The Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics

The Routledge Handbook
of Applied Linguistics
The Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics, published in 2011, has long been a standard
introduction and essential reference point to the broad interdisciplinary field of applied linguistics.
Reflecting the growth and widening scope of applied linguistics, this new edition thoroughly
updates and expands coverage. It includes 27 new chapters, now consists of two complementary
volumes, and covers a wide range of topics from a variety of perspectives. Volume One is
organized into two sections – ‘Language learning and language education’ and ‘Key areas
and approaches in applied linguistics’ – and Volume Two also has two sections – ‘Applied
linguistics in society’ and ‘Broadening horizons’.
Each volume includes 30 chapters written by specialists from around the world. Each chapter
provides an overview of the history of the topic, the main current issues, recommendations for
practice, and possible future trajectories. Where appropriate, authors discuss the impact and
use of new research methods in the area. Suggestions for further reading and cross-references
are provided with every chapter.
The Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics remains the authoritative overview of this
dynamic field and essential reading for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students,
scholars, and researchers of applied linguistics.
Li Wei is Director and Dean of the UCL Institute of Education at University College London, UK,
where he is also Chair of Applied Linguistics. He is Editor of International Journal of Bilingual
Education and Bilingualism and Applied Linguistics Review. He is Fellow of the British Academy,
Academia Europaea, Academy of Social Sciences (UK), and Royal Society of Arts (UK).
Zhu Hua is Professor of Language Learning and Intercultural Communication and Director
of the International Centre for Intercultural Studies at University College London, UK. She is
an elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (UK), and an elected Fellow and board
member of the International Academy for Intercultural Research. She is Chair of the British
Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL), 2021–2024.
James Simpson is Professor in the Division of Humanities at the Hong Kong University of
Science and Technology. He is the Director of the MA programme in International Language
Education. He was formerly in the School of Education, University of Leeds, UK.
Routledge Handbooks in Applied Linguistics
Routledge Handbooks in Applied Linguistics provide comprehensive overviews of the key

topics in applied linguistics. All entries for the handbooks are specially commissioned and
written by leading scholars in the field. Clear, accessible and carefully edited, Routledge
Handbooks in Applied Linguistics are the ideal resource for both advanced undergraduates and
postgraduate students.
The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics

Second Edition
Edited by Anne O’Keeffe and Michael J. McCarthy
The Routledge Handbook of Materials Development for Language Teaching

Edited by Julie Norton and Heather Buchanan
The Routledge Handbook of Corpora and English Language Teaching and Learning
Edited by Reka R. Jablonkai and Eniko Csomay
The Routledge Handbook of Language and the Global South

Edited by Sinfree Makoni, Anna Kaiper-Marquez and Lorato Mokwena
The Routledge Handbook of Discourse Analysis

Second Edition
Edited by Michael Handford and James Paul Gee
The Routledge Handbook of Content and Language Integrated Learning

Edited by Darío Luis Banegas and Sandra Zappa-Hollman
The Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics

Volume One, Second Edition
Edited by Li Wei, Zhu Hua, and James Simpson
The Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics

Volume Two, Second Edition
The Routledge Handbook of Language Policy and Planning

Edited by Michele Gazzola, François Grin, Linda Cardinal, and Kathleen Heugh
For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/Routledge-Handbooks-in-

Applied-Linguistics/book-series/RHAL
The Routledge Handbook
of Applied Linguistics
Volume Two
Second Edition

Designed cover image: © Getty Images | Gokcemim
Second edition published 2024
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© 2024 selection and editorial matter, Li Wei, Zhu Hua, and James Simpson;
individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Li Wei, Zhu Hua, and James Simpson to be identified as the
authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual
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without intent to infringe.
First edition published by Routledge 2011
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Li, Wei, 1961- editor. | Hua, Zhu, 1970- editor. | Simpson, James,
1967- editor.
Title: The Routledge handbook of applied linguistics / edited by Li Wei,
Zhu Hua, James Simpson.
Description: Second edition. | Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2023- |
Series: Routledge handbooks in applied linguistics | Includes bibliographical
references and index. | Contents: v. 1. Language learning and language
education—v. 2. Applied linguistics in action.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022057713 | ISBN 9780367536220 (v. 1-2 ; hardback) |
ISBN 9780367536213 (v. 1-2 ; paperback) | ISBN 9781003082620 (v. 1-2 ;
eBook) | ISBN 9780367536275 (v. 1 ; hardback) | ISBN 9780367536268
(v. 1 ; paperback) | ISBN 9781003082644 (v. 1 ; eBook) | ISBN 9780367536244
(v. 2 ; hardback) | ISBN 9780367536237 (v. 2 ; paperback) |
ISBN 9781003082637 (v. 2 ; eBook)
Subjects: LCSH: Applied linguistics. | LCGFT: Essays.
Classification: LCC P129 .R683 2023 | DDC 418—dc22/eng/20230117
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022057713
ISBN: 978-0-367-53624-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-53623-7 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-08263-7 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082637
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents
List of tables and figures viii

List of contributors ix
Acknowledgements xvi
Introduction 1
Li Wei, Zhu Hua, and James Simpson
PART I
Applied linguistics in society 5
1 Multilingualism 7
Jasone Cenoz and Durk Gorter
2 Language and migration 19

Mike Baynham and James Simpson
3 Language policy and planning 31

Lionel Wee
4 Family language policy 44

Kendall A. King
5 Critical discourse analysis, critical discourse studies, and critical

applied linguistics 57
Karin Zotzmann and John P. O’Regan
6 Digital language and communication 68

Caroline Tagg
7 Intercultural communication 81
Zhu Hua
v
Contents
8 Institutional discourse 94
Zsófia Demjén and Miguel Pérez-Milans
9 Medical communication 109

Sarah Collins, Sarah Peters, and Ian Watt
10 English for professional communication: a critical genre analytical

perspective 123
Vijay K. Bhatia and Aditi Bhatia
11 Identity 137
Bonny Norton and Monica Shank Lauwo
12 Gender and sexuality 151

Helen Sauntson
13 Language and race 163

Jennifer B. Delfino and H. Samy Alim
14 Politics and applied linguistics 176

Philip Seargeant
15 World Englishes and English as a lingua franca 187

Andy Kirkpatrick and David Deterding
PART II
Broadening horizons 201
16 Sign languages 203

Bencie Woll and Rachel Sutton-Spence
17 Lexicography 216
Thierry Fontenelle
18 Translation and interpreting 230

Mona Baker and Luis Pérez-González
19 First language attrition: bridging sociolinguistic narratives and

psycholinguistic models of attrition 243
Beatriz Duarte Wirth, Anita Auer, and Merel Keijzer
20 Clinical linguistics 254

Vesna Stojanovik, Michael Perkins, and Sara Howard
vi
Contents
21 Language and ageing 267

Lihe Huang
22 Forensic linguistics 280

Tim Grant and Tahmineh Tayebi
23 Linguistic ethnography 292

Karin Tusting
24 Posthumanism and applied linguistics 306

Kelleen Toohey
25 Social semiotics and multimodality 320

Theo van Leeuwen
26 Linguistic landscapes 337

Robert Blackwood and Will Amos
27 Minoritized/Indigenous language revitalization 349

Nancy H. Hornberger and Haley De Korne
28 Endangered languages 362

Julia Sallabank and Peter K. Austin
29 Ecolinguistics in practice 374

Stephen Cowley
30 Translanguaging 386
Li Wei
Index 396
vii
Tables and figures
Tables
21.1 Language characteristic changes from MCI to Severe AD 271
Figures
5.1 Fairclough’s three-dimensional view of discourse 59
10.1 English for professional communication overlaps 124
10.2 Theory of interdiscursive performance 133
11.1 Darvin and Norton’s model of investment 142
15.1 Sign on the door of a shop in Singapore 194
25.1 The system of social distance 323
25.2 The parametric system of voice quality 325
25.3 Rhythmic analysis of an excerpt from North by Northwest 328
viii
Contributors
H. Samy Alim is the David O. Spears Presidential Endowed Chair in the Social Sciences in the
Department of Anthropology and Associate Director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African
American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is also the founding director
of the Center for Race, Ethnicity, and Language (2010), co-editor of The Oxford Handbook
of Language and Race (2020, with Angela Reyes and Paul Kroskrity), and editor of the book
series Oxford Studies in Language and Race.
Will Amos is Associate Professor at the University of Warwick, UK, where he is a member of
the Translation and Transcultural Studies section within the School of Modern Languages and
Cultures. He is co-editor of the Bloomsbury Handbook of Linguistic Landscapes (forthcoming,
with Stefania Tufi and Robert Blackwood). In 2021, he co-founded the international cross-
disciplinary research network Wearable Ideologies (WE•ID).
Anita Auer is Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Lausanne (UNIL). She is
a (historical) sociolinguist with a special interest in diachronic and synchronic aspects of lan-
guage variation and change. Her recent research interests focus, among other things, on (his-
torical) sociolinguistic approaches to heritage languages – for instance, language maintenance
and shift among Swiss heritage speakers in North America.
Peter K. Austin (Emeritus Professor in Field Linguistics, SOAS, University of London)

researches theory and practice of language documentation and revitalization and languages of
Australia and eastern Indonesia.
Mona Baker is Affiliate Professor at the Centre for Sustainable Healthcare Education, Univer-
sity of Oslo; Co-cordinator of the Genealogies of Knowledge Research Network; and Director
of the Baker Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies at Shanghai International Studies
University.
Mike Baynham, Emeritus Professor of TESOL in the School of Education, University of

