Viewing Orwellian Newspeak from the Angle of Linguistics: An “Economic” Redundancy

Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four has been widely studied, but not one of his important inventions in that novel. That is his Newspeak. From the perspective of linguistics, one of the most important characteristics of the development of language(s) is the feature of the economy, which means that language evolves in various ways to streamline and make it easier for its users to express themselves. This is not the case with the English variant "Newspeak" created by George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, which is somehow simpler in form than standard English, which was named "Oldspeak", but "Newspeak" is actually in a sense simpler than "Oldspeak". Newspeak" is actually much more obscure than "Old speech" in a sense. The reason for this may be found in comparison with several typical language simplification movements. In order to investigate the issues, former researchers` findings would be referenced, and textual evidence would be found and discussed in the article.

English Language Learners, Labels, Purposes, Standard English, Whiteness, Deficit Views, and Unproblematic Framings: Toward Southern Decoloniality

This paper argues for revisiting ways in which English Language Learners (ELLs), and the learner labels attributed to them, are negatively, racially, and pathologically framed and constructed based on, putatively, their English language competence, or their lack of it. It contends that this framing tends to give rise to a raciolinguistic profiling of these learners, as they end up being classified by their race, pan-ethnicity, nationality, immigrant/refugee status, regionality, and at times, by their skin color, in addition to their language abilities. This raciolinguistic framing often engenders other framings such as White, deficit, and poverty framings, and sub-framings like an othering framing (e.g., the racial others and the linguistic others). These framings, together with the normative ways in which ELLs’ language problems are constructed, have been characterized in this paper as misframings. Additionally, employing southern decoloniality, the paper problematizes and critiques the way ELLs are constructed and labeled, and the appropriation of Standard English (SE) as the sole touchstone of acceptable English in the midst of the other varieties of SE and of pluriversal speakers of English. Finally, the paper calls for the provincialization/localization or the deparochialization of English in keeping with its southern decolonial approach.

Challenges of the Sudden Switch from Mother Tongue Instruction to English as a Medium of Instruction

The present study explored the challenges encountered through the transition from using the mother tongue as a medium of instruction at schools to using English as a medium of instruction at universities. Two focus groups were conducted with Saudi undergraduates and faculty members from different Saudi universities. The focus groups investigated how participants perceive this experience, what difficulties they face and how they cope. Participants expressed their preference for using English as a medium of instruction in higher education to maximise students’ future and international opportunities. Participant students reported difficulties in lecture comprehension, taking notes while listening and classroom communication. Participant content lecturers reported difficulties related to students’ reluctance to speak in English, lack of English terminology and insufficient lecture comprehension. Some suggestions that have been offered to overcome these challenges include the following: designing adequate trainings for content lecturers on teaching their content in English; using Arabic-English bilingualism as medium of instruction; giving emphasis to academic literacy and communication skills over the use of standard English models and enhancing the collaborative work between English language teaching practitioners and content lecturers.

Gaze selects the next speaker in answers to questions pronominally addressed to more than one co-participant

Like many other languages, but unlike modern (standard) English, German has a distinct second person plural pronoun (ihr, ‘you guys’), contrasting with the second person singular pronoun (du). The second person plural pronoun addresses a turn to more than one, and possibly all co-present participants. This paper investigates turn-taking after such multiply addressed turns, taking as an example information-seeking questions, i.e., a sequential context in which a specific next action is relevant in the adjacent position. It might appear that in such a context, self-selection applies (Schegloff 1992: 122); more than one co-participant is addressed, but none selected as next speaker. In this paper, I show on the basis of spontaneous interactions recorded with mobile eye-tracking equipment that this is not the case and that TCU-final gaze is employed to select the next speaker. The participant not being gazed at TCU-finally is addressed, but not selected as the answerer in next position and may provide an answer in a sequential position after the first answer. The article demonstrates that gaze is an efficient way to allocate turns in the absence of verbal cues and thus contributes to our understanding of turn-taking from a multimodal perspective.

Emoji-Based Reactions to the Said Construction in Spanish and English

The said construction (SC), a relatively common but understudied standard English construction, is usually characterized by the use of said in place of a determiner, followed by a noun (N2), typically given (in some sense) and licensed by an antecedent noun (N1). (e.g. “I made coffee… said coffee was bitter.”) I present the results of a social media based experiment, focusing on the way participants react to SC-containing sentences using the “reactions” buttons provided on many social media sites. Participants were presented with stimuli that looked like a Facebook profile; each item in the experiment had a “profile photo”, a sentence that contained either a standard determiner like the or that, or SC, as well as an emoji-based reactions schema with the reaction options provided on Facebook. Participants were told to read each sentence and react to it using the provided emoji buttons. Results showed that SC-containing sentences were more likely to receive the “

he Impact of Technology upon Formal Communication: Texting Impacting the Standard English

With the invention of mobile phones text messaging has become a popular medium of communication. Its users are multiplying with every passing day. Its use is not only limited to informal but to formal communication as well. Students are the advent users of mobile phones and of SMS as well. The present study manifests the fact that students are practicing SMS for a number of reasons and a good amount of time is spent upon it which is resulting in typographical features, graphones and rebus writing. Data is collected through questionnaires and came to the conclusion that its effect is obvious in the L2 users in general and examinations in particular.

Korean University Students' Usage, Awareness and Attitudes Toward ELF

Based on a survey conducted among 77 Korean university students, this article examined their usage and awareness of ELF (English as a Lingua Franca), and observed if problems which previous researches have claimed appeared among them. By analyzing data gathered via 2 simple questions and 4 descriptive questions, this study found that the respondents appreciated English as a basic medium for global communication. The respondents also reported various domestic and foreign situations in which they used English to communicate with different interlocutors who spoke different native languages. However, critical issues, such as ownership of English, idealized attitudes toward Standard English, and bias against the varieties of English spoken, all of which have been reported in several empirical researches, were also detected. As globalization extends throughout all areas of our life, and as L2 speakers excel L1 speakers in number as a result, this article calls for more effort to discuss ELF issues in general English education for university students. It also calls for the development of new pedagogical practices. The findings of this study could provide for a meaningful start in that it looked into the real life situations of the students.