English World-Wide - Current Issue

Researching language change across the lifespan benefits from analyzing the indexicalities and socio-cognitive salience of linguistic variables produced by speakers of different ages (Bülow and Vergeiner 2021; Mechler 2025). This paper demonstrates the potential of the Salient Language in Context tool by Montgomery et al. (2025) in a panel study to capture micro-reactions and holistic after the fact ratings. Findings reveal that the female speaker is perceptually downgraded for sociability and competence ratings when in her twenties (T1) while be like, a feature commonly associated with youth, is significantly more salient in her thirties (T2). This supports previous evidence of bias against young women (Duncan and Loretto 2004; Mechler 2025) and a penalty for defying age-based linguistic expectations. The results show that listeners struggle to reconcile linguistic “youthfulness” with societal norms for middle-aged women and confirm that “age-related ideology is inseparable from gender ideology” (Eckert 2014: 541).

Recent advances in streaming protocols and automatic speech recognition (ASR) have enabled large-scale spoken language corpora, yet research on Singapore English remains constrained by small or text-based datasets. The YouTube Corpus of Singapore English Podcasts (YCSEP) addresses this gap with 620 hours of transcribed, diarized speech from over 1,300 podcast episodes by Singapore-based content creators. YCSEP supports the empirical analysis of phonetics, morphosyntax, and discourse, enabling the study of low-frequency features like discourse particles and reduplication. The dataset reflects informal, spontaneous speech from diverse speakers and facilitates investigation into nativization and endonormative stabilization processes in postcolonial English. Built using a pipeline of yt-dlp, WhisperX, and Pyannote, YCSEP offers robust empirical grounding for linguistic features such as verb complementation and modality. It also contributes to broader theoretical discussions on areal norms and construction grammar in World Englishes.

Situated at the crossroads of English varieties studies, sociolinguistics, and typology, this paper offers an empirically-based discussion of practical and theoretical challenges involved in collecting speaker data for English varieties. The starting point is recent research on statistical trends between sociodemographic data, including speaker numbers, and linguistic structures. Such quantitative analyses depend on the availability and quality of speaker numbers and thus precipitate the collection of unavailable and well-documented data. In this vein, I detail how to extrapolate speaker numbers from open-access sources for a wide range of English varieties. Based on empirical use cases, practical issues like data quality and reliability are discussed. Furthermore, I illustrate how (the lack of uniform) definitions for concepts commonly used in census data like mother tongue or native speaker impact data collection. In short, this paper highlights key issues in collecting speaker numbers which have implications for research in English varieties and beyond.