Leeds, and Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, is a sociolinguist by training and applied
linguist by affiliation. He has a long-term research interest in language and migration, particu-
larly in migration narratives. His monograph Translation and Translanguaging, jointly written
with Tong King Lee, was published with Routledge in 2019.
Aditi Bhatia is Associate Professor at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her main inter-
est is in (critical) discourse analysis using the multi-perspective theoretical framework of the
ix
Contributors
discourse of illusion with focus on public argumentation in political and media discourses. Her
publications include Discursive Illusions in Public Discourse: Theory and Practice (Rout-
ledge, 2015). She is currently working on analyzing identity-construction in discourses of war
and populism, as well as in digital professions.
Vijay K. Bhatia is Adjunct Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research
interests include (critical) genre theory, ESP, and professional communication. His publica-
tions include Analysing Genre: Language Use in Professional Settings (1993), Worlds of
Written Discourse: A Genre-based View (2004), and Critical Genre Analysis: Interdiscursive
Performance in Professional Practice (2017).
Robert Blackwood is Professor of French Sociolinguistics at the University of Liverpool,

UK, and currently the editor of the journal Linguistic Landscape with Elana Shohamy. He is
the co-author with Stefania Tufi of The Linguistic Landscape of the Mediterranean (2015)
and co-editor with John Macalister of Multilingual Memories: Monuments, Museums and the
Linguistic Landscape (2020).
Jasone Cenoz is Professor of Education at the University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU
(Spain) and President of the Education Science Committee of the Spanish Research Council
(AEI). Her research focuses on multilingual education, bilingualism, and multilingualism. She
has published extensively and has presented her work at conferences in many countries. She is
the chair of the Book Award Committee of AAAL.
Sarah Collins is Senior Lecturer in Clinical Communication at the University of Edinburgh.

Her disciplines are linguistics, social sciences, and medical education. For the past 20 years
Sarah has developed and led communication training and curriculum innovations for students
in the healthcare professions.
Stephen Cowley is Professor at the University of Southern Denmark; his ecological view
of language and cognition builds on study of prosody in conversations, mother-infant inter-
action, classroom activity, and organizational use of drones. He has edited Distributed
Language, Cognition Beyond the Brain, and Biosemiotic Perspectives on Language and
Linguistics.
Haley De Korne is Associate Professor of Multilingualism at the Department of Linguistics

and Scandinavian Studies and a member of the Center for Multilingualism in Society across the
Lifespan at the University of Oslo. She conducts research and advocacy in relation to minori-
tized language education and language politics.
Jennifer B. Delfino is a linguistic anthropologist who studies language, racialization, and racial
inequality in the urban United States. She is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthro-
pology at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is an associate editor for Journal of
Linguistic Anthropology and the author of Speaking of Race: Language, Race, and Schooling
Among African American Children (2020, Lexington Books).
Zsófia Demjén is Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics at University College London and
specializes in illness and healthcare discourse ([im]politeness, metaphor, humour, narrative).
She is the author of Sylvia Plath and the Language of Affective States: Written Discourse and
x
Contributors
the Experience of Depression (2015, Bloomsbury), co-author of Metaphor, Cancer and the
End of Life: A corpus-based study (2018, Routledge), editor of Applying Linguistics in Illness
and Healthcare Contexts (2020, Bloomsbury), and co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of
Metaphor and Language (2017).
David Deterding is Visiting Professor at Universiti Brunei Darussalam, where he has taught
phonetics, forensic linguistics, Malay-English translation, and research methods in linguistics.
His research focuses on acoustic phonetics, description of varieties of English in Southeast
Asia, misunderstandings in English as a lingua franca, and the pronunciation of Malay.
Beatriz Duarte Wirth is a doctoral student at the University of Lausanne (UNIL). Her research
interests are multilingualism, language development in adults, crosslinguistic interaction, and
migration. As part of her PhD project, she explores multilingual communities, with a focus on
heritage languages. Her research investigates whether speakers of typologically different lan-
guages (e.g. English and Portuguese) experience language attrition differently when immersed
in a French-speaking context.
Thierry Fontenelle is Head of the European Investment Bank’s Linguistic Services Division.
His publications include Practical Lexicography: A Reader (OUP, 2008) and his PhD at the
University of Liège, ‘Turning a bilingual dictionary into a lexical-semantic database’ (Nie-
meyer, 1997). He is also the former president of the European Association for Lexicography
(EURALEX) and an associate editor of the International Journal of Lexicography.
Durk Gorter is Ikerbasque Research Professor at the University of the Basque Country UPV/
EHU (Spain), where he is the head of the Donostia Research Group on Education and Multi-
lingualism (DREAM). He carries out research on multilingual education, European minority
languages and linguistic landscapes. He is the editor of the journal Language, Culture and
Curriculum, and he obtained the award of Distinguished Scholar of Multilingualism from the
International Association of Multilingualism.
Tim Grant is Professor of Forensic Linguistics and Director of the Aston Institute for Forensic
Linguistics at Aston University, UK. His main research interests are in forensic linguistics
generally and forensic authorship analysis specifically. He also has extensive experience as a
consulting forensic linguist.
Nancy H. Hornberger, Professor Emerita at the University of Pennsylvania, researches mul-

tilingual education, language policy, and language revitalization internationally, specializing
in Indigenous, immigrant, and refugee contexts. A widely published author, she also served as
editor of the Anthropology and Education Quarterly and the Encyclopedia of Language and
Education (second edition).
Sara Howard is Emeritus Professor of Clinical Phonetics in the Division of Human Commu-
nication Sciences at the University of Sheffield, UK. Sara has published and presented widely
in the area of clinical phonetics and phonology and is an ex-president of the International
Association of Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics.
Lihe Huang is Associate Professor and General Secretary of the Research Centre for Ageing,
Language and Care, as well as Deputy Director of the Institute of Linguistics and Multimodality
xi
Contributors
at Tongji University, utilizing multifaceted disciplinary approaches to studying the linguistic

performance of older adults. He has been constructing Multimodal Corpus of Gerontic Dis-
course (MCGD) for language and ageing studies in China. He is Humboldt Fellow of the
Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and Honorary Postgraduate Supervisor at the University
of Liverpool.
Merel Keijzer is Professor of English Linguistics and English as a Second Language at the Uni-
versity of Groningen. Her research interests focus on multilingualism, multilingual processing,
and the interplay between multilingualism and cognition across the lifespan, with a focus on
older adulthood. She is also interested in second language learning as a cognitive intervention
in healthy and (pre)clinical elderly populations. She heads the Bilingualism and Aging Lab
(BALAB) in Groningen.
Kendall A. King is Professor of Multilingual Education at the University of Minnesota. Her

teaching and research address language policy, bilingualism and language learning, and lan-
guage use, identity, and ideology. She is particularly interested in how minoritized languages
such as Spanish or Ojibwe are best supported through official policies and practices at home
and at school.
Andy Kirkpatrick is Professor Emeritus at Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia, and a mem-
ber of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He is editor of the Routledge Handbook of
World Englishes (2020) and co-editor, with Anthony Liddicoat, of the Routledge Handbook
of Language Education Policy in Asia (2019). His most recent book is Is English an Asian
Language? Cambridge University Press (2020).
Bonny Norton (FRSC) is a University Killam Professor and Distinguished University Scholar
in Language and Literacy Education, University of British Columbia. Her research addresses
identity and language learning, digital storytelling, and open technology. She was BC 2020
Academic of the Year for her leadership of the Global Storybooks project (https://globalsto-
rybooks.net/).
John P. O’Regan is Professor of Critical Applied Linguistics at IOE, Faculty of Education and
Society, University College London, UK. His work spans critical discourse analysis, political
economy, world Englishes, and intercultural communication. He is the author of Global Eng-
lish and Political Economy (Routledge, 2021).
Luis Pérez-González is Professor of Translation Studies at the Department of Foreign Lan-

guages and Translation, University of Agder (Norway). He is the author of Audiovisual Trans-
lation: Theories, Methods and Issues (2014), editor of the Routledge Handbook of Audiovisual
Translation (2018) and co-editor of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Citizen Media (2020).
Miguel Pérez-Milans is Associate Professor at University College London. He is the author

of Urban Schools and English Language Education in Late Modern China: A Critical Socio-
linguistic Ethnography (2013, Routledge), co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Language
Policy and Planning (2018, Oxford University Press), and recipient of the 2019 British Asso-
ciation for Applied Linguistics Book Prize. Miguel is also the co-editor for Language Policy
xii
Contributors
(Springer) and Language, Culture and Society (John Benjamins) and serves as the co-president
of EDiSo Association for Studies in Discourse and Society.
Michael (Mick) Perkins is Emeritus Professor of Clinical Linguistics in the Division of Human
Communication Sciences at the University of Sheffield, UK. He has presented and published
widely in clinical linguistics, pragmatics, semantics, and language development.
Sarah Peters, a chartered health psychologist, is Professor of Psychology at the University of

