Anthropological linguistics is the subfield of linguistics and anthropology which deals with the place of language in its wider social and cultural context, and its role in making and maintaining cultural practices and societal structures. While many linguists believe that a true field of anthropological linguistics is nonexistent, preferring the term linguistic anthropology to cover this subfield, many others regard the two as interchangeable.
Multilingualism is the use of more than one language, either by an individual speaker or by a group of speakers. It is believed that multilingual speakers outnumber monolingual speakers in the world's population. More than half of all Europeans claim to speak at least one language other than their mother tongue; but many read and write in one language. Being multilingual is advantageous for people wanting to participate in trade, globalization and cultural openness. Owing to the ease of access to information facilitated by the Internet, individuals' exposure to multiple languages has become increasingly possible. People who speak several languages are also called polyglots.
Jenny L. Cheshire is a British sociolinguist and professor at Queen Mary University of London. Her research interests include language variation and change, language contact and dialect convergence, and language in education, with a focus on conversational narratives and spoken English. She is most known for her work on grammatical variation, especially syntax and discourse structures, in adolescent speech and on Multicultural London English.
Joshua Fishman was an American linguist who specialized in the sociology of language, language planning, bilingual education, and language and ethnicity.
Michael George Clyne, AM, FAHA, FASSA was an Australian linguist, academic and intellectual. He was a scholar in various fields of linguistics, including sociolinguistics, pragmatics, bilingualism and multilingualism, second language learning, contact linguistics and intercultural communication.
John Robert Edwards received a PhD from McGill University in 1974. After working as a Research Fellow at the Educational Research Centre in Dublin, he moved to Nova Scotia and joined the Psychology Department at St Francis Xavier University, where he is now Professor Emeritus and a Senior Research Professor. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax. He has been a Visiting Lecturer at many universities, and a Visiting Professor in England, Ireland and China. He is an Honorary Professor at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Edwards is a fellow of the British Psychological Society, the Canadian Psychological Association, and the Royal Society of Canada (2000).
István Kecskés is a Distinguished Professor of the State University of New York, USA. He teaches graduate courses in pragmatics, second language acquisition and bilingualism at SUNY, Albany. He is the President of the American Pragmatics Association (AMPRA) and the CASLAR Association. He is the founder and co-director of the Barcelona Summer School on Bi- and Multilingualism, and the founder and co-director of Sorbonne, Paris – SUNY, Albany Graduate Student Symposium (present).
The British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL) is a learned society, based in the UK, which provides a forum for people interested in language and applied linguistics.
A language survey is conducted around the world for a variety of reasons.
Suzanne Romaine is an American linguist known for work on historical linguistics and sociolinguistics. From 1984 to 2014 she was Merton Professor of English language at the University of Oxford.
Ranko Bugarski is a Serbian linguist, academic and author.
Professor Gillian Wigglesworth is an Australian linguist, Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, and former Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Arts at The University of Melbourne.
Joseph Lo Bianco AM is Professor of Language and Literacy Education at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne, and serves as Past President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. From 2011–2017 he designed, led and implemented a 6-year, 3-country language and peace building initiative for UNICEF in Malaysia, Myanmar and Thailand. He has previously worked on peace building activities in Sri Lanka in the late 1990s, and in several other settings. He is a language planning specialist, recognised for his work on combining practical problem solving language policy with academic study of language problems. He has published extensively on bilingual education, English as a second/additional language, peace building and communication, multiculturalism and intercultural education, Asian studies, Italian language teaching and the revitalisation of indigenous and immigrant community languages.
John C. Maher is an Irish-British linguist, academic and author, professor of linguistics at International Christian University, Tokyo, Japan.
Globalization has had major effects on the spread and ascribed value of multilingualism. Multilingualism is considered the use of more than one language by an individual or community of speakers. Globalization is commonly defined as the international movement toward economic, trade, technological, and communications integration and concerns itself with interdependence and interconnectedness. As a result of the interconnectedness brought on by globalization, languages are being transferred between communities, cultures, and economies at an increasingly fast pace. Therefore, though globalization is widely seen as an economic process, it has resulted in linguistic shifts on a global scale, including the recategorization of privileged languages, the commodification of multilingualism, the Englishization of the globalized workplace, and varied experiences of multilingualism along gendered lines.
Lucija Čok is a Slovene linguist, senior researcher in the field of multilingualism and a professor of multilingualism and intercultural communication. Throughout her career, she has held several important positions, including that of the Minister of Education, Science and Sport (2000-2002) of the Government of the Republic of Slovenia. In her role as the Minister, she contributed to the establishment of higher education institutions in the Slovene region of Primorska and in 2003 she was elected as the first rector of the newly established university. She participated in European Commission high expert panels that have shaped linguistic policies and strategies of higher education and research. She has facilitated the preparation of the formal basis for Slovenia’s integration into the European Research Area. She was an expert of the Institutional evaluation program board and member of the Council of the Slovenian Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education. Her research work and publications focus on the formation of models of bilingual education in areas of linguistic and cultural contact, sociolinguistic and didactics of intercultural communication. In 2013, the University of Primorska named her professor emeritus. The same year, she received a lifetime achievement award for her work in the field of Higher Education by the Ministry of Education, Science and Sport.
Ofelia García (Otheguy) is Professor Emerita in the Ph.D. programs of Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures (LAILAC) and Urban Education at Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is best known for her work on bilingualism, translanguaging, language policy, sociolinguistics, and sociology of language. Her work emphasizes dynamic multilingualism, which is developed through "an interplay between the individual’s linguistic resources and competences as well as the social and linguistic contexts she/he is a part of." Rather than viewing a bilingual's languages as autonomous, García views language practices as complex and interrelated, as reflecting a single linguistic system.
Alastair Pennycook is an applied linguist. He is Emeritus Professor of Language, Society and Education at the University of Technology Sydney, and a Research Professor at the Centre for Multilingualism in Society Across the Lifespan at the University of Oslo. He was elected a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2016.
Jasone Cenoz is a professor of education at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) University of the Basque Country in Donostia-San Sebastian, Spain since 2004. From 2000 to 2004 she was Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of the Basque Country in Vitoria-Gasteiz. Her research focuses on multilingual education, bilingualism and multilingualism. She is known for her work on the influence of bilingualism on third language acquisition, pedagogical translanguaging, linguistic landscape, minority languages and Content and Language Integrated Learning.
Multilingua, Journal of Cross-Cultural and Interlanguage Communication is a bimonthly peer-reviewed academic journal in linguistics, specializing in the sociolinguistics of multilingualism, language learning, intercultural communication, and translation and interpreting. The journal was established in 1982 and is published by de Gruyter Mouton.
