ABSTRACT
Over the last decade sociolinguistics has seen a noticeable burst of academic activity around the topic of what I shall call ‘linguistic border crossings’, to slightly paraphrase Rampton (1995). Books, journal articles and conference presentations containing words such as ‘translanguaging’, ‘translingual practices’, ‘language hybridity’, and similar have become increasingly frequent. To some extent, this has left the analytical framework of World Englishes (WE) in a position where it needs to catch up with these recent developments (see, for example, Schneider, 2016). Using a few extracts from Facebook conversations as illustrative of the language practices in question, in this chapter I discuss this very gap that is emerging between some of the latest advancements in sociolinguistics and the WE framework. I then conclude by remarking that the original spirit that in the Eighties induced a paradigm shift that brought about the very concept of Englishes needs to be rekindled in order for the paradigm to continue to shift.