Manchester. Her research focuses on healthcare interactions, particularly within challenging
contexts, such as explaining ‘medically unexplained’ symptoms and supporting health behav-
iour change. The goal of Sarah’s work is to improve patient care through health professional
education.
Julia Sallabank is Professor of Language Policy and Revitalization at SOAS, University of

London. She researches and teaches sociolinguistics and language policy and planning, espe-
cially the revitalization and documentation of minority and endangered languages worldwide.
Helen Sauntson is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at York St John University,
UK. She has published widely in the areas of language in education and language, gender, and
sexuality. She co-edits two book series: Palgrave Studies in Language, Gender and Sexuality
and Cambridge Elements in Language, Gender and Sexuality.
Philip Seargeant is Senior Lecturer at the Open University, where he specializes in language
and communication. He has published books on topics ranging from social media to political
persuasion and English around the world, including the Routledge Handbook of English Lan-
guage Studies (with Ann Hewings and Stephen Pihlaja).
Monica Shank Lauwo is a PhD candidate in Language and Literacy Education at the Uni-
versity of British Columbia. As an educator, teacher educator, and researcher, she is centrally
interested in ways in which language and literacy can be mobilized to disrupt inequitable sys-
tems of power, and to support antiracist, decolonial struggles. Her research interests include
translanguaging, multiliteracies, identity, teacher education, critical literacy, and language ide-
ologies, in East Africa and Canada.
James Simpson is Professor in the Division of Humanities at the Hong Kong University of
Science and Technology. He is the Director of the MA programme in International Language
Education. He was formerly in the School of Education, University of Leeds.
Vesna Stojanovik is Professor of Clinical Linguistics at the School of Psychology and Clinical
Language Sciences at the University of Reading. She is the vice president of the International
Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association (since 2018). Vesna has published widely in the
field of developmental disorders, focusing on language development in children with genetic
disorders.
Rachel Sutton-Spence has been involved in research and teaching about sign languages since
1989. She is the co-author, with Bencie Woll, of The Linguistics of BSL (1998). Her special
xiii
Contributors
interest is in the creative uses of sign language, such as sign language literature and humour.
Having worked for 25 years on British Sign Language (BSL) in the UK, she currently works in
the Department of Brazilian Sign Language at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, where
she is affiliated with the postgraduate program in translation.
Caroline Tagg is Senior Lecturer in Applied Linguistics at the Open University, UK. Her
research explores the role of digital communication in individuals’ lives. Her recent books
include Mobile Messaging and Resourcefulness: A Post-Digital Ethnography (2022, with
Agnieszka Lyons) and Message and Medium: English Language Practices across Old and
New Media (2020, edited with Mel Evans).
Tahmineh Tayebi is Lecturer in Forensic Linguistics at Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics
at Aston University, UK. Her area of research includes language aggression and impoliteness.
She is particularly interested in online offensive and abusive language and other similar phe-
nomena, such as cyberbullying and hate crimes.
Kelleen Toohey is Professor Emerita at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC. Working
with Indigenous, heritage, and English language teachers and researchers, her work is pub-
lished in various language education journals. Her work Learning English at school: Identity,
socio-material relations and classroom practice (2018) considers the contributions of post-
humanism to classroom research.
Karin Tusting is Professor in the Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster
University. Her research interests are in the area of workplace literacies, most recently the
university workplace. Her recent publications include Academics Writing: The Dynamics of
Knowledge Creation (with McCulloch, Bhatt, Hamilton and Barton, Routledge 2019) and the
Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Ethnography (editor, 2020).
Theo van Leeuwen is Professor of Language and Communication at the University of South-
ern Denmark. He has published widely in the area of visual communication, multimodality,
critical discourse analysis, and social semiotics and was a founding editor of the journals
Social Semiotics and Visual Communication. Recent publications include the third edition of
Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (with Gunther Kress), Visual and Multimodal
Research in Organization and Management Studies (with Markus Höllerer and others), and
Multimodality and Identity.
Ian Watt is Emeritus Professor of Primary Care at the University of York and the Hull York
Medical School (HYMS). He trained as a GP and public health physician and has worked in
a variety of roles in research, education, and management alongside clinical commitments in
general practice. A major part of his work related to interactions in healthcare.
Li Wei is Director and Dean of the UCL Institute of Education at University College London,
UK, where he is also Chair of Applied Linguistics. He is Editor of International Journal of
Bilingual Education and Bilingualism and Applied Linguistics Review. He is Fellow of the
British Academy, Academia Europaea, Academy of Social Sciences (UK), and Royal Society
of Arts (UK).
xiv
Contributors
Lionel Wee is Provost’s Chair Professor in the Department of English, Linguistics and Theatre
Studies at the National University of Singapore. He sits on the editorial boards of Applied Lin-
guistics, Elements: World Englishes, English World-Wide, International Journal of the Sociol-
ogy of Language, Journal of Sociolinguistics, Multilingualisms and Diversities in Education,
and Studies in World Language Problems, among others. His research interests include lan-
guage policy, world Englishes, and general issues in sociolinguistics and pragmatics.
Bencie Woll has been involved in research on sign language for over 40 years. In 2006, she
co-founded the ESRC Deafness Cognition and Language Research Centre and served as its
director until 2017. Her research interests in sign language embrace a wide range of topics,
including the linguistics of British Sign Language (BSL), the history and sociolinguistics of
BSL, deaf communities, deaf education, L1 and L2 acquisition of BSL, sign language and
the brain, and most recently, machine translation of sign language. In 2012, she was elected
a Fellow of the British Academy and, in 2016, a Fellow of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science.
Zhu Hua is Professor of Language Learning and Intercultural Communication and Director
of the International Centre for Intercultural Studies at University College London, UK. She is
an elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (UK) and an elected Fellow and board
member of the International Academy for Intercultural Research. She is Chair of the British
Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL), 2021–2024.
Karin Zotzmann works as Associate Professor in Applied Linguistics at the University of

Southampton. Her research interests include the ways socioeconomic, political, and institu-
tional factors and processes impact upon language education and communication more gener-
ally. Her work is theoretically informed by critical realism.
xv
Acknowledgements
When Louisa Semlyen from Routledge asked us (Li Wei and Zhu Hua) over coffee whether we
would be interested in leading a new edition of The Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguis-
tics, we said yes without hesitation. That was July 2019, and life was busy but happy and rather
different. Little did we know that the project would span over the COVID-19 pandemic, during
which both of us changed our jobs significantly – Li Wei has taken on a major leadership role
in his university and Zhu Hua has changed institutions twice. James Simpson, who masterfully
edited the first edition of the successful Handbook, also changed his job and crossed continents
to Hong Kong. The new handbook project provided a good distraction from social media and
politics but was also interwoven with changes in our family and work circumstances.
We are most grateful to Louisa Semlyen and her team in Routledge, in particular, Eleni
Steck and Talitha Duncan-Todd, for their support, understanding, and gentle nudges along
the way. We are equally grateful to Sahra Abdullahi, who has assisted us in communicating
with the contributors of no fewer than 60 chapters and keeping track of the progress, and to
Tania Douek, who stepped in at very short notice in the final copy-editing stage. We were most
impressed by and grateful for our contributors’ commitment, fortitude, and support throughout
this project.
The new edition builds on the success of the first edition, published in 2011. Our gratitude
is extended to the colleagues who were involved in the first edition in various capacities. Their
effort has not been forgotten.
This project is testimony to the dedication and achievements of generations of eminent
scholars in the exciting and diverse field of applied linguistics. It will, we hope, contribute to
the vitality of the field and showcase the best of what applied linguists can do.
xvi
Introduction
The new edition of the Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics builds on the success of the
first edition, edited by James Simpson and published in 2011, by refreshing and expanding the
coverage to reflect the developments of the field over the last decade. As with the first edition,
the Handbook is intended as an essential reference to key topics in applied linguistics, with
each chapter providing an accessible overview of an area of the field.
Applied linguistics as a transdisciplinary field

