Controller–pilot communication is a key safety barrier in flight operations, yet miscommunication can still occur in some cases. The aim of the study was to examine how a miscommunication can emerge across interactional turns and persist despite repeated attempts at clarification, showing how language-related factors and human factors operate together under operational constraints. An instrumental case study design was adopted using a publicly available air–ground communication recording. The analysis indicates that the breakdown was shaped by interacting mechanisms. Phonological interference supported lexical misidentification, and a low-frequency word was mapped onto a more frequent operational item, illustrating how speech intelligibility, lexical expectations, and attention interact in communication. Schema-driven perception then guided subsequent listening and sustained an elevated risk interpretation through expectation and confirmation bias. At the same time, mitigation in plain language produced mixed pragmatic signals because expedited handling was requested while emergency status was avoided, complicating risk calibration and repair. Narrative explanations and idiomatic wording further reduced conciseness and limited repair efficiency. The case shows how shared situational awareness can drift when language choices and cognitive processes do not align.

This study aims to analyse how Wolipop.detik.com frames androgyny in fashion and lifestyle news. This study departs from the view that androgyny in the media sphere does not appear neutrally, but is constructed through language choices, narrative arrangement, visual emphasis, and specific meaning-making processes that influence how the public understands gender expression that differs from common norms. This study uses a descriptive qualitative approach with Zhongdang Pan and Gerald M. Kosicki’s framing analysis model, which consists of syntactic, script, thematic, and rhetorical structures. This framework is strengthened by Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity to examine how masculine and feminine expressions in the media are produced through the repeated presentation of bodies, clothing, style, and visual appearance. The primary data consist of Wolipop news texts containing representations of androgyny, while the secondary data are drawn from books, scholarly journals, academic articles, and relevant previous studies. The findings show that Wolipop dominantly frames androgyny as a visual expression that is aesthetic, modern, inspirational, and closely associated with popular culture. The dominant patterns that emerge are the androgyny aestheticisation frame, celebrity legitimation frame, and lifestyle-oriented frame, which position androgyny as a fashion and lifestyle trend rather than as an issue of gender identity debated within a broader social dimension. These findings extend media and gender studies by showing that digital lifestyle media do not merely present fluid gender expression as a visual trend, but also construct symbolic legitimacy for androgyny through aesthetic, popular, and depoliticised framing mechanisms.

ABSTRACT This study examines Japanese public attitudes toward the use of English loanwords rendered in katakana in public health discourse during the COVID-19 pandemic. Focusing on reactions to a tweet by Japanese politician Taro Kono criticising the use of katakana English in public-facing messages, the analysis draws on 1,417 comments posted by X users. These comments capture spontaneous public responses under conditions of uncertainty, offering insight into how language choices are judged in high-stakes public communication. The findings showed pronounced opposition to katakana English, with most comments expressing concern about reduced comprehensibility, particularly for members of the public assumed to have limited familiarity with English-derived terminology. A small subset acknowledged that such forms may be acceptable in specific situations, including cases where concise translation is difficult or where alignment with internationally circulating terminology is considered necessary. Notably, no comments explicitly endorsed routine use of katakana English in official communication. By foregrounding public views expressed in online discourse, the study contributes empirical evidence to ongoing discussions of English use in public communication and linguistic accessibility in contemporary Japan.

Namibia’s post-independence English-only language policy has been portrayed as incompatible with the country’s pre-independence sociolinguistic character. Language attitudes and patterns of language use in pre-independence Namibia were documented in a large-scale pre-independence sociolinguistic survey conducted by the South Africa’s Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), published in 1982. What has changed since then? This article presents findings from a recently conducted sociolinguistic survey involving Windhoek residents. The quantitative component focuses on ethnolinguistic self-identification, language attitudes and language choices. The qualitative component focuses on folk categorisations of Namibian ways of speaking, their perceived social diffusion and the ideologies underpinning them. The survey finds that English has eclipsed Afrikaans as a lingua franca, although Afrikaans has maintained itself in a distinctive form among young black men. Even though Oshiwambo is spoken by Windhoek’s new Ovambo demographic majority, its use remains largely confined to family settings, while Otjiherero has lost its former role as a marginal urban lingua franca. The article ultimately argues that post-apartheid Namibia’s English-only language policy, combined with mass migration from Oshiwambo-speaking districts historically more exposed to English than to Afrikaans and long-standing proficiency in English among urban Afrikaans speakers, catalysed the seemingly abrupt post-independence shift in lingua franca use. At the same time, the rural stigmatisation of Oshiwambo has hindered its potential to develop as a lingua franca.

