Volume 2026, Issue 297

In this piece, I return to an old paper from college and rewrite it to confront my fraught relationship with the English language. I trace back the fears, the shame, the tiny victories, the silent joys. I look back on the people who influenced my learning, the awkward situations I had to endure, the spaces where I struggled to fit in. And in all of these residual memories, I begin to see the embodied textures of “Unequal Englishes” – the lived reality that there are many Englishes, each shaped by different histories and sociopolitical dynamics, but not all are valued equally. I grapple with the following questions: What do unequal Englishes look like on the ground? How do we feel these inequalities, carry them in our bodies, and live through them under our breath? In the awkward pauses? The swallowed words? In the ways we try to sound ‘right’? In the end, the paper mobilizes a modest proposal, which I call the “affective banalities of unequal Englishes,” to bring front and center – to visibilize – the ordinary, seemingly harmless, often taken-for-granted moments of daily life where inequities among Englishes and their users quietly emerge and take root, yet are also easily dismissed.

Chinese cities Guangzhou and Yiwu have established themselves as major trade hubs and important nodes of “low-end” globalization. In particular, Guangzhou in Southern China has been an important port of the modern-day belt and road initiative in the 21st century, contributing to the global flows of people, goods, and ideas at a grass-roots level and attracting traders and businessmen from Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and beyond from a superdiverse range of sociolinguistic and religious backgrounds. Despite its fundamental role in the very making of globalization, language is less explored in globalization literature overall. In particular, the (socio)linguistic aspects remain significantly under-researched in low-end globalization or globalization from below (which stands in contrast to the fancy and sophisticated high-end globalization operated by national governments and transnational corporations). The increasingly multilingual and complex world we are in highlights the pertinent issues of grass-roots communication in low-end globalization. In this article, using Guangzhou as a case study, we explore the sociolinguistic aspects of low-end globalization on the ground, highlighting how multilingual signs (e.g. Arabic, Hindi, Bengali, Urdu, Russian, French, Swahili and Twi), various semiotic materials, and dynamic and hybridised communication practices (e.g. translanguaging) effectively serve as the “language” of low-end globalization at a grass-roots level in a context of superdiversity and mobility. The article also points to the emergence of an English-based trade pidgin in the city as a result of language contact.

This study examines the oppressive conditions under which Kurdish lexicographical efforts have emerged – particularly in Iran, and to a lesser extent in Turkey – and their significance as forms of resistance. It draws on examples from across Kurdistan, analyzing how Kurdish intellectuals and lexicographers confront state-imposed marginalization that reduces Kurdish to a dialect or local patois. Despite these constraints, the past three decades have seen the publication of numerous dictionaries in diverse formats, documenting Kurdish vocabulary and challenging the linguistic dominance of official state languages. By treating Kurdish lexicography as both a means of cultural preservation and a mode of resistance, this study shows its role in contesting erasure and reclaiming linguistic agency. Through scholarly rigor and cultural assertion, Kurdish dictionaries function as vital repositories of identity, affirming the place of Kurdish language and culture within the region’s historical and political landscape.

Understanding how foreign-accented speech is perceived in majority societies is increasingly important in the context of global migration. Such research provides valuable insights into the challenges and opportunities encountered by international migrants, particularly regarding their prospects for social inclusion in key societal domains such as employment, housing, and education. This article presents key findings from a large-scale study on language attitudes in multilingual Sweden. A speaker evaluation experiment was conducted in which twelve foreign-sounding accents were assessed across multiple tasks. The study involved over 2,000 participants, selected to form a representative sample of the Swedish population. The results reveal a pronounced evaluative hierarchy of accents that mirrors broader societal rankings of languages based on status, prestige, and perceived social value. Accents associated with North-Western European languages were more accurately identified and more positively evaluated. In contrast, accents from other regions were more frequently misidentified and evaluated less favourably – particularly when the accent was perceived as originating from an L1 Arabic background. The analysis of these misidentifications reveals that listeners’ evaluations are often shaped less by the linguistic signal itself than by socially constructed assumptions about the speaker’s ethnic or cultural background. The article concludes with a critical methodological discussion highlighting the importance of including accent identification tasks in language attitude research.

Mass population movements and the booming Internet have broken down geographical borders for languages and facilitated language contact, resulting in superdiversity of linguistic landscapes and challenges for maintaining minority languages. Given the extensive discussion regarding the relationship between language attitudes and language use, how language attitudes and language ecology within a country interact with the rapidly developing economy and mass population movements in the digital age remains underexplored. In this study, we conducted an online questionnaire survey about dialect vitality and language attitudes of citizens ( n  = 1,162) in the Chinese mainland. We found that 1) vitality of the northern branch of Chinese dialects was higher than the southern branch; 2) as a factor related to dialect vitality, the relevance of language attitudes outperformed socioeconomic situations; 3) attitudes toward dialects differed mainly according to whether people migrated and had an emotional attachment to their dialects; and 4) respondents whose dialect vitality was weaker had stronger faith in maintaining their dialects in virtual spaces. These findings help us understand the relationships between language vitality, language attitudes, and socioeconomic development in the increasingly globalised and digital age.