Applied linguistics is a transdisciplinary field which connects knowledge about language and
language users to policies and practices in specific contexts. Generally speaking, the role of
the applied linguist is to make insights drawn from areas of language study, combined with
other disciplinary approaches, relevant to society and individuals’ lives. In this sense, applied
linguistics mediates between theory and practice. In the last decade, there has been a growing
recognition of the value of new theorizations and conceptualizations that emerge from applied
research with impact on policy and practice. Applied linguistics has shown the promise of
becoming a theory of practice in itself (Kramsch 2015) or a practical theory of language and
communication (Li 2018).
The origins of applied linguistics lie in the mid-20th century effort to give an academic
underpinning to the study of language teaching and learning. Until at least the 1980s, applied
linguistics was most closely associated with the problems and puzzles surrounding language
pedagogy, learning, and acquisition. Whilst language teaching and learning remains the core of
applied linguistics of the 21st century, the focus of various subfields has shifted considerably.
The acquisition and learning of specific domains of language (e.g. phonology, vocabulary,
pragmatics) have become central issues for second language acquisition (SLA) research, and
teacher development, material, and syllabus design have become core areas for TESOL and
second and foreign language education. What remains under the rubric of applied linguis-
tics are investigations of learner language (often with corpora), classroom discourse, motiva-
tion, learner strategy, content and task-based learning, and language testing. In the meantime,
new areas have opened up for applied linguists to explore. For example, translanguaging or
translingual practices, interculturality, intersections between translation and politics and the
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082637-1 1
law, bi- and multilingualism, media discourse, forensic linguistics, sign language, language
planning and language policy, and family language policy, as well as new issues of scholarly
concerns, such as gender, ethnicity and social class, neoliberal ideologies, (in)equality and
social justice, and linguistic landscapes. Some of these areas have long and well-established
histories. But a new generation of applied linguists has joined established researchers to raise
new questions and develop new analytical perspectives. Many of the new research sites came
to the attention of applied linguists because of the intensification of global migration and
contact between people of different linguistic and cultural backgrounds (Block and Cameron
2001). The applied linguist’s traditional focus on the language learner gradually expanded to
the diversity of language user groups. Globalization and language contact also motivated some
to raise questions of access to linguistic resources. A speaker’s apparent lack of proficiency in a
particular language may have nothing to do with their cognitive capacity but could be the result
of a lack of opportunity to access the necessary resources to learn and use the language. Such
issues manifest themselves not only in language teaching classrooms but also in the workplace
as well as health and legal contexts. The new edition of the Handbook further demonstrates the
vitality and widening scope of the field through updating the chapters in the original edition
and bringing in the new topics that have emerged in the last decade. Examples of the latter
include chapters on content and language integrated learning, curriculum and material from the
perspective of decolonization and inclusivity, language awareness, critical and post-humanist
applied linguistics, linguistic landscapes, digital communication, language and race, ecolin-
guistics, and translanguaging.
The diversity of interests of applied linguists and the ever-expanding scope of the field not-
withstanding, applied linguistics maintains its distinctive conceptual focus. The most widely
cited definition of applied linguistics comes from Christopher Brumfit, who describes it as
‘the theoretical and empirical investigation of real-world problems in which language is a
central issue’ (1995: 27). Brumfit’s definition is broad enough to encompass the range of areas
of enquiry indicated above. It also firmly distinguishes applied linguistics from other related
fields by making it problem-oriented. While language is, of course, fundamental to human life
and surrounds us, the problem orientation helps to delimit the field. That is, the motivation
for applied linguistics lies not with an interest in autonomous or idealized language, as with
understandings of linguistics which deal in linguistic universals: applied linguistics data is
collected empirically in contexts of use. Neither is its concern with the entirety of ‘language
in use’. It is demarcated by its interest in how language is implicated in real-world issues.
The scope and structure of the Handbook

This new edition of the Handbook consists of two volumes, 30 chapters each, but retains a
broadly similar chapter format, covering a history of the area, a critical discussion of its main
current issues, and an indication of its emergent debates and future trajectory. Chapters con-
clude with a list of related topics in the Handbook. Bibliographical references appear at the
end of each chapter, making them self-contained. Finally, each chapter has a section on further
reading: a short annotated list of works which readers might consult for a more in-depth treat-
ment of the area.
Volume 1 of the Handbook focuses on language learning and language education. It is
made of two parts. Part I is on language learning and language education – the historical core
of applied linguistics, with the aim of addressing practical problems in language learning and
teaching. The new edition includes the topics which have emerged or have seen considerable
2
Introduction
development in last few years, such as content and language integrated learning, language
learning across the lifespan, English as an additional language, and the topics which were
not included in the first edition due to space constraints, such as curriculum and material and
language awareness. Part II is on key areas and approaches to applied linguistics. The section
foregrounds the range of different conceptualizations and methodological approaches as well
as the interdisciplinarity of applied linguistics.
Volume 2 also contains two parts and focuses on broader issues beyond language teaching
and learning that applied linguists deal with. In Part I, ‘Applied linguistics in society’, new
topics include family language policy, critical applied linguistics, digital communication, inter-
cultural communication, institutional discourse, language and race, and politics and applied
linguistics. Part II, ‘Broadening horizons’ contains new chapters on language attrition,
posthumanism and applied linguistics, linguistic landscapes, endangered languages, ecolin-
guistics, and translanguaging.
The contents of this volume can be found on the Table of Contents pages. The contents of
Volume I include the following:
Part I: Language learning and language education

1 Conceptualizing language education: theories and practice – Diane Larsen-Freeman
2 Second and additional language acquisition across the lifespan – Lourdes Ortega
3 Language teaching and methodology – Scott Thornbury
4 Technology and language learning – Richard Kern
5 Teacher communities of practice – Simon Borg
6 Curriculum and materials: decolonization and inclusivity – John Gray
7 Content and language integrated learning and English medium instruction –
Heath Rose and Jim McKinley
8 Bilingual and multilingual education – Ingrid Gogolin
9 English for academic purposes – Nigel Harwood and Bojana Petrić
10 Language testing – Barry O’Sullivan
11 Language awareness – Xuesong (Andy) Gao
12 Classroom discourse – Amy B. M. Tsui
13 Language and culture – Claire Kramsch
14 Language socialization – Agnes Weiyun He
Part II: Key areas and approaches in applied linguistics
15 Grammar – Michael Swan

16 Lexis – Joe Barcroft and Gretchen Sunderman
17 Applied phonetics and phonology – Helen Fraser
18 Literacy – Doris S. Warriner
19 Genre analysis – John Flowerdew
20 Stylistics – Elena Semino
21 Discourse analysis – Guy Cook
22 Corpus linguistics – Phoebe Lin and Svenja Adolphs
23 Cognitive linguistics – Bodo Winter and Florent Perek
24 Systemic functional linguistics – Lise Fontaine and Anne McCabe
25 Generative grammar – Shigenori Wakabayashi
26 Psycholinguistics and second language acquisition – John Field
3
27 Neurolinguistics in language learning and teaching – John W. Schwieter and

Stefano Rastelli
28 Psychology of language learning: personality, emotion, and motivation –
Jean-Marc Dewaele
29 Sociocultural approaches to language development – Steven L. Thorne and Thomas Tasker
30 Sociolinguistics for language education – Petros Karatsareas
We hope that the new enlarged edition of the Handbook further reflects the scope of con-
temporary applied linguistics and will stimulate the interests of a new generation of students
and researchers in this exciting and diverse field.
References
Block, D. and Cameron, D. (eds.) (2001) Globalization and Language Teaching, Oxford: Routledge.
Brumfit, C. (1995) ‘Teacher professionalism and research’, in G. Cook and B. Seidlhofer (eds.), Prin-
ciples and Practice in Applied Linguistics: Studies in Honour of H. G. Widdowson, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, pp. 27–41.
Kramsch, C. (2015) ‘Applied linguistics: A theory of the practice’, Applied Linguistics, 36(4): 454–465.
Li, W. (2018) ‘Translanguaging as a practical theory of language’, Applied Linguistics, 39(1): 9–30.
4
Part I
Applied linguistics in society
1
Multilingualism
Introduction
Nowadays, there are more multilingual than monolingual speakers in the world (Edwards
2019; De Bot 2019). Multilingualism is very common, and the number of existing languages
is much larger than the number of independent states. Individuals and whole communities need
to speak more than one language for different reasons. In some cases, they are speakers of a
minority autochthonous language, such as Navajo in the US, Quechua and Aymara in Peru and
Bolivia, Maori in New Zealand, or Welsh in the UK, and need to learn the dominant state lan-
guage. In other cases, multilingualism is related to immigration because immigrants speak their
first language(s) as well as the language(s) of their host countries. Moreover, globalization has
spread the use of English all over the world to a greater extent than any other language in the
past and English is increasingly used as a lingua franca, along with many other languages.
Multilingualism can be understood as an individual or a social phenomenon. It can refer to
the acquisition, knowledge, or use of several languages by individuals or by language com-
munities in a specific geographical area. This broad scope is recognized in some definitions
such as that of the European Commission ‘the ability of societies, institutions, groups and
individuals to engage, on a regular basis, with more than one language in their day-to-day
lives’ (European Commission 2007: 6). The term ‘plurilingualism’ is used in some cases to
refer to individual multilingualism but the most common term is ‘multilingualism’, both for
the individual and social dimensions. Plurilingualism has also been related to a more integrated
view of languages in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (Council
of Europe 2001), but this integrated view that looks at the whole linguistic repertoire is also
associated with the term ‘multilingualism’.
Nowadays, multilingualism is widely used to refer to two or more languages, and bilin-
gualism is considered as a variant of multilingualism, which also includes other variants,
such as trilingualism. Studies on third or additional language acquisition have focused on
the specific characteristics that distinguish multilingualism when it involves more than two
languages (Gabryś-Barker 2019). Research in this area shows that the diversity of contexts
and the higher complexity of processes involving more than two languages can result in
interesting insights. These insights on language acquisition and specific resources used by
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082637-3 7
multilinguals cannot be found when only two languages are involved (Aronin and Jessner
2015; Quay and Montanari 2019).
An important question when discussing multilingualism is what we understand by being
multilingual. It is a difficult question to answer because there are different dimensions of mul-
tilingualism (Baker and Wright 2021). One of the most important dimensions is proficiency,
understood as language competence in the different languages. The idea of ‘native control of
two languages’, suggested by Bloomfield (1933), when referring to bilingualism is extremely
demanding and very uncommon when more than two languages are involved. As we have
already seen, the definition given by the European Commission does not establish a specific
level of proficiency in each of the languages in order to be multilingual but refers to the use of
the languages on a regular basis. The idea of balanced multilingualism at the level of an ‘ideal
educated native speaker’ in several languages is not realistic. Another dimension of multilin-
gualism is related to age. Multilingual speakers can learn two or more languages simultane-
ously or sequentially at different ages. As Muñoz and Singleton (2019) explain, age can refer
to the starting age in which exposure to the language occurs or biological age. They also add
that the influence of age is influenced by the specific context of acquisition. Other dimensions
of multilingualism include the frequency and purpose of use of the languages in society or their
status and typology (see also Festman 2019).
An interesting dimension of multilingualism is the distinction between productive and
receptive abilities. Lingua receptiva refers to situations in which speakers use different lan-
guages but understand each other (ten Thije et al. 2017). Lingua receptiva has a strong tradition
in Scandinavia where speakers of a language such as Swedish, Danish, or Norwegian use their
respective first languages when communicating with each other because they can understand
the languages used by their interlocutors. Lingua receptiva can promote language diversity
because speakers only need to understand the language of their interlocutors and do not need
to speak it.
Multilingualism is related to many areas of applied linguistics and therefore to many other
chapters in this volume.
Historical perspectives
Multilingualism is not a new phenomenon as it can be seen in ancient texts written in several
languages, such as the Behistun Inscription (the sixth or fifth century BC) or the Rosetta
Stone (196 BC). Multilingualism was also common in the Roman Empire and in the Middle
Ages in many areas of Europe. There are many other examples of multilingualism in Africa,
Asia, and the Americas. There have also been strong forces against multilingualism such as
European colonialism and the development of nation-states with the idea of ‘one country,
one language’.
Multilingual individuals have often been praised for their abilities. Several well-known
polyglots are Cardinal Giuseppe Caspar Mezzofanti; James Murray, first editor of the Eng-
lish Oxford Dictionary; and Solomon Caesar Malan, a Victorian scholar (see also Edwards
2019).
Aronin and Singleton (2008) compared the characteristics of historical and contemporary
multilingualism, and they concluded that multilingualism is a more global phenomenon nowa-
days because its geographical and social spread is wider than in previous times. Cenoz and
Gorter (2020a) explain that one of the characteristics of multilingualism nowadays is that, in
most cases, it includes the English language.
8
Multilingualism
Critical issues and topics

