This paper tells previously untold stories about the dynamic cultures, linguistic repertoires and language practices of migrants and refugees that are continuously shaped and mediated by the convoluted histories, journeys and migration itineraries of these people. It brings to light the effect of proficiency in multiple languages on their speakers' affiliations, and their perceptions of belonging in local communities. The paper draws on the outcomes of a study with refugee background Africans (hereafter, African diasporas) in regional New South Wales (NSW) to propose the language nesting model that seeks to illustrate the complex linguistic and discursive practices of these people and how such resources are used to create and negotiate material and social spaces in everyday life. The paper concludes that the stories that were elicited - about the languages, cultures, identities, migration histories and just about everything else about the sampled African diasporas - both support and resist the theoretical suppositions of superdiversity in equal measure.

The role of the academy in the manufacture of individual and group identities remains least understood from theoretical and empirical perspectives. The legitimation and consumption of such identity discourses (by both academic practitioners and the general public) have also been inadequately theorised. What is well known and heavily theorised is the subject of how disciplines have created their own identities but the consequence of such disciplinary identity formations remains a grey area that still requires systematic theorisation. Drawing on a selection of humanities and social science disciplines, their academic associations, journals and journal articles bearing the name 'southern Africa' as its data set, this paper provides a critical discourse analysis of how these fields of study have shaped the idea of southern Africa. The overall intention here is not to flag which discipline provides the best definition and understanding of southern Africa. Rather, the overarching argument is this: in the course of pursuing their individual disciplinary interests, the different strands of the humanities and social sciences have inadvertently invented and sustained competing and contested southern African identities that are inconsistent with the dynamic and fluid nature of the everyday lived experiences of the peoples whose region they purport to describe and represent in academic circles.

This chapter revisits and interrogates mainstream sociolinguistics and social science discourses and conversations that inform current understandings of key issues on language, migration, and diaspora. The focus is on the theoretical underpinnings and the attendant social policy and political consequences of approaches to the three interrelated areas of current concern in the field of language and society studies, namely (1) conceptualizations of the language profiles and practices of immigrant communities; (2) transnational migration and migrant identities; and (3) imaginings of diaspora cultures and identities. The chapter argues that standard ideological frameworks that came with the industrial revolution and the invention of the modern nation-state have seen debates on language, migration, and diasporas being attached to a set of unpromising associations-language as a monolithic ontological entity; diasporas as backward-looking with nostalgia for "homeland"; and immigrant communities as somewhat reified, inflexible, and never changing. Immigrant and diaspora linguistic and cultural identities have historically been looked at through the lenses of the two battalions of groupism: multiculturalism and multilingualism. These dominant theoretical frameworks that undergird current academic debates and conversations around these issues have not engaged in substantial ways the reflexive relationship among the notions of language, immigrants, and disaporas.

