Today's world is characterised by increasing social and professional mobility and extensive contact among people who are often not only distant in terms of space, but are also culturally different from each other. As a consequence, ‘contact and interaction (physical and virtual) between diverse peoples, languages, cultural models, media and practices’ have now become the norm rather than an exception. Naturally, these developments have inevitable repercussions: on the one hand, they affect the ways in which people communicate in settings that involve participation of individuals with different cultural and linguistic backgrounds; on the other hand, the way communication and language as such are understood also become less stable.