This study addresses the limited research on how translanguaging operates within playful talk in audiovisual digital environments, particularly in relation to identity construction and authenticity negotiation. While previous studies have examined translanguaging in educational or written digital contexts, little attention has been given to its role in informal, multimodal interactions on platforms such as YouTube. This study aims to analyze how multilingual speakers employ translanguaging practices to construct social identities and negotiate authenticity in playful talk. This research adopts an interpretive qualitative approach using a case study design. The data were collected from one episode of the Playful Talk YouTube channel, focusing on a single participant (GS1). Data sources include video recordings and a semi-structured interview, which were analyzed using thematic and discourse-oriented analysis. The findings reveal that translanguaging functions as a structured communicative strategy rather than a random language alternation. English is predominantly used for affective expression and stance-taking, while Indonesian provides contextual elaboration and narrative grounding. These language choices enable the participant to construct hybrid identities that integrate local and transnational orientations. Furthermore, multimodal resources such as gestures and facial expressions are systematically aligned with linguistic shifts, reinforcing meaning-making and authenticity in interaction. This study contributes to digital sociolinguistics by demonstrating that translanguaging is not only linguistic but also multimodal and interactional. It offers a more integrated framework for understanding multilingual communication in digital environments and highlights the role of playful talk as a site of identity negotiation.

Background/Objectives: Cancer-related terminology is not merely descriptive and plays a critical role in shaping emotional responses, personal identity, and communication across clinical, social, and public spheres. Despite growing interest in the psychosocial dimensions of illness language, few studies have centered the lived experiences of individuals navigating cancer through the lens of terminology. This study explores how people living with and beyond cancer perceive, interpret, and emotionally respond to cancer-related language, focusing on the way terminology influences identity, stigma, and communicative interaction. Methods: A sequential mixed-methods design was employed. The quantitative phase involved 146 participants with a cancer diagnosis completing a structured questionnaire on preferred terminology and emotional impact. The qualitative phase followed, using open-ended questionnaires with 11 participants to deepen understanding of linguistic experiences. Thematic content analysis was used to identify patterns across narratives. Results: These findings reveal that labels such as "cancer patient" evoke strong negative emotional reactions, associated with stigma, fear, and identity reduction. Person-first and context-sensitive language was perceived as more respectful and empowering. Emotional responses to language varied widely, from fear to neutrality, shaped by speaker role, context, and time since diagnosis. Media representations were often seen as dramatizing or moralizing, reinforcing the need for communicative clarity, empathy, and education in both clinical and public discourse. Conclusions: Cancer-related language is a powerful psychosocial force. It shapes how individuals are seen and see themselves and can either reinforce stigma or foster dignity and resilience. This study highlights the urgent need for person-centered, context-aware communication practices across healthcare, media, and society.

Energy efficiency in computing has emerged as a critical concern due to escalating environmental and financial costs, particularly in the context of cluster computing, where there is an ever-increasing software workload. Achieving meaningful improvements in energy efficiency requires a comprehensive understanding of the interplay between hardware and software. This research investigates how algorithmic optimisations, language choice, and parallelisation strategies influence energy efficiency and how hardware-level strategies such as underclocking, overclocking, cooling, and on-demand computing can further impact energy usage. A set of measures that can be used generally to show the impact trade-off of power and performance are defined, including the Energy Factor (EF) and a new Efficiency–Performance Score (EPS). Validation experiments on a custom-built Raspberry Pi Bramble cluster used workloads like Monte Carlo Pi simulations in Python and C. Energy and performance trade-offs were evaluated using the Energy Factor and Efficiency–Performance Score on a small example cluster to validate the approach. Results show parallelisation greatly improves energy efficiency over serial execution. Cooling slightly boosts speed under heavy loads but increases total energy use. Perhaps counter-intuitively, underclocking actually raises total energy consumption, while overclocking reduces it. Language choice also impacts efficiency, with C offering notable energy savings over Python. The findings support the hypothesis that software optimisation alone can improve energy efficiency, but the most impactful results are achieved when both software and hardware strategies are jointly considered. These insights contribute to the design of future energy-aware computing systems and provide a foundation for sustainable, high-performance computing architectures.

