The language used in online forums of Hong Kong is highly colloquial and provides an authentic representation of language use among Hong Kong netizens. Meanwhile, the theoretical perspective of translanguaging offers valuable insights into their multilingual lives, enabling an effective exploration and in-depth analysis of the construction of Hong Kong netizens’ cultural identity. Through classification and analysis of the language use in Hong Kong online forums, this study identifies the following characteristics of Hong Kong netizens’ translanguaging practices: (1) multicode integration, as reflected in Cantonese–English mixing, multilingual borrowing, and the use of mixed semiotic resources; (2) diverse linguistic innovation, manifested in the creation of new words through transliteration and homophony, compound formation, functional shifts of word classes, and new interpretations of existing words; (3) strong community specificity in online buzzwords. Based on these, the cultural identity of Hong Kong netizens can be characterised by hybridity, local subjectivity, fluidity, and innovative selective appropriation. In particular, its fluidity reflects their construction of national identification after Hong Kong’s return and deepening recognition of their identity as Chinese, national development and the integrated development of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. Translanguaging serves as symbolic representations through which Hong Kongers actively construct their cultural identity. In turn, it also reinforces Hong Kongers’ awareness of identity boundaries, sense of cultural belonging, emotional attachment, and capacity for continuous innovation. Such translanguaging practices concretise Hong Kong’s cultural diversity through language, while demonstrating the resilience and creativity embedded in Hong Kong culture.

In the late 19th century, with the rapid rise of Singapore driven by international trade,   various Chinese varieties such as Minnan dialect and Cantonese brought by Chinese immigrants came into sustained contact with the booming commercial activities and jointly created a diverse range of overseas Huayu commercial vocabulary. This interaction gave rise to a rich and distinctive body of commercial vocabulary, which constitutes a substantial component of the early Nanyang Huayu lexicon. Drawing on commercial expressions collected from Chinese-language newspapers of that period, including the Lat Pau and the Sing Po, this paper classifies these expressions into three broad categories: goods and trademarks, business operations and transactions, and currency and commercial instruments. Through selected examples, it illustrates the translingual and cross-cultural lexical innovations of Chinese dialects used by early Nanyang Huayu communities in their interaction with local commercial practices. Minnan dialect and Cantonese functioned not only as major sources of commercial vocabulary, but also as a medium for translating and borrowing words from English and local languages. The commercial lexicon demonstrates the linguistic and cultural significance of early Nanyang Huayu: (1) From the perspective of Global Chinese, Nanyang Huayu documents provide valuable evidence for reconstructing the history of modern and contemporary Chinese; (2) these documents shed light on the historical development of Chinese dialects as they travelled with migrant communities and evolved through contact with other languages; and (3) these linguistic developments demonstrate the self-awareness and reflective reference of overseas Chinese in the process of mutual learning from and interacting with other civilizations.

Based on questionnaire data collected from 1120 respondents of the new generation of Indonesian Chinese across 12 administrative regions between 2022 and 2023, this study reveals a U-shaped trend in Huayu proficiency across three generations: grandparents, parents and children. The child generation demonstrates higher Huayu proficiency than the parent generation. In contrast, Chinese dialect proficiency shows a continuous decline: while grandparents and parents generally possess stronger dialect skills, there is a significant drop among the younger generation, indicating an unfavorable outlook for intergenerational dialect transmission. Regression analysis shows that Chinese dialect proficiency has a significantly positive effect on Huayu inheritance among the new generation of Indonesian Chinese, and this impact remains statistically significant after controlling for individual, family and other variables. The survey also finds that the family serves as the primary venue for young Indonesian Chinese to acquire dialects, with ages 0 to 3 as a critical period of dialect acquisition. Sustained family language planning and consistent parental use of dialects are essential to maintaining families as the last bastion for Chinese dialects, thereby supporting Huayu inheritance among young ethnic Chinese. It is important to recognize the role of Chinese dialects in facilitating Huayu transmission among the new generation of Indonesian Chinese, capitalize on their critical period for dialect acquisition, engage multiple stakeholders to reinforce the dialects’ contribution to Huayu retention, and increase the supply of Chinese dialect cultural products to diversify access to linguistic resources.