The study of multilingualism has been approached from different perspectives, such as psy-
cholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and education. Different aspects of multilingualism receive
more or less attention depending on the discipline. In psycholinguistics, the basic topics are the
cognitive outcomes of bilingualism and language processing by multilingual speakers.
Sociolinguistic studies on multilingualism have focused on the use of different languages
and their interaction in specific contexts, the relationship between language use and identity
and the status and vitality of different languages as related to power relationships. Research
on education has focused on the use of minority languages as languages of instruction and
the learning of second and additional languages in school contexts. Critical issues and topics
on multilingualism are relevant for many other areas of applied linguistics, such as language
learning, language in education, and language in society. Due to space limitations, only some
critical issues in multilingualism will be presented here.
The outcomes of bilingualism and multilingualism

Up to the 1960s multilingualism was generally associated with negative results in cognitive
ability. Multilingual schoolchildren scored lower than monolinguals, particularly in verbal
intelligence, but these tests often had serious methodological problems. The multilingual chil-
dren tested in these studies were in contexts in which their first language was regarded as infe-
rior in society and was not developed at school. Moreover, multilingual children often came
from lower socioeconomic backgrounds than monolingual children.
This idea of associating multilingualism with detrimental effects in cognitive ability changed
in the following decades. A very influential study was published by Peal and Lambert in 1962.
This study proved that bilingual children scored higher on several verbal and non-verbal tests
of cognitive ability. Although some methodological aspects of this study have been criticized,
it triggered off a large number of methodologically stronger studies on the effects of bilingual-
ism. In contrast to the studies conducted between the 1920s and the 1960s, studies carried out
in recent decades have generally associated bilingualism with cognitive advantages in execu-
tive control and third language acquisition.
Research on the outcomes of bilingualism shows that bilinguals have advantages in some
areas of non-verbal executive control and that they could be related to the high levels of con-
trol of attention (Bialystok 2010). Results also indicated that bilingualism could possibly slow
down the process of cognitive decline (Bialystok et al. 2004). However, the advantage shown
by bilinguals in general executive functioning has been criticized in recent years, and some
methodological issues have been pointed out (see, for example, Paap 2019).
Bilingualism and multilingualism have been associated with possible advantages in the
acquisition of additional languages (see Cenoz 2013; Jessner and Cenoz 2019). The basic idea
is that monolinguals and multilinguals are not on equal footing when facing the task of acquir-
ing an additional language. Multilinguals already have access to at least two linguistic systems
with their lexicons, syntax, phonetics, pragmatics, and discourse properties. Moreover, with
the exception of early bi-/multilinguals, multilingual learners have already the experience of
acquiring a second or third language and have developed strategies that can influence the
acquisition of additional languages. Metalinguistic awareness refers to the ability to reflect on
language and to manipulate it. Bilinguals have been reported to have advantages over monolin-
guals in some dimensions of metalinguistic awareness and that this could have some influence
9
on the acquisition of additional languages (Woll 2018). Communication practices are also
different when comparing monolinguals and multilinguals because the latter need to switch
between languages according to the situation or the interlocutor.
The positive effect of bilingualism on the acquisition of additional languages is not so obvi-
ous in the case of immigrants when the first language is not taught and valued at school or in
society (Jiménez Catalán and Fernández Fontecha 2019). In these cases, learners can be in situ-
ations in which they do not have the opportunity to develop their first language at school and to
benefit from the enhanced metalinguistic skills associated with multilingualism. Furthermore,
in many cases immigrant children come from weaker socioeconomic and socioeducational
backgrounds which are usually associated with poorer school achievement. Some studies have
reported that the advantages associated with bilingualism in L3 acquisition are linked to profi-
ciency in the first or second language (Edele et al. 2018; Maluch and Kempert 2019).
Multilingualism, language planning, and education

Language planning is understood as a type of intervention into the corpus of a language, its
status and acquisition. The institution of education can be regarded as a crucial tool of language
planning. Schools can have an important influence on language learning but also on the status
and values associated with different languages. In fact, schools have been regarded as spaces
where ‘specific languages and specific linguistic practices come to be inculcated with legiti-
macy and authority’ (Martin-Jones 2007: 172).
Some European minority languages, such as Basque, Catalan, or Welsh, are good examples
of the effect of language planning (Gorter et al. 2014). These languages were neglected or even
forbidden to be used in educational contexts, but over the last decades, rather elaborate systems
have developed for the teaching of the minority language from the earliest stages of education
until university and adult education. Nowadays, not only home or first language (L1) speakers
of a minority language have it as the language of instruction but also speakers of the major-
ity language learn through the minority language at school. In some schools, such as those in
the Basque Country, there is a shift from bilingualism to multilingualism and English is being
increasingly used as an additional language of instruction. Basque, the minority language, is
the main language of instruction and English is an additional language of instruction in some
schools (Gorter et al. 2014).
Multilingual education not only implies the teaching is in two or more languages but also
that education aims at multilingualism and multiliteracy as an outcome. There are different
types of bilingual and multilingual education, depending not only on school variables (teach-
ers, curriculum, etc.) but also on the sociolinguistic context in which the schools are located
and the language policy of that society (see Cenoz and Gorter 2019). The values associated
with different languages and their prestige in society are closely related to multilingual educa-
tion. For example, the strong language policy to protect Basque in the Basque Country is not
only aimed at schools but also at the use of Basque in government agencies, town halls, private
companies, and the linguistic landscape. This situation is completely different from that of
immigrant languages in the Basque Country or elsewhere. Immigrant languages are often seen
as obstacles to integration (Yagmur 2016).
Current contributions and research

In this section, we will focus on three new areas of development in research on multilingual-
ism: the multilingual turn, translanguaging, and the linguistic landscape.
10
Multilingualism
The multilingual turn

