This paper generally lends support to the arguments advanced by Awonusi (1989, 1990, 2004) and others in favour of an endornormative as opposed to an exonormative standard for English pronunciation in Nigeria. They include the fact that the existing, exonormative standard, British Received Pronunciation (RP), has undergone and is still undergoing changes in its homeland, and is not homogeneous. The heightened social mobility of today’s world perhaps works against the demarcation and homogenization of language varieties, and this is all the more true of the varieties or lects that have been proposed for Nigerian English when these are related, more or less explicitly, to educational attainment. Major attention is given in the paper to a schema of basilect, mesolect, and acrolect presented by Ugorji (2010), with a focus on his account of vowels and his presentation of a mechanism derived from optimality theory for evaluating vowels in contention. The basilect and the mesolect are found to be so close to each other that they might be combined. There would then be just two varieties. In contrast, the acrolect is close to British RP, albeit with many variants due to the conflict of two standardising forces, i.e. British RP and the basilect-mesolect. The vowel system of an officially adopted endonormative standard – ‘Nigerian RP’ – would mainly be the same as that of British RP, but the optimality mechanism could be employed to give preference to some of the Nigerian variants for inclusion in it.

This publication originated from the idea that uncertainty should not be taken as fear of the unknown that should be avoided, but as a natural starting point for scientific and journalistic writing. Risk awareness is seen as a necessary prerequisite for gaining confidence and evoking trust. Moving from uncertainty to confidence and trust is also an integral part of international academic collaboration, as the discussions of the partners from Germany (Chemnitz), Macedonia (Skopje, Ohrid/Bitola), Albania (Vlora), Serbia (Niš, Vršac), Croatia (Split) and Bosnia and Herzegovina (Banja Luka) have shown throughout this and previous years. The project, funded by DAAD, aimed to bridge the diverse cultural academic and media contexts in Southeast Europe and to show that uncertainty can and should be taken as an opportunity. This was achieved through discussions and research projects in the course of an online workshop and summer school and this publication.

The present volume draws on the experience of the Workshop held in Germany in late 2018 to combine the specialisations of the two linguistic research teams of the two partner universities, Sun Yat-sen University in China and Chemnitz University of Technology in Germany. It combines more theoretical approaches by experienced scholars and case studies by young researchers on topics and texts on current Chinese developments. The contributions can also serve as a general model for open and critical international and intercultural academic discourse.

The present volume draws on the experience of the Summer School held online in 2021 and in Serbia in August 2022, where graduate students and experienced scholars met from Germany, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Northern Macedonia, and Croatia. All contributions discuss original empirical research on the construction of confidence and trust online and offline in the case of academic or journalistic writing, mainly from South Eastern European but also from German perspectives. The contributions can also serve as a general model for open and critical international and intercultural academic discourse in joint teaching, research and publishing.