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Regional lexical variants often emerge in interlocutors’ daily conversations, but they are unconscious about applying these locally lexical variants in the communications. Why do they use these lexical variants? What is the role of the regional lexical variants in the society? What is the significance of their existence? Why are there different lexical variants existed in different environments and context? In the quest of discovering the nature and the function of the regional lexical variants, an investigation and examination were conducted on the discussions within the online community to observe and analyze a high-frequency local lexical variant "Kopitiam" in the daily dynamic conversation among Malaysians. With the application of Functional Grammar Discourse Analysis this research found that in a specific context and environment, regional lexical variants played an essential role in promoting the establishment of identity among social members in certain region. The interaction between members were developed, the sense of groupness and belonging were strengthened gradually, and eventually societal cohesion could be formed. In addition, this investigation also revealed that the relevant lexical variants could possibly be derived by the differentiation of lexical semantics in certain contexts. The findings in this research provide a deeper understanding on how language interacts and participates in the formation of identification in the societal and individual terms in a specific context.

Recently, molecular gels have been studied with edible low molecular gelators and vegetable oils to respond to the increasing pressure to reduce the amount of saturated fat and trans fat in food products1. Molecular gels are a group of relatively new soft materials capable of numerous possible applications such as being an oil-spill recovery, drug carrier, cosmetic matrix, and fat substitute2. The gelators for forming molecular gel are low molecular weight molecules self-assembling into a three-dimensional network by means of supersaturation. The well-known 3-D network is self-assembly fibrillar networks (SAFiNs) capable of the entrapping high amount of liquid solvent (above 90 wt%) to provide the framework of molecular gels. It is widely accepted that supersaturation is the dynamic driving force for gelation kinetics; however, how the supersaturation affects the formation of a fiber network, particularly the creation of the junctions, remains poorly understood. But for a given gelling system, gelator concentration and gelation temperature can be described by supersaturation in solution. In addition, it has been studied that the force balance between gelator-gelator force and gelator-solvent force plays an important role in molecular gel formation even the mechanism behind it is still not clear. Thus, the aim of this study is to develop an alternative to fat by using a mixture of health promotional small lipid molecules to self-assemble into the three-dimensional network for entrapping several vegetable oils. Furthermore, the physical property of molecular gels is investigated by changing the mixing ratio of small molecules and changing the liquid solvent with 27 different vegetable oils. While choosing the edible gelators, -sitosterol got our attention because not only plant sterols are free of saturated fatty acids but also they have been found to lower blood cholesterol by interfering with cholesterol absorption in the intestine3. Thus, a two-component system, stearic acid + -sitosterol, with different concentrations and mass ratios was prepared with respect to their gelation ability, network structure, thermal property, and rheological properties in order to determine the optimum conditions under which canola oil gels. Results showed that stearic acid + -sitosterol was a promising structuring agent to entrap canola oil by means of forming a network consisting of needle- and platelet-like crystals through supersaturation. In addition, the ability of gel formation was tailored by manipulating the concentration and ratio of the two-component system. Based on the first stage of the study, stearic acid + -sitosterol was a successful system to structure canola oil. Thus this system was chosen to apply on various oils to test the effect of liquid environment on gelation. Twenty-five edible oils and two non-edible oils were tested and distinguished into three groups based on the gelation result, which were oleogels, partial oleogels, and non-oleogels. It was found that oil having more portions of unsaturated fatty acids than saturated fatty acids introduces the high chance of oleogel formation. It meant that an oil having more in linolenic acid with a low percentage of saturated fatty acids (