Traditionally, monolingualism has been the reference even in the study of multilingualism or
in educational contexts aiming at the development of students’ multilingualism. Multilingual
speakers’ proficiency has been measured by comparison to the proficiency of educated native
speakers of each of the languages involved, and the focus has been only on one of the lan-
guages at a time. These monolingual views also imply that languages have to be isolated so that
they do not contaminate each other. Another implication associated with monolingual views
is that balanced multilingualism with equal high proficiency in different languages should be
achieved (Cenoz 2019).
Monolingual views and ideologies of language separation have been criticized, and a mul-
tilingual turn is replacing them by multilingual views that are based on the way multilingual
speakers use languages in communication (May 2014; Conteh and Meier 2014; Cummins
2017; Cenoz and Gorter 2020a). These multilingual views consider that boundaries between
languages are soft and fluid, and multilingual speakers do not isolate their languages. Multilin-
gual views include different proposals. One of these proposals is to focus on multilingualism,
which links the way multilingual speakers use their communicative resources to the teach-
ing and learning of languages at school (Cenoz and Gorter 2015, 2020a). The dimensions of
focusing on multilingualism are the multilingual speaker, the whole linguistic repertoire, and
the social context. The multilingual speaker dimension considers that the multilingual speaker
is a different type of speaker when compared to the monolingual native speaker because mul-
tilingual speakers use different linguistic resources. Therefore, multilinguals should not be
compared to monolinguals because they are not the sum of several monolingual speakers (see
also Pennycook and Makoni 2020). The second dimension, the whole linguistic repertoire,
highlights the need to focus on multilingualism because multilingual speakers link new knowl-
edge to existing knowledge and use resources from all their languages when learning and using
languages. The third dimension of focusing on multilingualism is the social context. Multilin-
gual speakers engage in social practices to learn and use languages. Multilingual speakers have
the resources in their multilingual repertoire, but they use them in different ways depending on
their interlocutors, and they contribute to shaping the communicative context.
Translanguaging
The term ‘translanguaging’ was first used in the context of bilingual education in Wales to refer
to the pedagogical practice that alternates the use of Welsh and English for the input and the
output during the same lesson (Lewis et al. 2012). The aim of translanguaging in the Welsh
context is to develop both language and academic skills. Nowadays, translanguaging is widely
used in different contexts and it can be regarded as ‘an umbrella term that embraces a wide vari-
ety of theoretical and practical proposals’ (Cenoz and Gorter 2020b: 2). The original concept
of translanguaging has been extended to refer to the discursive practices that bilingual speak-
ers use both at school and elsewhere (García 2009; García and Li 2014). Li (2018) considers
that translanguaging is natural and refers to a ‘translanguaging instinct’. The legitimization of
translanguaging practices in school contexts is linked to social justice and the empowerment
of minoritized students (García and Li 2014).
Cenoz and Gorter (2020b) represent translanguaging on a continuum with two ends: peda-
gogical and spontaneous translanguaging. Pedagogical translanguaging is close to the original
concept of translanguaging and refers to a theory and practice that integrates two or more
languages. Pedagogical translanguaging relates prior knowledge to new knowledge and uses
11
resources from the multilingual speakers’ repertoire to develop language and content skills.
The integration of different languages can be done by alternating the languages of the input
and the output but also by working on the development of metalinguistic awareness across
languages and the coordination of teachers of different languages and language and content
teachers (Cenoz and Gorter 2021). Spontaneous translanguaging occurs naturally, and it is
widely used by multilingual speakers.
There are different approaches to translanguaging and different theoretical distinctions as
well. One of the main issues is the way scholars position themselves regarding the existence of
languages (Leung and Valdés 2019). Some scholars consider that the boundaries between lan-
guages can only be defined socially or politically because there is a single linguistic repertoire
understood as a single aggregation of lexical and structural resources (García and Otheguy
2020: 25). Other scholars consider that there is no scientific evidence to claim that languages
do not exist and that it is counterintuitive (MacSwan 2017; Cummins 2021). Some scholars
also point out that scholars who do not assume the existence of languages still refer to indi-
vidual languages (Berthele 2021).
Linguistic landscape
The study of the linguistic landscape as a field in its own right is a relatively recent develop-
ment in applied linguistics and sociolinguistics, although there is a long tradition in the analysis
of the meaning of signs in semiotics. The study of the linguistic landscape, also referred to as
semiotic landscape, can be a way to increase our understanding of different aspects of multilin-
gualism (Gorter 2013, 2019). The focus of linguistic landscape studies is on ‘written languages
in public spaces’ but from its inception there has been an important expansion beyond a narrow
definition to include images, multimodal dimensions, placement of objects, and how people
interact with signage (Shohamy 2019). An alternative definition could be ‘the configuration of
language choices on public signage in multilingual settings’ (Matras et al. 2018: 53).
Studies on linguistic landscapes conducted in various settings show the cultural and lin-
guistic diversity in the use of different languages. In a classical study, Ben Rafael et al. (2006)
compared Jewish, Israeli Palestinian, and non-Israeli Palestinian settings in Israel. They report
on the use of Hebrew, Arabic, and English in Jewish and non-Israeli Palestinian locations. The
use of different languages on the signs is also reported in numerous studies conducted in cities,
towns, and rural areas around the world. An overview of those studies linked to multilingual-
ism can be found in Shohamy (2012), Van Mensel et al. (2016) and Gorter and Cenoz (2017).
Apart from multilingualism, another trend observed in these studies is the spread of Eng-
lish in the linguistic landscape. In some cases, the use of English in commercial signs could
be interpreted as informative when it is aimed at foreign visitors in non-English-speaking
countries, but at the same time, it is clear that English has a strong symbolic function for the
local population. The global use of English, especially in advertising, has been associated with
values and perceptions such as modernity, success, and internationalness (Hornikx and Van
Meurs 2020).
The development of multilingual landscapes is also closely linked to language policy (Spol-
sky 2009). For example, Cenoz and Gorter (2006) compared two European bilingual cities,
Donostia-San Sebastian in the Basque Country (Spain) and Ljouwert-Leeuwarden in Friesland
(The Netherlands). The official languages are Basque and Spanish in the Basque Country and
Frisian and Dutch in Friesland. Basque and Frisian are minority languages, but the institu-
tional support for Basque is much stronger than for Frisian and the linguistic landscape is one
of the areas where Basque is much more strongly promoted than Frisian. Gorter et al. (2012)
12
Multilingualism
confirmed that the local language policy had an important impact on the linguistic landscape.
The conflict over of the French language in Canada, particularly in Québec, is a renowned
example for the development of language policy in relation to the study of linguistic landscapes
(Leimgruber 2019). Another widely known example is the legal arrangement for Dutch and
French in Belgium, which divides the country into two monolingual territories, with the excep-
tion of the officially bilingual capital, Brussels. Local language policy dictates strict equality of
Dutch and French on official signage, whereas on private signage is left unregulated (Janssens
2012). Similar influences of language policy were also found in studies in such diverse loca-
tions as the bilingual community of Galicia, Spain (Dunlevy 2012), and in Guangzhou, one
of the largest cities in China (Han and Wu 2020), and in studies on Indigenous languages in a
small town in the Amazon region in Brazil (Shulist 2018).
The study of the linguistic landscape can thus contribute to the study of multilingualism in
different ways. Language signs are indicators of the status and prestige of languages used in a
specific setting and the signs can also be an additional source of input in language acquisition
(Cenoz and Gorter 2008; Li and Marshall 2020). An area of research that has become increas-
ingly important is the analysis of linguistic landscapes inside schools and other educational
contexts as related to language teaching and multilingualism (Gorter 2018; Krompák et al.
2022; Malinowski et al. 2020; Niedt and Seals 2020).
Recommendations for practice