Objectives: This study investigates language shift, code-switching, and linguistic change in an understudied trilingual Japanese-Korean-Russian speech community on Sakhalin. It elucidates how successive political regimes, demographic transformations, language/dialect structure, and speaker proficiency shape diglossic relations, language choice patterns, and multilingual practices. Methodology: Using implicational scales, macro-level analysis visualizes language choice across interlocutors and domains. Micro-level analysis draws on Myers-Scotton’s Matrix Language Frame model and Poplack’s code-switching typology, with apparent-time analysis to identify linguistic innovation and change. Data and analysis: Five hours of recordings from 16 second-to-fourth-generation Sakhaliners of Japanese, Korean, and mixed heritage yielded 220 multilingual utterances and 450 code-switching instances, analyzed alongside self-reports on language choice. Findings: Macro-level analysis reveals a typical three-generation language shift pattern for Koreans but not Japanese, demonstrating that changes in demographics and institutional support can produce abrupt language shifts. Diglossia exhibits initial structural stability but eventual instability: high languages are replaced by successive colonial powers, while low languages persist through the third generation before facilitating language shift. Micro-level analysis confirms the applicability of both Myers-Scotton’s and Poplack’s frameworks across typologically similar (Japanese/Korean) and dissimilar (Russian/Japanese, Russian/Korean) language pairs. Code-switching functions—quotational authenticity effects, audience inclusion, compensatory/emphatic purposes, and identity marking—enhance communicative efficiency. Apparent-time analysis identifies three age-cohort-specific speaker innovations (analogical leveling, light verb formations, novel negation constructions) and one change in progress: the productive Russian tag question construction, appearing across age cohorts. These patterns demonstrate a systematic preference for regularity and invariant forms in language change. Originality and significance: Providing rare systematic linguistic documentation of a historically stratified language contact zone, the findings advance theoretical understandings of diglossia, language shift, code-switching, and contact-induced innovation and change. They highlight preference for regularity , predictability , and communicative efficiency and underscore the importance of considering language/dialect structure, speaker proficiency, and sociohistorical context in multilingual analysis.

This current research sought to examine the use of language and choice of languages in a common public Nigerian secondary school setting through a sociocultural and sociolinguistic framework, with special emphasis on the dynamics of bilingual practices, especially the interaction between English and Yoruba languages. This research was based on a qualitative case study research methodology with a component of quantitative data. The data was collected through observations of classes and semi-structured oral interviews of 120 students, 15 teachers, and 10 administrators and support staff of Osogbo Grammar School in Osun State, Nigeria. The results of the research showed that the school was a bilingual setting where situational and metaphorical code-switching were common. English was dominant in the formal sphere of the school, while Yoruba was dominant in the informal sphere. The research further showed that factors like educational goals, cultural identity, and prestige of languages were major determinants of the language preferences and attitudes of the students, teachers, and non-teaching staff. The research concluded that the language use of the Osogbo Grammar School reflects the general sociolinguistic patterns of multilingual communities.

This study aims to investigate the types, functions, and language distribution of classroom language used by Grade VII English teachers at SMPN 13 Mataram. Employing a qualitative case study design, data were collected through non-participant observations, audio-video recordings, and semi-structured interviews with two teachers. The analysis followed Miles and Huberman’s interactive model. Findings reveal that teachers employed two major types of classroom language based on Hughes’ framework: instructional talk (49.8%) and managerial talk (50.2%). Instructional talk encompassed explaining, questioning, eliciting, checking understanding, giving feedback, and directing students, while managerial talk included opening routines, giving instructions and directions, praise, attendance checking, attention getters, and other regulatory expressions. In terms of function, classroom language predominantly served pedagogical purposes (78%), particularly instructional-managerial and language modelling functions, with social functions accounting for 22%. Regarding language choice, Indonesian was most dominant (43%), followed by English (34%) and mixed code-switching (21%), especially during core instructional activities to ensure comprehensible input. English was mainly used for routines, simple instructions, and modeling. The findings indicate that teachers strategically balance first language support and target language exposure to facilitate comprehension and participation. Future research should examine the longitudinal impact of classroom language patterns on students’ speaking proficiency and communicative competence.

This​‍​‌‍​‍‌​‍​‌‍​‍‌ research work was derived from the Arabic version of The Beekeeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri that principally treated aspects like emotional and cultural elements and also the experience of refugees in the Arabic language. The novel is a gentle encounter of the traumatic experience of the couple forcibly displaced; the research work, through its examination of the translation process, has been able to identify the emotional and cultural aspects of the text that have been preserved, changed, or even amplified. The comparative descriptive research has been used in this study along with the translation studies and narrative theory to look into the effects of language choices on the depiction of trauma, loss, and ​‍​‌‍​‍‌​‍​‌‍​‍‌resilience. Major sections of the English original and Mahdi A. AlSoliman's Arabic translation (نحَّال حلب) are contrasted to find differences in meaning, emotional intensity, and cultural translation. The translation nearly aligns with the original ideas of the novel but deviates in terms of everyday terms and wording such that there is a considerable difference in the strength of emotion as well as the cultural meaning of the novel. This study highlights the necessity for additional research on how translation shapes narratives of displacement and the degree to which it conveys the emotional veracity of refugee experiences in literature.

