Kongish Daily, a Facebook page promoting Kongish – a creative, critical, and colloquial form of Hong Kong English with Cantonese inflections – has attracted a following in social media over the past decade. It has also sparked interest among sociolinguists interested in (post-)multilingual developments in East Asia. This study is built on Hansen Edwards’s (2016) premise that Hong Kong English would gain wider acceptance in Hong Kong as the cultural identity of local language users shifted amidst sociocultural transformations. We first provide an overview of the Kongish phenomenon, followed by a qualitative study involving 30 active Kongish users from diverse age groups, genders and occupations. Through semi-structured interviews, we explore users’ perceptions of language and identity. Our findings support Hansen Edwards’s prediction regarding the strengthening of Hong Kongers’ cultural identification, while revealing an evolving, counter-stereotypical Hong Kong culture as well as an opinion divide on the future trajectory of Kongish.

This paper explores the complementation of the verb prevent in contemporary English. While the verb is typically followed by from -ing, British English also exhibits a variant without from (e.g. They must carry out a forensic examination of these failings to prevent them happening again [The Daily Mail, 22 December 2020]). In British English, this construction has in fact been reported to be on the increase in recent years. Since previous studies on this topic have tended to rely on a limited number of examples, the present research investigates a larger dataset drawn from the 2010 issues of The Daily Mail (British) and USA Today (American). This study also examines the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus as a supplementary resource. The BAWE corpus is a collection of academic assignments and provides insight into unedited uses of the verb prevent. The findings are as follows: the use of from-less -ing is indeed expanding in contemporary British English; the rate of this expansion differs between newspaper texts and unedited academic writing; and the complementation patterns of prevent are more varied in contemporary English than previously assumed. The discussion concludes by situating these present-day uses within the historical development of this verb.

Research has shown that when ‘xxx English’ is used in reference to an English variety, the attribute ‘xxx’ is more likely to be an adjective than a noun. This is true of traditional ENL and ESL varieties, whose speakers can legitimately claim that ‘English is our language’. EFL varieties tend to follow the same trend, with ‘China English’ being a glaring exception to date. Corpus analysis shows that the pre-head attribute of a noun phrase may be filled by a noun (e.g., Belgium, Canada) or an adjective derived from it (e.g., Belgian, Canadian). A pre-head nominal attribute expresses the meaning ‘a type of’ (e.g., ‘communication skill’, ‘generation gap’), while a pre-head adjective signals either a quality (e.g., ‘smart city’ – with quality of being smart) or membership of a class (e.g., ‘smart card’, distinct from other cards). A pre-head nominal attribute and its adjectival counterpart signaling ‘class membership’ thus share a classificatory function. This helps explain stylistic variation such as free alternation between ‘Scottish flag’ and ‘Scotland flag’ in the same text; nor is there anything unusual using names of countries in sports reporting (e.g., ‘Brazil national football team’). But such a stylistic shift is semantically nuanced and not always licensed (consider, e.g., ‘Ukrainian security’ and ‘Ukraine war’, where the pre-head attributes ‘Ukrainian’ and ‘Ukraine’ are not interchangeable). The adjectival form of a toponym is usually longer in speech and writing than the toponym itself. Apparently, phonology matters when naming an English variety, witness the rarity of ‘Guamanian English’ and ‘Peruvian English’.

While the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) for languages was originally developed for the European context, its influence has extended to other regions. The present paper highlights this growing influence by reporting on revisions to grammar in South Korea’s National English Curriculum based on CEFR criteria and the related CEFR-based English Grammar Profile resource. Specifically focusing on Appendix 4 of the 2015 curriculum, which consists of example sentences of language forms for communication (e.g. Kate is from London), the revising process based on CEFR and the English Grammar Profile involved two steps: 1) adding grammatical categories for the example sentences, and 2) reorganizing the school level where the grammatical categories are recommended to be taught. The resulting changes were implemented in the 2022 Korean National English Curriculum, which began being applied nationwide to English education in 2024.

This study examines how English is semiotically represented in video games, an under–explored but promising virtualscape. Drawing on the concept of semiotic landscape, this study critically explores how English and other semiotic resources work together to create social meanings and what are the ideological forces governing the process of semiotic appropriation. Data were collected from the in–game English representation and other semiotic resources from two female–oriented Chinese video games. It is found that English embodies cosmopolitan and poetic dispositions in the romanticized virtual space. Such dispositions are made relevant to the globally consuming elite class who are assumed not only to have access to the world consumption opportunities but also to show literary appreciation with a sense of distinction. The paper highlights the implications of these findings for understanding romance–mediated English as classed and gendered ideologies in the context of the increasing popularity of female–oriented game sphere.

Despite comments in the ELT literature on the importance of word-stress for comprehensibility in English, there are many places where native speakers of English appear to pay it little attention, showing systematic variation as well as errors. At the very least, there is a paradox here, in that learners are told to get a feature right that native speakers feel free to ignore. More detailed consideration, though, shows that matters are not as simple as this implies. In this paper, several types of stress variation in English are exemplified, and it is also shown that in everyday usage native English speakers are flexible in what they will accept where stress is concerned. This raises questions about the best model for teaching stress in English as a second or foreign language. A simple right/wrong dichotomy is unlikely to reflect native usage.