We will look at attitudes and value judgments which speakers and communities have about English dialects and discuss their social relevance of language in general. We will see that language is not only a means to share information but an essential part of social life which helps us organize ourselves and define our identity. There are different levels of usage (regional, social, ethnic, individual) and that variation has regional, social and individual dimensions. We start with a short discussion of general attitudes about language varieties, look at social prejudice based on language usage, find out why some varieties are stigmatized whereas others have high prestige and get a first glance of perceptions about standard and non-standardized varieties. Looking at examples from English around the world, we take a look at perceptual dialectology to demonstrate how views toward dialects affect our ives – not forgetting their negative side effects.

ILanguage issues may have a political dimension, and English has played a major role in this around the world. In this chapter, we look into sociolinguistic aspects involved in politics and nation building, for instance whether English should be adopted to serve in all official functions as a national or official language, or whether a local language, accessible to larger sections of a community, should be adopted instead. We discuss how and to what extent governments should plan and orchestrate language-related activities in education and public discourse, and we look at language policies implemented in the US and Ireland as cases in point. We discuss the impact of governmental bodies on language planning as in the Speak Good English movement in Singapore, and present efforts to achieve language revitalization, which are preeminent considering language obsolescence around the world. The chapter ends with a look at language rights in migrant communities.

In this chapter, language policies are examined with reference to how they are debated in public discourse. The chapter argues that, like in politics, the space afforded to language policy in conventional media is often narrow, and depends upon how language-related issues invoke broader narratives of identity and ideology, though more significant debating often occurs in new media. The case study examines debates about language policy in Singapore, drawing on examples from traditional media (in the form of letters to the editor) to comments under a Facebook post by a local media outlet.

Social interaction in the twenty-first century involves dynamic use of multilingual and multimodal semiotic resources and is often characterized by the transient, momentary occurrence of creative features. This chapter aims to present Translanguaging as an analytical framework for such dynamic use and creative features in social interaction. The chapter begins with an outline of the diverse phenomena of dynamic and creative practices involving multiple languages and multimodal semiotic resources. Special attention is paid to new media mediated interaction. The characteristics of such practices are identified and discussed. And theoretical issues such as temporality and momentarity are addressed. The chapter then reviews the various analytic concepts, frameworks and approaches that may help to understand these practices, their characteristics and the theoretical issues herein. It focuses specifically on those that have the capacity to offer new insights into the dynamics at the interface of the temporal and spatial dimensions of human social interaction and the creativity of multilingual language users. Perspectives from social semiotics and multimodality, as well as the traditional sociolinguistic and discourse analytic approaches are included. Thus, concepts such as creativity and criticality are also critiqued. The theoretical motivations for the translanguaging perspective and the methodological implications of adopting such a perspective are then discussed and highlighted. It aims to show the added value of translanguaging as an analytic framework for social interaction in the linguistically and culturally diverse world today.

This chapter documents the historical background and the current usage conditions of English in postcolonial countries where English holds a strong position as a widely used second language, notably in West and East Africa, in South and South-East Asia, and in the Pacific region. Case studies focus more closely on Nigerian English (including a sample text of news in Nigerian Pidgin English, with linguistic explanations), on English in Singapore (also with a recording, transcript and linguistic analysis of a sample, a conversation in "Singlish") and on Tok Pisin, an English-derived pidgin which is a national language in Papua New Guinea (also with a sample text, an election poster). To these world regions English was brought as the language of traders and missionaries, and later administrators and soldiers. Interestingly enough, the diffusion of English to these countries has gained special momentum only fairly recently, after the end of the colonial period, in the wake of globalization. The last section continues this exploration by describing the growing role of English in non-postcolonial countries in East Asia, with brief looks at Japan and South Korea and an extensive case study, including samples of Chinese English, of English in China.