In dual-language contexts, bilinguals often switch between their languages. How they do this, and how they control their languages during switching, can depend on the nature of the interactional context and the task (comprehension or production). Here, we examined the influence of the immediate and overall language context on language control. First, we examined how language control differs between producing language switches in response to cues, producing switches voluntarily, and comprehending switches. Second, we examined whether language control changes after a change in a bilingual's daily-life overall environment. To do this, we conducted a longitudinal study with Mandarin-English bilinguals who moved from China (L1-dominant environment) to the United Kingdom (bilingual/L2-dominant environment) and with a control group staying in China. Participants completed three tasks twice (7 months apart): cued picture naming (cues indicating language choice), voluntary picture naming (free language choice), and comprehension of spoken words. Language control differed between the three tasks. Participants showed greater language-switching costs in cued production than during voluntary production and comprehension. Furthermore, only cued production showed that using two languages was more costly than using one (mixing costs). However, we found no evidence that a change in the language environment resulted in changes in language control. This suggests a bilingual's language control mechanisms adapt to the immediate context they are communicating in but are perhaps not shaped as strongly by the overall language environment they live in. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Media institutions play a central role in shaping public perception and understanding of conflict and peace processes across Africa. Through language choice, framing, and narrative construction, the media can either escalate tensions or contribute meaningfully to conflict management and resolution. This paper examines the nexus between media, language, and conflict management in Africa, with particular emphasis on the power of narrative in constructing social realities, mobilizing identities, and influencing political behaviour. Anchored in framing theory, peace journalism, and critical discourse analysis, the study interrogates how dominant and alternative media narratives shape perceptions of “self” and “other” in contexts of ethnic, religious, and political conflict. Drawing on qualitative discourse analysis of selected print, broadcast, and digital media texts from conflict-affected African societies, the paper demonstrates that sensationalist framing, inflammatory language, and ethnically-coded narratives often reinforce polarization and legitimize violence. Conversely, peace-oriented narratives, characterized by inclusive language, contextual reporting, and solution-focused framing, have the potential to de-escalate tensions and support dialogue and reconciliation. The paper further highlights the under-explored role of indigenous languages and vernacular media in either amplifying conflict narratives or fostering communal consensus and moral restraint. The paper contributes to scholarship by moving beyond the conventional focus on media as a driver of conflict escalation to foreground its normative and practical role in conflict management. It argues that effective conflict transformation in Africa requires deliberate narrative interventions, ethical journalism, and the institutionalization of peace-oriented communication frameworks. By situating African experiences within broader debates on media, discourse, and peacebuilding, the paper offers theoretical and policy-relevant insights for scholars, media practitioners, and conflict management institutions seeking to harness the power of narrative for sustainable peace. Keywords: Media, Conflict, Narrative Framing, Peace Journalism, Language and Discourse, and Conflict Management

ABSTRACT While translanguaging in second/foreign language writing has gained growing scholarly attention, research has predominantly focused on bilingual students, leaving the translanguaging practices of multilingual students underexplored. To address this gap, this case study investigates the translanguaging practices in English and French writing of six Chinese emergent multilingual undergraduate students enrolled in an English-French dual foreign language programme. Data sources included students’ planning notes, outlines, drafts, and their reflective learning journals. The emergent multilingual students employed four types of translanguaging practices to navigate linguistic and discursive difficulties: (1) using their first language (L1) to lessen the cognitive load of generating content and language simultaneously; (2) testing words and phrases across languages to identify the most precise expression; (3) temporarily including words from other languages as placeholders to maintain the thought flow; and (4) tailoring language choices to respond to different writing tasks. Crucially, participants used their languages in various directions and their translanguaging extended beyond simple L1 transfer to second language (L2) or third language (L3). This study contributes to multilingualism research by exploring the translanguaging practices of emergent multilingual students who are learning both the L2 and L3 primarily in a formal learning context, with limited opportunities for daily use.

