Christian Mair

The rise of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in academic writing and publishing (AWP) raises questions about linguistic inclusivity and the legitimacy of diverse Englishes in global scholarly communication. This article responds to these questions through a structured scholarly dialogue involving five sociolinguists from World Englishes and adjacent fields. Organised around five guiding questions, the dialogue interrogates how GenAI tools influence writing practices, reinforce or disrupt dominant language norms, and raise ethical challenges. Contributors reflect on the potential of GenAI to democratise writing processes while also raising concerns about GenAI’s tendency to marginalise minoritised varieties and flatten nuance in scholarly writing. Across the dialogue, themes of linguistic (in)justice, researcher agency, and institutional responsibility emerge, with contributors calling for equity-informed policies, critical AI literacy, and inclusive co-design in GenAI development. The article shows the value of dialogic reflection in understanding GenAI’s role in AWP. It concludes that while GenAI may reinforce existing hierarchies, it can also serve as a site of resistance, depending on how it is designed, governed and used within scholarly communities committed to linguistic diversity.

This paper examines the evolving dynamics of global multilingualism in the digital age, focusing on the hierarchical structure of the World Language System (WLS) and the intensifying competition among languages online. Two major trends shaping linguistic diversity in the 21st century are identified: the ongoing decline of offline linguistic diversity and the selective, economically driven nature of online multilingualism. Drawing on recent data, the analysis demonstrates that while fears of an English-language internet monoculture have not materialized, digitalization has further entrenched English as the global lingua franca, creating sharper hierarchies and new digital divides. The paper explores the implications for smaller national languages, such as Romanian, which risk marginalization despite robust offline vitality. The author argues that the future of linguistic diversity depends on active digital language planning and intelligent language activism, advocating for policies that support both the global spread of English and the technological empowerment of other languages.

The study explores three factors in the digital spread of pidgins and creoles. The first is the writing boom on the Internet, which has led to prestige gains for pidgin/creoles. The second is the interplay of migration, culture and the media as boosters in the diffusion of pidgin/creoles. The third is the technologisation of pidgin/creoles, as measured by their presence in Large Language Models (LLMs) developed for text generation and machine translation. While pidgin/creoles are typically not among the languages that have been technologised ‘top down’ and systematically, several of them — among them Jamaican Creole and Nigerian Pidgin — have a high profile in the digital media and therefore also a significant presence in the training data of LLMs. Where pidgin/creoles have become informal world languages in this way, this poses new challenges for the development of standard orthographies and codification.

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Surveying a representative sample of studies of colloquialisation, a tendency for written norms to move closer to spoken usage, the chapter explores: the relationship between colloquialisation, operationalised in exclusively linguistic terms, and informalisation and democratisation, two processes primarily targeting wider sociocultural change, and complications arising when colloquialisation is extended beyond its original domain of application, standard written English of the ENL type. There are two major findings. Colloquialisation works less well in the study of ESL varieties than ENL ones. In addition, recent real-time analyses of change in spoken English suggest that the supposedly homogeneous baseline style of informal conversational English is more internally variable than is assumed in current work on colloquialisation.

The massive expansion of English in Germany over the past few decades has not challenged a robustly exonormative orientation, which still by and large recognises standardised British and American English as the most authentic and prestigious representations of the language. Attitudes to the use of English in the national context are diverse, ranging from enthusiastic embracement via grudging acceptance to active resistance. This diversity of opinion reflects the fact that English is currently transitioning from a foreign language (EFL) to a lingua franca (ELF). On the national scale, ELF use is promoted in business, academia and, more generally, among young and well‐educated Germans with an international orientation, but deeply resented by sectors of society. This paper argues that English (in its lingua franca function) has become the only language other than German that has open prestige. The task ahead will be to develop strategies of intelligent multilingualism that will help to ‘domesticate’ English in the national sociolinguistic context.

The chapter studies the intertwined topics of Empire, migration and race in the Hansard Corpus (1803–2005). The British Empire emerges as a prominent topic from the mid-nineteenth century, but rapidly recedes into insignificance in the two decades following World War II. Emigration dominates in the nineteenth century, whereas immigration takes over in the twentieth century. References to race remain frequent throughout, though in the context of two contrasting discourses. Older uses show a broad range of adjective + noun combinations classifying the ‘human race’ on the basis of geographical or physical characteristics (e.g. English race, Indian race, white/black/brown/yellow race) or evaluating groups within a colonialist ideology of white supremacy (e.g. backward/advanced races). Recent and contemporary use of the term is dominated by high-frequency nominal compounds belonging to the vocabulary of identity politics (e.g. race relations). The study situates itself at the interface of historical linguistics, colonial history and cultural studies. Methodologically, it raises the question of the future relationship between corpus linguistics and the Digital Humanities.

The therapeutic potential of minigastrin (MG) analogs for the treatment of cholecystokinin-2 receptor (CCK2R)-expressing cancers is limited by poor in vivo stability or unfavorable accumulation in non-target tissues. Increased stability against metabolic degradation was achieved by modifying the C-terminal receptor-specific region. This modification led to significantly improved tumor targeting properties. In this study, further N-terminal peptide modifications were investigated. Two novel MG analogs were designed starting from the amino acid sequence of DOTA-MGS5 (DOTA-DGlu-Ala-Tyr-Gly-Trp-(N-Me)Nle-Asp-1Nal-NH₂). Introduction of a penta-DGlu moiety and replacement of the four N-terminal amino acids by a non-charged hydrophilic linker was investigated. Retained receptor binding was confirmed using two CCK2R-expressing cell lines. The effect on metabolic degradation of the new ¹⁷⁷Lu-labeled peptides was studied in human serum in vitro, as well as in BALB/c mice in vivo. The tumor targeting properties of the radiolabeled peptides were assessed using BALB/c nude mice bearing receptor-positive and receptor-negative tumor xenografts. Both novel MG analogs were found to have strong receptor binding, enhanced stability, and high tumor uptake. Replacement of the four N-terminal amino acids by a non-charged hydrophilic linker lowered the absorption in the dose-limiting organs, whereas introduction of the penta-DGlu moiety increased uptake in renal tissue.