of the Malay phoneme /r/, a consonant known to exhibit phonetic variation. The data analysed in this study contained both tap [ɾ] and trill [r] realisations of /r/. A total of 74 tokens containing the /r/ sound were extracted from audio recordings of four Standard Malay-speaking participants. Based on acoustic analysis, it was found that the /r/ phoneme was consistently realised as either a tap or trill in initial and medial positions, while it was frequently omitted in word-final position. These findings have clinical relevance for speech-language pathology, particularly in differentiating between typical dialectal variation and disordered speech.
This article reports on research assessing the vitality of Daur, an ethnic language spoken mainly by Daur people residing in Inner Mongolia, China. The research involved a language use survey, individual interviews, and the EGIDS framework. Based on analysis of Daur use patterns in various domains and answers to the five key EGIDS questions, it is observed that Daur enjoys relatively low vitality (6b) and seems to be threatened in Inner Mongolia. The likely main causes for its relatively low vitality are the lack of a unified and widespread writing system and the small size of the speaker population. After presenting the findings and discussing the vitality level of Daur, this article concludes with some general implications and considerations for the maintenance of the Daur language in Inner Mongolia. This research sheds light on issues related to the vitality of ethnic languages in Inner Mongolia and seeks to contribute to the discussion on ethnic language maintenance in ethnic regions and areas in China.
Given its diverse population, Sarawak exhibits a remarkable degree of linguistic variation. Among its varieties is the Tambirat Malay dialect, a unique and understudied subdialect spoken in Kampung Tambirat, Samarahan. This study is an attempt to model the phonological behaviour of liquid consonants in this dialect, an aspect that has been overlooked by prior research. This study uses primary data collected from native speakers through interviews and the citation method with the Swadesh 200-word list as the primary instrument. Offering insights from the constraint-based approach, this study reveals that the rhotic [ɣ] is completely excluded in syllable codas, and to avoid this, deletion is employed as a repair strategy. The lateral [l], on the other hand, is allowed in a coda only when the preceding vowel is [e]. This restriction arises from the dialect’s general avoidance of coda [l], and as a resolution, it is typically substituted by the high vowel [j]; however, since this substitution will yield the diphthong [ej], which is marked and ill-formed, this process is blocked by the constraint NO-[ej]. The analysis shows that ALIGN-RHOTIC must be highly ranked, but NO-[ej] must dominate ALIGN‑LATERAL to eliminate candidates with the diphthong [ej]. IDENT‑IO[+lateral] and MAX-IO[+rhotic], on the other hand, must be ranked low to ensure that the candidates with ɣ-deletion and l-substitution emerge as the optimal outputs. Ultimately, the following partial constraint ranking is developed: ALIGN-RHOTIC, DEP-IO, MAX-IO[–rhotic], IDENT‑IO[–lateral], NO-[ej] >> ALIGN‑LATERAL >> MAX-IO[+rhotic], IDENT‑IO[+lateral]. Beyond its theoretical significance, this study is crucial for the documentation of Sarawak’s subdialects, many of which are gradually undergoing extinction due to language shift and urbanization.