This study investigated family language policies (FLP) in the current context of the Macao Special Administrative Region (Macao SAR). It explored family language ideologies, management strategies, and intergenerational practices through questionnaires, semi-structured interviews, and participant observations. The findings indicate that Macao permanent residents’ families take Cantonese Chinese as the primary medium of communication and cultural identity. Simultaneously, Mandarin and English are often valued for their roles in academic and professional advancement. Portuguese exhibits a trend of marginalization, despite remaining one of the official languages of the Macao SAR. As for other dialects, they may be used in family conversations but are not considered important languages. Beyond this hierarchy of language values, the researchers also revealed that the FLP of Macao’s permanent residents’ families tends to be driven by both experience and foresight, enabling family members to engage in effective consultation on language choice and language learning. Regarding language practice, children’s multilingual fluency is significantly better than that of their parents. The dominant family language tendency does not influence the consensus of multilingualism and allows code-mixing to appear in conversations. In this article, FLP in Macao families is found to be shaped by both experiential knowledge and future-oriented practical considerations, while also reflecting parents’ affective concerns and responses to broader structural pressures. All these factors together form a decision-making system. In this system, both emotion and reason play their roles simultaneously. If a hierarchical distinction must be made, the rational recognition of the diverse characteristics of the linguistic environment and the dominant status of the main language will be primary.

A Review of: Frye, J., & Hasler-Barker, M. (2024). “Lady can talk forever...”: Exploring caring discourse in bilingual librarianship. Library & Information Science Research, 46(2), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lisr.2024.101301 Objective – To investigate how bilingual reference librarians in a public library express care in their interactions with community members, and to examine whether and how librarians’ linguistic choices reflect authentic caring discourse in multilingual contexts. Design – A case study of bilingual reference desk transactions. Setting – Online. Subjects – A public library in a U.S.-Mexico border town. Methods – Members of the research team digitally recorded approximately 20 hours of reference desk interactions over one week and collected extensive field notes. Bilingual transcribers produced full transcripts, categorized by language use (Spanish-only, English-only, bilingual). The research team examined the transcripts under the guidance of the critical discourse analysis methodology. The researchers used Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework (description, interpretation, and explanation) to summarize interactions, examine linguistic features, and analyze expressions of care in relation to social and cultural contexts. Coding of the transcripts was refined through feminist research practices, ensuring attentiveness, validation, and dialogue across researcher perspectives. Main Results – Caring discourse was infrequent in bilingual reference transactions. Out of 20 bilingual interactions, only 3 contained explicit expressions of care. The caring discourse was mostly brief, primarily delivered in English regardless of the community member’s language choice and often tied to emotional disclosures rather than the initial informational requests. The researchers identified three main categories of caring discourse: commiseration, soothing assurance, and expressions of condolence. These were supported by five conversational devices: interjections, idiomatic expressions, lexical intensifiers, voice modulation (such as whispering), and humor. For example, the librarians used commiseration to acknowledge difficulties with English pronunciation or experiences of discrimination or offered condolence in response to disclosures about illness and loss. Humor appeared occasionally but often reflected discomfort or reinforced stereotypes rather than building solidarity. Although some librarians attempted to show empathy, their responses often revealed underlying deficit-based perceptions. For instance, disabilities were minimized through whispered assurances, implying embarrassment, while older patrons’ struggles with technology were met with dismissive humor about aging. Hispanic librarians also avoided using Spanish with community members who initiated conversations in that language, which created distance and limited deeper connection. The researchers believe these patterns indicated that surface-level caring expressions frequently masked disengagement, callousness, or adherence to dominant cultural norms. Several broader themes emerged: including camouflaged needs, where community members sought emotional support disguised as informational inquiries; the failure of shared identity to guarantee care, as Hispanic librarians sometimes distanced themselves from Hispanic patrons; and the dismissal of patrons’ emotional needs due to inattention or institutional pressures. Conclusion – The researchers believe bilingual caring discourse at the reference desk was often more illusion than reality, reflecting institutional conformity rather than genuine responsiveness to community members. Thus, the researchers recommend using care theory for continued use as a framework for examining librarian discourse, especially in multilingual and multiracial contexts. Additionally, the authors encourage further research to explore other aspects of care such as competence and responsiveness. Librarians need to be prepared to meet both informational and emotional needs, with cross-cultural communication and multilingual skills integrated into education/training and employ improvisation and role-play to practice caring responses. The authors also encourage reflective analysis of language use and advise institutional support to help manage the emotional labor of care.

