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Many scholars consider clause-final adverbs (CFAs) like already, also, and only to be a prominent feature of Colloquial Singapore English (CSE), but little is known about their use in present-day CSE. Using data from the Corpus of Singapore English Messages (CoSEM), we investigate patterns of variation involving CFAs and examine whether they are sensitive to factors such as speaker age and gender. We find that clause-final already and only has increased over time, while clause-final also has remained stable. Overall, the results suggest that CFAs are a stable feature of CSE. Variation in the use of CFAs is conditioned by semantic function, age, and gender. Specifically, clause-final already is associated with the inceptive function. Clause-final already and also are more likely to be used by younger speakers, while clause-final also and only are more likely to be used by males and in all-male conversational settings respectively. We suggest that these patterns are due to present-day English-Mandarin bilingualism, increasingly positive attitudes toward CSE, and National Service for males. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper documents the linguistic landscape of Saint Catherine Street, a major thoroughfare in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The street is taken as a microcosm of the sociolinguistic variation observable at the various levels of analysis, ranging from the neighbourhood, the city, the province, Canada as a whole, and the globally similar environment of the downtown shopping street. By way of a systematic sampling of signs in the street's linguistic landscape, the interactions between federal policies of bilingualism, provincial laws strengthening the visibility of French, and local linguistic realities is considered, as is the impact of the global connectedness of both the 'grassroots' and the commercial world on the linguistic landscape in this street. While the presence of French and English is largely instrumental in function, many instances of other languages are found to be motivated by more symbolic functions, driven, in no small part, by the globally encoded indexical meanings of the languages in question.

Few studies to date have considered the agency of readers in reinterpreting the cultural, historical, political, and social background of the linguistic landscape (LL; visible language in public space) and the ways in which individual and collective identities are discursively conceptualised through the LL. In this article, we present results from a study involving participants from three self-described sociolinguistic identities (Francophone, Anglophone, and Bilingual), reading signs found in the LL of Montreal. Using photographic prompts, we questioned participants about the probable location of signs, their languages, and the languages’ placement on monolingual (French or English) and bilingual (French–English) signs emanating from both governmental and private entities. Further discussions about their emotive responses to the signs presented and the possible responses of “others” reveal the relative degrees of importance attached to these linguistic elements in constructing, negotiating, and communicating various and (more) fluid sociolinguistic identities.

Despite its innovative, salient, and robust usage in Colloquial Singapore English (CSE), the adverbial use of confirm has largely gone unnoticed. In this paper, we provide morphosyntactic and semantic evidence to show that adverbial confirm behaves like a strongly subjective speaker-oriented adverb (SpOA). We argue that adverbial confirm developed as a result of contact with the Mandarin adverbial kending, likely due to English–Mandarin bilingualism amongst Chinese Singaporeans, although its use has proliferated throughout the general CSE-speaking population. Quantitatively, adverbial confirm emerges as the most frequently used SpOA when compared to surface-semantically equivalent strongly subjective SpOAs, such as definitely, sure, for sure and surely. The results suggest an increase in preference by CSE speakers to use confirm to express strong speaker certainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United Arab Emirates have long been in contact with English. Its economy requires high rates of migration, resulting in large numbers of migrants who impact the local linguistic ecology. English acts as lingua franca and occurs in several forms, as labour is recruited from nations having experienced British or American influences. Arabic is used at home by Emiratis and Arab expatriates. However, it faces pressure from English both in education and at home, where shifts towards English occur. This study focusses on the interaction and competition between English and Arabic among university students. Qualitative results from a mixed methods survey suggest that while Arabic gets high solidarity ratings for "cultural identity," English rates higher for "individual identity." Status measures tend to align in both languages. Gender and citizenship had little effect, unlike self-assessed proficiency in both languages. Overall, English and Arabic are competitive in some areas, but also complementary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Colloquial Singapore English (CSE, commonly known as Singlish) is a linguistic variety used in Singapore, a Southeast Asian nation home to three major ethnic groups: the Chinese (74.35% of the citizen and permanent resident population), the Malays (13.43%), and the Indians (9%) (Singapore Department of Statistics, 2019). It is one of the best known post-colonial varieties of English and has been documented since the emergence of the field of world Englishes (e.g., Greenbaum, 1988; Richards & Tay, 1977). Linguistically, the grammar and lexicon of CSE are systematically imported from other non-English languages used in the island nation (Leimgruber, 2011). From a creolist perspective, it can be viewed as an English-lexifier creole that contains influences from Sinitic languages such as Hokkien, Cantonese and Mandarin, as well as Malay, Tamil and other varieties in the Singapore language ecology (McWhorter, 2007; Platt, 1975). Several distinct features across various levels of language have been investigated in CSE, including phonetics (Starr & Balasubramaniam, 2019), morphosyntax (Bao, 2010; Bao & Wee, 1999), semantics (Hiramoto & Sato, 2012), and pragmatics (Hiramoto, 2012; Leimgruber, 2016; Lim, 2007). