Often dubbed as multilingual,  Macao has had a very mixed population in which there is huge variation in their linguistic repertoire and the degree of individual multilingualism. With a huge number of mobile and imported workers, especially in recent years, Macau is better conceived as several communities co-existing with each other rather than one community where speakers speak more or less the same varieties and share similar speech norms. Under such diversity, the status and functions of English defy simple and neat descriptions such as a “High variety” or “a language of communication”.   Not having been an official language in Macao, a former Portuguese colony, English, as argued in this paper, has its market fostered almost entirely by its translocality and the mobility of the population as, firstly, the Macanese (people of mixed descent of Chinese and Portuguese) have moved elsewhere, and, more recently, a huge number of non-Chinese (but somehow English-speaking) workers (noticeably from the Philippines) have been imported. In public signs and discourses, English has been an “additional language” which somehow indexes the “tourists” and “outsiders”. Interestingly, this deprivileges the non-Chinese workers (who do not speak or read Chinese and Portuguese but have become local residents) and perhaps also tourists from mainland China who may not read/speak English.