I visited the Faculty of Education at the University of Windsor (Canada) in November 2025. One of the things I noted was the different ways of acknowledging the land before we gave talks or lectures. I consulted one member of the host professor’s research team. The team appreciated their learnings of what makes a good Land Acknowledgement from Jaimie Kechego, who is the Indigenous Curriculum and Pedagogy Project Coordinator for the Centre for Teaching and Learning at the university. The following are direct quotes from Indigenous Educator Kechego’s workshop on ‘What makes a good Land Acknowledgement’ in September of 2025 for the professor’s research team (personal communication with Dr. Chenkai Chi): 1) knowing the history of the Indigenous territory you are on; 2) pronouncing correctly the names of the Indigenous communities in that territory; 3) committing to actions of engaging and investing in our collective future to move forward together.

So, at the beginning of my talks when I was there, I built on the University of Windsor’s Land Acknowledgement and started by saying: I wish to acknowledge that my work at the University of Windsor takes place on the traditional territory of the Three Fires Confederacy of First Nations – the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi peoples – who are part of the larger Anishinaabe Nation. I express my deepest gratitude for the privilege of learning, teaching and conducting research on these lands and waters. Their teachings continue to guide my understanding of relationality, reciprocity, and responsibility as an educator, visitor and researcher.

Coming back to Australia from Canada, I attended a symposium on Monash University campus in Melbourne (Australia) in early December, and I noted that one of the organisers from the Faculty of Education started the symposium by his ‘Acknowledgement of Country’: We acknowledge the lands on which we all meet today and recognise that sovereignty has never been ceded. It always was and always will be Aboriginal land. We pay our respects to the Peoples of the Kulin nation here in Victoria, to their ancestors, to their leaders past and present, and to the children we are educating into the future. We also acknowledge Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who are participating today. We acknowledge the lands of other Indigenous Peoples where students and lecturers are living and working around the world, and we pay our respects to them.

Reflecting on these Land Acknowledgements, I understand that, although they commonly appear at conferences and symposia, in classrooms, across digital platforms, and in institutional communications across cultures, their familiarity in our English‑speaking academic and professional lives may obscure a deeper truth, i.e., Land Acknowledgement is not a formula to be repeated, but a linguistic and cultural practice that emerges from specific place‑based histories, epistemologies and relationships. In contexts such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States, Land Acknowledgements in English are shaped by histories of dispossession and by Indigenous relational understandings of country, land and sovereignty. They are speech acts, and the spoken words constitute an integral part of a commitment to truth‑telling and the recognition of Indigenous people’s ongoing presence.

To speak of land in English across cultures is therefore to reconceptualise English as a living and evolving repertoire – an ensemble of Englishes re‑shaped by the local people and places. Indigenous Englishes, for example, render Land Acknowledgement through relational cadence, kinship vocabulary, and pragmatic norms distinct from global standardised institutional scripts. Similarly, multilingual speakers who engage in translanguaging practices across cultures may express land relations in English, which may reflect their linguistic and cultural traditions, shifting the meanings of ownership, belonging and responsibility.

If Land Acknowledgement is to remain meaningful across cultures, it may have to allow English – and its many Englishes – to bend toward local cosmologies. This involves listening to Indigenous voices, honouring place‑based knowledge systems, and embracing linguistic plurality. Ultimately, Land Acknowledgement in English across cultures invites all of our English Today readers to recognise not only the land beneath our feet, but the diverse languages, histories, and relations that shape how we speak of land and the English language.

In this issue we are pleased to bring readers a variety of the best scholarship on English varieties. The volume begins with three research articles that focus on English‑language phonologies. Jie Zeng, Stefanie Pillai and Shin Yi Chew examine monophthongal vowels used by English speakers from the indigenous Yi people of southwestern China and how those vowels potentially diverge from the larger community of English users in China. Christopher Ankomah examines monophthongal vowels in Ghanian English to suggest that speakers’ repertoire of vowels is not as small as previously thought. Finally, Lena Lotte Lenhardt and Philipp Meer examine the use of English among a small group of German high school students to determine whether American or British norms dominate.

This issue also includes four shorter articles. Mohammad Mosiur Rahman and Guangwei Hu survey English as a medium of instruction (EMI) policies in higher education institutions in China, Japan, Malaysia and Nepal. Similarly, Nguyen B. Ngoc Jade explores the EMI policies that have come to influence higher education in Taiwan. Charlie Taylor conducts a corpus study of myself used as a subjective pronoun. Finally, Abu Saleh Mohammad Raji proposes steps to encourage translanguaging in ELT classrooms in Bangladesh. Three book reviews close this issue. Lin Yu reviews Zeki Hamawand’s English Stylistics: A Cognitive Grammar Approach. Muhammed Parviz reviews Alfonso Del Percio and Mi–Cha Flubacher’s edited volume Critical Sociolinguistics: Dialogues, Dissonances, Developments. Finally, Zheng Wang reviews Alex Baratta, Rui He and Paul Vincent Smith’s monograph Emerging Englishes: China English in Academic Writing.