There are several previous studies on Vietnamese terms of address and reference. Included among them are several Vietnamese grammar books. However, most such studies consist of a collage of the various forms of address in this language, including their denotative meanings and general usage (Cooke, 1968; Thompson, 1987; Nguyễn Đình-Hòa, 1997). Others discuss the pragmatic aspects of the usage of particular terms of address, for example, the social meanings of personal pronouns (Nguyễn Phú Phong, 2002; Nguyễn Văn Thành, 2003), and kinship terms (Spencer, 1945; Benedict, 1947; Nguyễn Tài Cẩn, 1975; Luong, 1984; Lê Biên, 1999; Cao Xuân Hạo, 2003; Szymańska-Matusiewicz, 2014). Also, there are studies that illustrate the complexity of the usages of these terms to convey politeness and appraisal (Vũ Mai Yên Trần, 2011; Phuc Thien Le, 2013; Ngo & Unsworth, 2011). However, apart from those denotative and social meanings that Vietnamese terms of address convey, it is also their affective meanings, or the emotional messages transferred through switches of these terms during conversations that constitute the complexity and also the unpredictability in Vietnamese address practice. This thesis builds on and extends this previous body of literature by providing empirical evidence through systematic data collection and analysis, including conversation analysis of telenovelas, content analysis of movie subtitles, EFL students‘ translation tasks, and professional translation works. With a special focus on switches of address terms during speech events among Vietnamese speakers, this study examines the situation-regulated affective meanings of Vietnamese terms of address, which are not their intrinsic property. It argues that it is important to study how these terms are employed in different contexts for different purposes, especially for the purpose of expressing one's emotions. Multiple sources of data were used. These include a total of 147 episodes of television series, equal to approximately 110 hours, of two Vietnamese telenovelas; a review of 5 professional translation works (English to Vietnamese and Vietnamese to English); 49 translation papers performed by third-year students who majored in English (Translation and Interpretation) from the Faculty of Foreign Languages at the University of Dalat (Vietnam); a questionnaire for teachers of translation and interpretation courses that sought to better understand EFL students' translation outcomes; and face-to-face interviews with two professional translators (one in Sydney and another in Hanoi). The major findings of the study indicate that interactants' choices of address terms demonstrate their different states of attitude or emotion, which strengthens the argument that Vietnamese address terms have affective meanings, most of which are not an innate property, but can be revealed and interpreted in combination with other address terms and the situational context. The research results confirm and illustrate the general view among scholars that unlike those of many other languages, Vietnamese address terms pose major translational challenges particularly as a consequence of such factors as the relationships between the interlocutors, their relative age, and social, cultural, and emotional status. Overall, the originality and significance of this thesis lie in its innovative interdisciplinary approach that combines three branches of applied linguistics, namely pragmatics, translation studies and EFL teaching. These sub-fields of applied linguistics are usually studied in isolation of each other, thus overlooking the insights to be gained from a more integrated approach where the three are treated as complementary. The thesis innovatively uses insights from these three areas of research to contribute new empirical and theoretical ideas on how terms of address implicate emotions of speakers. The study draws on Vietnamese terms of address to illustrate the particular point about linkages between linguistic usages and the expression of emotions, and also the difficulties in solving the gaps or discrepancies between Vietnamese and a language such as English during the translation process.

Drawing on postcolonial theories and discourses, this paper provides another look at where the English language meets with politics, political propaganda and ZANU PF struggles for legitimacy in 21st century Zimbabwe. The paper is conceived against the well known anti-British and anti-west stance of the ZANU PF political elite, which reached its crescendo from 2000 onwards. While denouncing everything else British, President Robert Mugabe and those around him have continued to hold onto the English language (a legacy of British colonial rule in Zimbabwe) to the extent of retaining it as the country's sole official language, perfecting it and probably being more fluent in it than the native speakers. Whereas the hypocrisy of the ZANU PF anti-British and anti-west rhetoric has been analysed in the context of their appetite for western style dress codes and shopping sprees in western fashion capitals, their love for the British language has so far not been subjected to any systematic academic scrutiny. The following questions have not been addressed: Why has the English language remained insulated from the anti-British political discourse in Zimbabwe? Does this mean English has been appropriated, nativised/indigenized and therefore, no longer seen as part of the colonial legacy? What purpose does the English language serve in the anti-British and anti-west propaganda in Zimbabwe? What does the Zimbabwe case study tell us about the pragmatic and symbolic functions of English in postcolonial Africa?

The use of the personal pronoun as an address term in different speech communities around the world is widely documented. The pioneering work of Brown and Levinson (1987), Brown and Gilman (1968), Friedrich (1972), Gumperz (1982), and Gumperz and Hymes (1972) on politeness strategies long established that both singular and plural personal pronominal forms are often used to express respect, social distance, intimacy and solidarity. More recent studies (Watts 2003; Allan and Burridge 1991, 2006; Allan 2012) concur with the early studies on politeness strategies. Most of their conclusions are based on data mainly from French, Italian, Russian and English speech communities. This chapter presents the most recent empirical evidence from the Midlands Ndebele speech community of Zimbabwe to support the argument that the personal pronominal address system is more complex than is currently acknowledged in the literature. The data indicates that the use of both the singular (wena - you SING) and plural (lina - you PL) forms of the personal pronoun in the Ndebele language betrays an uneasy and unpredictable situation. This uneasiness and unpredictability revolves around a lack of clarity about when it is deemed appropriate to be euphemistic, when to display solidarity or endearment and when to express social distance.