[Introduction by the Editorial Board] Applied Linguistics for Global Challenges: Sustainability, Inclusion and Innovation

Abstract

EDITORIAL BOARD SPECIAL SECTION

Applied Linguistics for Global Challenges: Sustainability, Inclusion and Innovation

Human waste and trace, the golden sun, sad abodes of death, and the infinite moon nourishing the nights could be illuminated through paragraphs, parses, and phrases. Conjoined with these very different facades of feelings and emotions are languages which are contoured with flexibility and precision. From expressing love, nature, smiles and elaborate beauties to treading solemness, motionless large language models, solitudes, and deaths, languages take the wings of multiple spaces to honor these varied facets of globalities in keeping with their borderless conditionings. It is precisely these abilities to adjust, adapt, and adopt that linguistics with its applied-ness demonstrates its continued brood of care, mirroring its contemporariness and interpolation of multilingual realities. In short, in whatever manifestations, constructions-and-deconstructions, inclusions-and-exclusions, innovations-and-deinnovations, applied linguistics forge through conscientiously.

The contributions of this issue address the universalized versatility of applied linguistics. The first article presents insights into the dynamics of Malaysian English as represented in social media environments. By examining the formation, usage, and linguistic features of Malaysian English online, Zhiming Zhang and Manjet Kaur Mehar Singh highlight the composite and challenging identities negotiated by users in digitally-mediated spaces. Questions of mobility, belonging, and intercultural engagement are further examined in the second contribution by intercultural connoisseurs, Lu Xixi, Yan Shixiao, and Hadina Habil. Focusing on graduate mobility programs in Indonesia, they provide significant depths into the linguistic and cultural complexities experienced by these transnational scholars. The theme of inclusion is approached from another angle in the third article by Joram Kim Brillantes Corcuera, Roland Bautista, and Raffy Quines. Their work presents a pensive departure from conventional perspectives of sports broadcasting in the Philippines. Through an examination of gendered formulations within sportscasting discourse, the study exposes the ways in which languages both reproduce and challenge domineering gender ideologies. Technological innovation and its implications for creativity constitute the focus of the fourth contribution. Investigating the responses of English creative writing majors to generative artificial intelligence, the author, Angela Rumina Leo, reveals intricate shapes of resistance and adaptation in relation to AI-assisted writing. The final contribution by Cheng-Chun Tsai, Ngoc Thuan Nguyen, and Tanachai Worrachotchaicharoen addresses language avoidance mechanisms. While research has traditionally prioritized productive vocabulary, this study proposes a comparative typology of avoidance language across two professional domains, policy-driven avoidance in English-language social media moderation and culture-driven avoidance in Thai business communication. Taken together, the five articles demonstrate applied linguistics’s abilities to bend.

These journal articles are a result of several selection processes beginning December 2025. Out of 19 journal articles, only five (5) are eventually selected, reviewed, and published. They are, to this end, slated through varied facets of reviews, similar to the refereeing processes of conventional articles submitted in our journal.  Based on their connexity, complexity, and expansivity, these journal articles in the special section mirror the compliance accorded to the journal, strictly responding to the maintenance of issues close to the hearts of linguistics, languages, and literature. Their foci, substantive content, and trajectories are generally streamlined well with the readers of the journal. For prospective readers, may the special section articles exemplify the commitment to critical inquiry and academic integrity that this publication represents.

Mohd Muzhafar Idrus

Associate Editors

3L: Language, Linguistics, Literature^® The Southeast Asian Journal of English Language Studies 

Faculty of Major Language Studies,

Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia, Malaysia

muzhafaridrus@usim.edu.my