For decades, international development has been trapped in a colonial linguistic straitjacket, privileging European languages while marginalizing African vernaculars. This study cracks open that paradigm through an unprecedented case: the American Peace Corps' accidental success using Cameroon Pidgin English as their primary development medium. Analyzing forty-four items of field questionnaire administered to forty-five participants across agricultural, educational, and health interventions in Cameroon's Northwest region, the study employs a triangulated methodology integrating Social Interactionism to examine how Pidgin English mediates knowledge construction between volunteers and communities, Critical Discourse Analysis to interrogate institutional power dynamics shaping language choice, and Semiotics to decode the cultural symbols through which development interventions acquire legitimacy. The evidence reveals that Pidgin English significantly outperformed standard English in knowledge transfer across all sectors, with comprehension gains exceeding thirty percentage points in health messaging and near-universal adoption of agricultural techniques. Volunteers who deployed Pidgin English proverbs and vernacular registers achieved what English-language manuals could not—they were granted traditional titles, incorporated into kinship networks, and positioned as legitimate development actors rather than external benefactors. Development interventions became sustainable not when communities acquired English proficiency but when innovation was communicated through African linguistic frameworks enabling epistemic appropriation. From these findings, the study advances Developmental Sociolinguistics as a new interdisciplinary framework positioning hybrid languages as essential communicative infrastructure for participatory development. The framework is organized around the Three Laws of Linguistic Justice—Epistemic Access, Discursive Parity, and Sovereignty—as normative axioms for development praxis, and operationalized through the Pidgin Protocol for decolonizing aid work. Grounded in Social Interactionist principles of guided participation, this research proves that Pidgin English is not "broken English" but repaired development, demonstrating that most projects attributed to communication gaps are, in their deepest structure, language sovereignty crises demanding political rather than technical remediation.

Being a sociocultural phenomenon, language enables people to communicate to other members of the society as well as to one’s inner self. By analyzing verbal behavior, or the communicative aspect of language, Pragmatics highlighted the necessity to reckon certain extralinguistic factors when creating meaning, such as the speakers’ intents, communicative goals, personal attitudes and feeling, as well as their sociocultural characteristics. The aim of this paper is to investigate the communicative-pragmatic peculiarities of complaint in English. Complaint is placed among Expressives, a class of speech acts that state what the speaker feels. On the illocutionary level, complaints express negative emotional message, the complainers’ disapproval about a certain situation or dissatisfaction with some state of affairs. The research of the practical material carried out in this paper shows that complaints, like other speech acts, can be phrased with the help of direct and indirect speech acts. Having an adversative illocutionary content, complaint depends heavily on the principles of politeness that govern the process of communication. The research attempts to illustrate how certain social factors affect the language choice by the speakers in the process of complaining.

In this interview, Professor Payal Arora, author of The Next Billion Users: Digital Life Beyond the West (Harvard University Press, 2019) and From Pessimism to Promise: Lessons from the Global South on Designing Inclusive Tech (MIT Press, 2024), sits down with communication scholar Dr Isabelle Alice Zaugg to explore the impact of the “next billion users” on language diversity in the digital sphere. This wide-ranging conversation touches upon the role of youth in cultivating the vitality of minoritized languages in digital spaces, how aspirations impact language choices, how voice technologies shift power dynamics for digitally disadvantaged languages, and the “hidden” use of diverse languages beyond digital spaces researchers can access. The discussion also examines the ways in which language, metaphor and visual communication are leveraged, particularly by women, to navigate their personal freedom within highly surveilled digital spaces. The purity politics of language is addressed, including hybrid languages, online slang, emoji and the art of virality through fresh and flexible communication. Arora also dissects tech companies’ newfound concentration on “the next billion users”, and proposes that a consumer-focused approach to the Global South honours communities’ desire for quality services and is an effective route to serving their linguistic, cultural and social interests. Citing global solidarity, Arora rejects the idea that ethnographers are unable to authentically represent other cultures. Rather, she advises them to engage research participants as co-collaborators to avoid extractive patterns of knowledge development, while mapping the unique relations between the global and the local across humanity’s diverse contexts.

The modern linguistic space is characterized by a high degree of variability due to globalization processes, digitalization, migration flows, and the transformation of cultural practices. The dynamics of language preferences reflect not only social changes, but also individual strategies for self-identification, professional growth, and inclusion in the global communication space. The article examines key trends in the transformation of language preferences in the 21st century, analyzes factors influencing the choice of languages for education, communication, and professional activity, and offers forecasts for the development of the language situation in the coming decades.