The main recommendation for practice regarding multilingualism is to focus on multilingual-
ism taking a multilingual turn or using a multilingual lens (May 2014; Conteh and Meier 2014;
Cummins 2017; Cenoz and Gorter 2020a) This recommendation applies to research, language
policy, and teaching.
There is now a growing body of research on multilingualism, and it is necessary for
research to take a more holistic approach considering multilingual speakers and their whole
linguistic repertoire instead of isolating and focusing only on one language at a time. Stud-
ies on the acquisition and use of three or more languages has been a big step because they
analyze the differences between second and third language acquisition and analyze the
effect of previously acquired languages (Jessner and Cenoz 2019). However, it is neces-
sary that research in these areas adopt a more multilingual lens by looking at the whole
multilingual repertoire and the way it is used by multilingual speakers. Another important
point regarding research is to consider that multilingual speakers use languages in different
contexts, and they cannot be compared to monolingual speakers, who use only one language
in all contexts.
The same recommendation to focus on multilingualism can apply to policy-makers in edu-
cation. All languages in the students’ multilingual repertoires need to be valued even if they are
not part of the curriculum. As Duarte and Kirsch (2020) point out, it is often the case that immi-
grant and minority languages are not taught at school, and this can have negative consequences
for students and their learning process. An important issue is the assessment of multilingual
learners. In the context of Europe, De Backer et al. (2017) explain that immigrants with a home
language that is not part of the curriculum often take language and content tests in a language
they do not know well. In these contexts, immigrant students tend to obtain lower results in
tests designed from a monolingual perspective. It is necessary to approach assessment from a
multilingual lens, considering the needs these multilingual students have. Immigrant students
can benefit from a multilingual approach that gives value to their languages and provides lin-
guistic support using translanguaging (Slembrouck et al. 2018). Another step in this direction
13
in relation to language assessment is the Council of Europe’s (2018) new criteria for building
a plurilingual repertoire and for plurilingual comprehension.
The same recommendation about focusing on multilingualism applies to teaching. Pedagogi-
cal translanguaging strategies can be a useful way to activate resources from the multilingual
students’ whole repertoire and positively influence language and content learning (Cenoz and
Gorter 2021). Moreover, students’ social, multilingual, and multicultural identities can be vali-
dated when multilingual students use resources from all their languages (see also Norton 2014).
Future directions
Multilingualism is a very broad area, and there are many possible future directions. In this
chapter we have only looked at some of them. As has already been said, there is a strong trend
towards adopting a real focus on multilingualism or a multilingual lens in the study and prac-
tice of multilingualism. Another important trend is the awareness of social inequalities and the
way there is a hierarchy of languages because there are important differences in the status of
speakers. Multilingual practices such as spontaneous translanguaging can be seen as related to
social justice and legitimization of the way minoritized speakers communicate (García and Li
2014). A related direction in the study of multilingualism is the relationship between language,
race, and social class (Rosa 2018). This area, also referred to as raciolinguistics, has important
implications for educational settings because it goes against standard languages, which are the
varieties that are used as a model in most schools.
Another future direction is related to pedagogical translanguaging and its influence on the
development of language and content skills in education. Now that boundaries between lan-
guages are regarded as soft and fluid, it is important to see the effect of specific strategies that
use resources from the whole multilingual repertoire in order to link new knowledge to prior
knowledge. Some results indicate that pedagogical translanguaging can have a positive influ-
ence on the acquisition of vocabulary (see, for example, Leonet et al. 2020). More studies are
necessary to evaluate the specific influence of pedagogical translanguaging because there is
a wide range of practices that can be considered as pedagogical translanguaging that can be
applied at different ages and in different contexts.
Related topics
conceptualizing language learning and language education: theories and methods; second and
additional language acquisition across the lifespan; bilingual and multilingual education; lan-
guage and ageing; linguistic landscape; minority/Indigenous language revitalization; languag-
ing and translanguaging
Further reading
Baker, C. and Wright, W. E. (2021) Foundations of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 7th ed., Bristol:
Multilingual Matters. (This volume is probably the most comprehensive overview of the character-
istics, types, and outcomes of bilingualism and bilingual education. The volume looks at individual,
social, and educational aspects of bilingualism and multilingualism.)
Cenoz, J. and Gorter, D. (2021) Pedagogical Translanguaging, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
(This volume focuses on pedagogical translanguaging, understood as a theoretical and instructional
approach that aims at improving language by using resources from the learner’s multilingual repertoire.
Pedagogical translanguaging, which is close to the original use of translanguaging in Welsh-English
bilingual schools, can be used in language and content classes.)
14
Multilingualism
García, O. and Li, W. (2014) Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education, New York: Pal-
grave Macmillan. (This volume focuses on the definition and scope of translanguaging as theory and
practice. The volume also looks at translanguaging pedagogies in multilingual classroom contexts.
The transformative potential of translanguaging in education is highlighted, as well as its orientation
towards social justice.)
Pennycook, A. and Makoni, S. (2020) Innovations and Challenges in Applied Linguistics from the
Global South, New York: Routledge. (This volume looks at the Global South as linked to margin-
alized people in post- and de-colonial areas. Pennycook and Makoni view languages as invented
social constructs and they adopt an integrational approach to multilingualism that goes against plural
monolingualisms.)
Van Avermaet, P., Slembrouck, S., Van Gorp, K., Sierens, S. and Maryns, K. (eds.) (2018) The Multilin-
gual Edge in Education, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. (This edited volume highlights the role of
minority students’ multilingual repertoires in different school context in Africa, Europe, and North
America. The establishment of integrated multilingual contexts in heterogeneous classrooms makes
them more equitable and efficient.)
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2
Language and migration
Introduction
The multilingual landscapes of the 21st century are a product of continuing transnational and
translocal mobility and exchange of people, information, and products across physical and vir-
tual boundaries. Knowledge of local and global/international languages gives access to infor-
mation, facilitates the exchange of material goods, and enables communication with people
in our immediate social space and beyond (Castells 2000). Languages themselves migrate or
are remade through migration. Within this context of linguistic superdiversity (Vertovec 2007;
Creese and Blackledge 2018), language plays a key role in the constitution of public and pri-
vate institutions and is crucial for actors who come into contact with these institutions to gain
access to material and symbolic resources.
Across these multilingual landscapes of mobility and exchange there has of late been a
closing down, materially and in public discourse, particularly in the media and in the politi-
cal sphere. Here, migration is increasingly viewed through the lenses of nationalist and racist
rhetoric, creating atmospheres of social panic in which migrants and refugees are seen as
threatening national borders (Rheindorf and Wodak 2020). Applied linguistic research aims
to increase our understanding of the linguistic dimensions of migration and the subtle ways
that language ideologies and practices contribute to social processes of ‘othering’ and exclu-
sion in crucial institutional contexts. It investigates such processes while remaining attuned to
large-scale social processes (political, policy-oriented, and institutional); its analyses offer an
emic perspective on these movements of human beings rather than their objectivist othering in
nationalist or racist discourses.
Applied linguistic research into language and migration is based on two simple, interrelated,
but far-reaching propositions: (1) for migrants, access to the crucial material and symbolic
resources that enable survival and integration is mediated through repeated face-to-face inter-
actions with institutions, and (2) these face-to-face interactions are significantly shaped by
changing policy environments and institutional arrangements as well as sometimes volatile
national political and media attitudes towards diversity, integration, citizenship, and accom-
panying ideologies concerning who should have access to what resources and how. These
face-to-face institutional encounters are normally realized through language. Such face-to-face
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082637-4 19
encounters, typically characterized by asymmetries of power between participants, are the

empirical focus of the applied linguistic study of language and migration, along with represen-
tations of them in media, political, and popular discourses.
Avoiding methodological nationalism (Glick-Schiller 2010), an applied linguistic research
agenda on language and migration investigates how language practices in domains such as health,
education, the law, and work are shaped both by the dynamics of face-to-face encounters and the
constraints of the surrounding political, policy, and institutional environment; they ask the fol-
lowing questions: What linguistic factors enable and constrain access for migrants (for example,
to health services, education, legal advice, or employment)? What languages and forms of com-
munication get used, and when, why, and where? And what are the consequences for the migrant?
Development of the field of language and migration studies

Language and migration research has been influenced by the dynamics of globalization (Col-
lins et al. 2009). Emerging sociolinguistic agendas, rather than focusing on the sociolinguistic
description of settled communities, have developed into a sociolinguistics of movement and
flows and what Pratt terms ‘contact zones’ (Pratt 1987: 60; Mezzadra and Neilson 2013).
Another influence on language and migration studies has been work on institutional discourse
(Duchêne et al. 2013). Migration trajectories have been characterized as repeated series of
institutional encounters, mediated through talk, which can gatekeep access to resources, form-
ing powerful means of exclusion and othering. Such research points to deeply embedded
inequalities in power/knowledge, played out in daily encounters with teachers, social workers,
migration lawyers and others (Piller 2016). The default sociolinguistic context for language
and migration studies is multilingualism, even in national and institutional settings where pow-
erful social forces equate migration with giving up a language in favour of the language of the
country of settlement. This is not of course to deny the significance of such linguistic ideologi-
cal issues, currently brought to the fore in debates around citizenship and political belonging
(Cooke and Peutrell 2019).
So if the influences in language and migration studies have been largely sociolinguistic,
what applied linguistic agendas have emerged? Language learning and teaching, interpreting
and translating, doctor-patient interactions, and job interviews and other institutional encoun-
ters are not exactly new in themselves, while emerging themes, such as the impact of new poli-
cies on citizenship and exclusion, also claim the attention of applied linguists. What is new is
the bringing together of these disparate topics into a coherent theme, permitting their interlink-
ing and articulation as part of general processes of migration and population flow. Language
and migration thus provide a powerful integrating theme for applied linguistic research.
A framework for applied linguistic research into language

and migration
An applied linguistic research agenda on language and migration might investigate
• the linguistic ideological influences on migration policies at global, regional, national, and
local levels;
• the discursive construction of migration processes and migrants in the media and in cre-
ative practice;
• the dominant and popular discourses on migration, as well as the investigation of migra-
tion processes ‘from the inside’, such as through narrative and life history;
20
• the linguistic aspects of migration trajectories and the opening up of diasporic spaces;
• key ‘sites of institutional encounter’, such as work, health and social welfare, education,
and the law, both ethnographically and using tools for the analysis of language interaction
(including mediated interaction of different kinds) and document analysis drawn from
linguistic ethnography, CA, CDA and literacy studies;
• the social processes leading through categorization to exclusion and the operation of
power in institutional encounters; and
• the role of digital media in reshaping diasporic space through the compression of
space-time.
While retaining its linguistic focus, such a research agenda is alert to the work on migration
in fields such as sociology, anthropology, cultural geography, and political science for the
description of large-scale phenomena that shape and influence migration flows and diasporic
settlements. The following sections review research in relation to these themes, identifying
emergent topics and directions for future work.
Public policy, language ideology, and the law