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While World Englishes scholarship has always been concerned with different types of English varieties, Expanding Circle (i.e., non-postcolonial) Englishes have had a 'late start' in being added to its research remit. As a result, much important work in this area remains to be done. Expanding Circle Englishes in general and Asian Expanding Circle Englishes in particular are still neglected in many handbooks of World Englishes (e.g., in The Cambridge Handbook of World Englishes ; Schreier, Hundt & Schneider, 2020). Notable exceptions here are, for example, The Routledge Handbook of World Englishes (Kirkpatrick, 2020; including, among others, chapters on Japanese, Chinese, and Slavic Englishes) and The Handbook of Asian Englishes (Bolton, Botha & Kirkpatrick, 2020; including, among others, chapters on Taiwanese, Cambodian, and Indonesian Englishes). While traditionally much focus has been laid on matters of language policies, education, and attitudes, corpus linguistic approaches to Expanding Circle Englishes have become more and more relevant (see, e.g., Edwards, 2016 for the Netherlands; Rüdiger, 2019 for South Korea). In this article, we present the first results from a corpus-based study of Taiwanese English, drawing on the pilot version of a spoken Taiwanese English corpus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discourse particles are among the most commented-upon features of Colloquial Singapore English (CSE). Their use has been shown to vary depending on formality, context, gender and ethnicity, although results differ from one study to another. This study uses the Corpus of Singapore English Messages (CoSEM), a large-scale corpus of texts composed by Singaporeans and sent using electronic messaging services, to investigate gender and ethnic factors as predictors of particle use. The results suggest a strong gender effect as well as several particle-specific ethnic effects. More generally, our study underlines the special nature of the grammatical class of discourse particles in CSE, which is open to new additions as the sociolinguistic and pragmatic need for them develops. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has witnessed an unprecedented economic and cultural development since its foundation in 1971. Foreign labor and investment play a central role in this development, yielding a sharp imbalance between the Emirati and the foreign population. A population of no less than 85 per cent of highly transient foreigners strongly impacts the local linguistic landscape, with many languages competing in the public sphere. English occupies a special role in this multilingual texture, as it is used as a foreign language, a second language, and a lingua franca. It occurs in its standardized varieties, but also in several non‐standard forms, as foreign labor is recruited from places formerly under British or American influence. Based on a new questionnaire study of 692 university students, we explore the tension between English and Arabic, the prominence of English, the increasing use of English as a home language, and the emergence of a new variety of English: 'Gulf English'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Colloquial Singapore English (CSE), also known as ‘Singlish’, features a wide range of sentence‐final particles (SFP) influenced by local languages such as Hokkien, Cantonese, Mandarin and Malay. This study focuses on the SFP sia, a relatively new and less‐explored particle with Malay roots. We examine sia and its variants (sia, sial, siak and siol) using data from the Corpus of Singapore English Messages, a 6.9‐million‐word text‐message corpus from 2016 to 2022.While previous research has associated sia and its variants with strong illocutionary contexts, particularly among young male Singaporeans due to its vulgar and masculine connotations, our data indicate that sia is now used more broadly among CSE‐speaking youth. It is employed in both strong and weak illocutionary contexts, suggesting a shift away from its negative/vulgar associations. Sia and its variants are emerging as general phatic markers reflecting the identity of CSE‐speaking youth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Colloquial Singapore English ('Singlish') is well known, among other features, for its class of discourse particles derived from substrate languages. These particles have been ascribed to various languages, chief among them Southern Min, Malay, and Cantonese. Previous research has also shown this class to be open to newcomers, with Lim (2007) concentrating on particles of Cantonese origin appearing in the 1980s. In this paper, I present evidence of a previously undocumented particle, bah, whose origins are suspected in Mandarin, a variety that has hitherto contributed only little to the grammatical structure of Singlish. Using corpus data complemented by data from online discussion forums, as well as responses to an online survey, the paper describes bah's pragmatic meanings and the socio-historical and sociolinguistic reasons for its emergence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]