Language naming systems are local ways of organising diversity, yet the language names used by linguists are sometimes incommensurable with the lived social reality of speakers. The process of assigning language names is not neutral, trivial or objective: it is a highly political process driven and shaped by understandings of group identity,…

This paper uses a transnational lens to discuss findings from a longitudinal study of the home literacy practices of linguistically diverse immigrant families. The paper draws on the experiences of three families to show how literacy events and practices index and mediate immigrants' identities as they settle into the host community. Observations,…

In this article I adopt a family language policy approach and a diachronic perspective to explore how the dialect-Italian dynamics unfolds differently within different cohorts of Italian migrants due to the hierarchical position of the two heritage languages. I highlight three main issues that emerge across time in the language policies in the…

A key factor that has been found to be critical in shaping family language policy is parents' linguistic identities, or "parents' personal experiences with bilingualism, biculturalism or second language learning" (King, Kendall A. & Lyn Fogle. 2006. Bilingual parenting as good parenting: Parents' perspectives on family language…

Maintaining heritage languages is frequently desired by migrants to continue cultural and social connections to family and identity. However, in imagined monolingual nations such as Australia, efforts to transmit minority languages are seen as a private matter and largely unsupported. Transmission of culture and language is also frequently seen as…

Filipino migrants are the fifth largest migrant community in Australia. Filipino migration to the country has been driven by socioeconomic and political factors in both the Philippines and Australia. Against this context, this paper investigates heritage language maintenance practices of Filipino migrant families by using a 2019 interview-based…

This contribution discusses some links between the linguistics and the economics of the spirit of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurialism. Whether it is individuals or various social groupings, or even entire societies, a review of policies promoting self-investment in language ability links to a neoliberal economic and political ethos of…

This study explores interpreters' role performance, lawyers' reactions to interpreters' performance, and the perceptions and expectations of the interpreter role among these two groups of professionals. It adopts an ethnographic approach to generate data from observations made in Australia of 20 authentic interpreted lawyer-client interviews and…

International students studying at Australian universities are largely represented in the media as problematic speakers of English, in part due to the dominance of the monolingual mindset as an approach to language. This paper focuses instead on international students' multilingualism and examines the multimodal media representation of them as…

Professional interpreters are obliged by their codes of ethics to interpret the speakers' speech faithfully, including offensive, profane or vulgar language. In order to achieve this goal, interpreters need to be pragmatically competent, so as to understand the intention and effect of the offensive remark in the source language and be able to…

Diaspora vloggers--migrants who produce video blogs in the language of their home countries for a transnational diaspora community--have been a largely overlooked group in the studies of social media. This paper focuses on the unique role of Chinese diaspora vloggers during an unprecedented global event--the COVID-19 pandemic. Using manual keyword…

The relationship between the polite and conventional nature of friendly language and the sincerity of the writer's feelings is a central topic in linguistic and historical research on friendship in epistolary communication. This relationship can be understood in the context of the emotional values and conventionalised emotional practices that…

This article explores the construction and shifting of "expert" and "novice" roles between and within two languages (Japanese and English). Taking a language socialization perspective while drawing upon insights from conversation analysis on epistemics in interaction, it analyzes seven hours of audio recordings of dinnertime…

Theories of language policy increasingly emphasise focusing on the specific contexts in which language management occurs. In government settings, policy seeks to shape how individuals interact with officials. Australian asylum procedure is an area where policy aims at tight control. I examine how communication is managed in this setting, in which…

This article scrutinises language discourse in transnational culture and considers theories on "reflexive modernity" (Beck et al. 2003) for analysis. I introduce symbolic meanings of language in transnational Communities of Practice constituted by salsa dance, where, depending on dance styles and on local, national and transnational…