With the rapid advancement of speech synthesis technology, synthesized Putonghua has been widely applied in education, news media, public services, and other real-world scenarios. Consequently, increasing attention is being paid to its linguistic normativity and speech quality. Existing speech synthesis evaluations primarily focus on technical performance and do not adequately address the needs of language governance, including the national standards for spoken and written Chinese, and Putonghua proficiency assessment. Drawing on the development practice of the Standards and Guidelines of Synthesized Putonghua Proficiency Assessment, this study builds upon the theoretical and institutional foundations of the Putonghua Proficiency Test (PSC) and examines the core approaches and frameworks for synthesized Putonghua proficiency assessment, particularly in light of the shifts from evaluating human speakers to machines. The study proposes four guiding principles: goal orientation, human-machine alignment, inheritance with innovation, and normativity and scientific validity. Key components discussed include level classification, characteristic descriptors, task design, scoring methods, and experimental validation. This study outlines a structured approach to constructing both assessment standards and assessment design. It argues that synthesized Putonghua proficiency assessment is not simply an expansion of the PSC’s scope; rather, it requires a reconstruction of rating logic, assessment content, and implementation mechanisms in response to changes in assessment objects and represents an important extension of language governance in the era of intelligent speech technologies.

The Proficiency Standards and Testing Guideline for Chinese National Sign Language are the first national document in China to provide standards and specifications for assessing communicative competence in sign language. It specifies the name, nature, purpose, and target population of the test, the scope, content, format, and duration, as well as the item types, sample items, and scoring criteria. The development of the document was guided by four principles: reflecting the linguistic characteristics of sign language, adopting an international perspective, taking account of China’s national context, and facilitating technology-enabled implementation. Drawing primarily on the principles of the approaches set out in the 2001 edition of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment (CEFR), as well as the 2018 Companion Volume, it establishes a three-dimensional proficiency framework encompassing sign language comprehension, expression, and communication abilities. Assessment is administered across five dimensions — vocabulary, sentence, discourse, topic, and signing rate — yielding a three-level, six-grade proficiency scale. In addition, sample test forms with high reliability and validity have been developed, and a preliminary test item bank has been established. Nevertheless, the relatively insufficient depth of ontological research of Chinese sign language has imposed certain constraints on the development process, and several issues in the testing procedure remain to be further investigated and resolved.

As an emerging interdisciplinary field, International Chinese Language Education (ICLE) serves the national strategic priorities and is deeply integrated with practice. The development of ICLE relies on the policy advisory contributions of scholars. In this field, “intergenerationality” carries special significance linked to the discipline's history, serving as an important observation point for understanding how knowledge and human resources can be sustainably transformed into real-world policy influence. A survey of scholars currently active in teaching and researching ICLE reveals structural intergenerational differences in policy advisory capacity between young and senior scholars. These differences primarily stem from age, experience, and disciplinary paradigm shifts, with institutional platforms, research teams, and transferable experience acting as key influencing factors of their policy advisory effectiveness. Therefore, it is necessary to construct an academic-policy collaborative ecosystem, turning differences into complementarity. Optimization should be carried out to shift (1) from universal incentives to a differentiated, supply-side empowerment system; (2) from focusing on individual growth to building collaborative and complementary platforms; and (3) from paper-only evaluation to incentive-compatible diversified evaluation mechanisms.

Face-to-face conversation is the most fundamental and pervasive form of language use. The success of language generation by large language model (LLM) technology therefore depends crucially on whether it can maximally exhibit the social and communicative properties of human language use. In this regard, interactional linguistics offers more communication-sensitive criteria than traditional linguistic approaches. By rendering tacit regularities of verbal conduct and their underlying interactional mechanisms explicit and empirically testable, it reveals how speakers deploy linguistic resources to accomplish natural social interaction and, by extension, how artificial systems might be designed to do so. In this regard, interactional linguistics offers insights that better profile the nature of communication than traditional linguistic approaches. It uncovers patterns of speech behavior and related interactional mechanisms, revealing how humans manipulate language to achieve natural social interaction, and by extension, how machines should do so. As a matter of fact, some core concepts in interactional linguistics have already been incorporated into the annotation frameworks of AI dialogue systems. TRP (Transition Relevance Place), for one, has been introduced for the prediction of potential turn-ending points, enhancing LLMs’ “interactional awareness” of when to take the floor, thereby enabling smooth turn-taking in human-machine interaction. Moreover, even in the pre-LLM era, AI developers at Google and elsewhere had already figured out that being too fluent is unnatural, and embedded discourse markers and other “disfluencies” into machine language output. In light of the linguistic concepts already adopted by AI developers, this study collects dialogues conducted between large language models and compares them with naturally occurring human conversations. It further examines discourse markers, pauses, elongations, repairs, and other “disfluencies”, as well as turn overlaps arising from TRP-based predictions. The analysis reveals that these linguistic features all carry interactional functions in human speech and exhibit observable regularities, while in LLM language output, they are relatively scarce or even entirely absent. These findings point to two priorities for future research: on the one hand, linguistics studies should place greater emphasis on the recurrent patterns of speech interactional behavior in verbal interaction; on the other hand, greater efforts should be devoted to building multimodal corpora, which will form a solid empirical foundation for language design in artificial systems.