Language issues concerning migration gain an explicit place in public policy at national level
in times of perceived crisis. Post–World War II assimilationism gave way in the 1970s and
1980s to policies which emphasized to varying degrees cultural and linguistic diversity and
inclusion. Progressive refocusing of national policy in the neoliberal political contexts through
the 1990s shifted the emphasis away from linguistic diversity onto the mobilization of human
capital through literacy and the acquisition of fluency in the dominant language of society. This
is at the expense of diasporic linguistic diversity, apart from those languages which could be
linked with economic benefits (Duchêne et al. 2013).
The 21st century has seen a continuing profound shift away from policies informed primar-
ily by diversity and inclusion to those highlighting citizenship and settlement in the context of
social cohesion. As Cooke and Peutrell say with reference to the UK (2019: 1):
levels of English competence in migrant communities have been central to debates about
citizenship, community cohesion, integration, segregation, unemployment and extrem-
ism, and the rhetoric of politicians has remained similar across changes in government.
A strand of research examines the linguistic ideologies (Schieffelin et al. 1998; Irvine and
Gal 2000) which inform language testing policies for citizenship and language requirements
for immigration introduced since the 1990s. Piller (2001) looks at the interrelationship of ide-
ologies of national and linguistic identity in Germany and their impact on ideologies of citi-
zenship using the case of the introduction of language tests for naturalization. She shows how
the linguistic issues posed by migration challenge basic political and moral assumptions of
the nation-state. McNamara and Ryan (2011) address the impact of language testing on the
citizenship process in Australia, distinguishing between fairness (test quality) and justice – that
is, whether the political motivation behind a test is discriminatory. Language is increasingly
used as a gatekeeping tool for migration: Loring and Ramanathan (2016) and Simpson (2020)
discuss the intertwining of language and immigration law. Harding et al. (2020) examine the
Secure English Language Tests used for immigration purposes in the UK, demonstrating how
they are part of broader securitization processes under that nation’s so-called ‘hostile environ-
ment’ immigration policy.
21
This research uncovers the web of assumptions about the role of language in the construc-
tion and maintenance of the social order. Anxieties concerning migration are, it seems, a special
case which triggers the formulation of language-related policy, making explicit what have
previously perhaps been tacit though widely held assumptions linking national language(s)
with the nation-state.
Language, migration, and media discourse

Another strand of the language and migration research agenda concerns the discursive con-
struction of representations of migrants and migration processes in the media and other forms
of public discourse (van Dijk 1991). There has been a decisive shift away from traditional print
media to online sources (van Hout and Burger 2017), which has blurred the boundaries between
consumers and providers of news. Typical research approaches to media texts employ critical
discourse analysis (CDA), as, for example, van Leeuwen and Wodak (1999), but also combina-
tions of CDA and corpus linguistics. In a relatively large-scale study (Baker et al. 2008), print
media texts were sampled from periods when issues of migration and asylum reached a high
profile in the media. Here, CDA and corpus linguistics are combined, the latter tracking the
distribution of lexical items and collocates (e.g. ‘looming’ + ‘influx’ in the following example):
BRITAIN was warned last night it faces a massive benefits bill to pay for the looming
influx of immigrants, including gypsies, from eastern Europe.
( The Express, 9 Feb. 2004, cited in Baker et al. 2008: 286)
CDA, with its focus on text structure, is then able to track the discursive patterns of othering
that occur in reporting of immigrants and asylum seekers, through identifying textual and
intertextual chains of linguistic strategies such as referring and predicating, argumentation,
discourse representation, intensification/mitigation, and linking the micro textual detail (which
can tell us that there is something negative about the collocation of ‘looming’ + ‘influx’) to
ideological macro structures of exclusion.
Recent shifts in the media landscape are, however, complex, with a weakening of histori-
cally authoritative print media news sources in favour of a less top-down, more rhizomatic
circulation of ‘news’ on social media leading to the emergent concept of transmediatization:
the circulation of news across a range of social media, through posting and sharing (Fast and
Jansson 2019).
Insider perspectives on migration

While language ideology and discourse analysis have been used to investigate the representa-
tions of migrants and migration in public discourse, narrative and life history methods have
been used to investigate ‘from the inside’ the discursive construction of the experience of
migration. Themes include migration and space-time orientation in narrative, as well as iden-
tity, migration, and agency (see Baynham and de Fina 2016 for a synthesis). This research illus-
trates the interaction between the different dimensions of the language and migration research
agenda identified earlier: language ideology and policy shape the life experiences of narrators,
as do their encounters with the institutions of work, schooling, healthcare, and the law. The
sharpness of these encounters is best demonstrated in the narratives that make up the insti-
tutional encounters themselves, as Maryns’ analysis of asylum-seeking interviews (Maryns
2006) demonstrates.
22
Migration does not always involve migration across national borders. The linguistic conse-
quences of internal migration in China is a theme in Dong and Blommaert (2009). Liebscher
and Dailey-O’Cain (2005) document through narrative the West-East migration movements in
the post-1989 reunified Germany. Narratives also chronicle migratory mobility in geopoliti-
cal units larger than the nation-state, such as in the expanded European Union in the work of
Galasińska and Kozłowska (2009). Changes to EU legislation, leading to increased internal
mobility, have emphasized narratives of short-term migration and return. In this context, Mein-
hof (2009) draws on life history narrative to examine the flows and movements in the migration
patterns of Malagasy musicians both within Madagascar and between Madagascar and Europe.
An emergent theme in language and migration research concerns the ‘backstory’ of migration:
the story of what leads up to the decision to migrate. This is addressed in Juffermans and Tava-
res’s (2019) research in Cabo Verde and Guinea Bissau.
Key themes in this research are the discursive construction of the complex orientations and
reorientations that are involved in migration processes and the spatial and temporal disloca-
tions involved. These narratives can be of disempowerment but also of agency and empower-
ment, of finding a voice as well as losing it. We see clearly the ways that large-scale political
and social phenomena shape the interactional worlds of the migrant narrators and the signifi-
cance of institutional encounters in opening up or closing down opportunities, which will be
addressed in more detail in later sections. While contributing substantively to the understand-
ing of migration processes, this research has also contributed to the development of narrative
theory, most notably in the way that migration narratives foreground and problematize space
in narrative, echoing de Certeau’s claim that ‘every story is a travel story – a spatial practice’
(de Certeau 1988: 115).
Diasporic spaces, multilingual landscapes

Influences coming from writers such as de Certeau (1988) and Harvey (1989), from cultural
geography and indeed the tradition of neighbourhood studies in urban sociolinguistics, have
placed emphasis on how urban spaces are appropriated and made over by migration and dias-
pora. This is investigated through methods such as linguistic landscaping (Shohamy and Gorter
2009; Blommaert 2013). In their classic literacy ethnography, Gregory and Williams (2000:
Chapter 1) show how the Spitalfields area of East London has been appropriated and made
over by successive migrations: the Huguenots in the 17th and 18th centuries, the Irish in the
early 19th century, the Jews in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and in the mid-20th century,
post-Second World War a migration from what is now Bangladesh.
In a study of the streetscapes of multilingual neighbourhoods in Ghent as part of a larger
multi-sited ethnography of language contact in urban neighbourhoods, Collins and Slemb-
rouck (2007) and Blommaert (2013) examined the constitutive indexical role of multilingual
shop signs in creating these interpretative spaces or ‘linguistic landscapes’, involving novel
cultural syntheses and blends (businesses that might combine real estate, insurance, account-
ing, and loans, with more generalized cultural brokering).
Similar diasporic spaces were explored by Keating (2009) in her study of the literacy prac-
tices of migrant Portuguese women in London. Keating contrasts the migration trajectories of
Dina towards hospital work, union activism and community involvement in London and that
of Zelia towards work as a legal interpreter based in a driving school business: ‘The driving
school was a family-based hybrid setting serving as school, travel agency and community
advice centre’ (Keating 2009: 241). It is from this base that Zelia engages in her work of cul-
tural brokering and interpreting. Vigouroux (2009), in her study of an Internet café in Cape
23
Town as a focal site for the communicative practices of Congolese migrants, identifies a similar
multifunctional space, investigating the impact of interacting time-spaces of different scale on
the semiotic artefacts and language practices which are characteristic of the Internet café and
its various topographical spaces, as well as the indexical relationships produced through these
interactions. Sabaté Dalmau (2014) examines similar processes in Barcelona locutorios. Dong
Jie’s fieldwork in China (Dong and Blommaert 2009; Dong 2011) shows how a centre/periph-
ery metropolitan/urban/rural dynamic is played out in service encounters in Beijing, where
capacity to speak Putonghua has a high value attached. Dong Jie interviews Xiao Xu, a street
seller of breakfast dumplings, who demonstrates complex indexical shifts in his repertoire
when talking about his work (Dong and Blommaert 2009: 56–57).
Work and enterprise

A number of the diasporic spaces described above involved work: Xiao Xu selling breakfast
dumplings on a Beijing street, Zelia in her driving school in London, in the multifunctional
enterprises of Ghent and Cape Town. Martin-Jones (2000) takes up the notion of ‘enterpris-
ing women’ in an ethnographic study of the multilingual literacy practices of Gujarati women
in Leicester. The Portuguese women in London in Keating’s study were also enterprising
women. Dina, the other subject of Keating (2009), has another employment trajectory, in the
unionized public sector workforce. Vigouroux (2013) reports on linguistic differentiation in
the informal economy in the case of Congolese migrants in Cape Town, and Blackledge and
Creese (2019) present an innovative ethnographic study of language use in a small business, a
butchers’ stall in Birmingham, UK, owned by a Chinese couple and catering for people from
all over the world.
Research into diasporic spaces has tended to identify multilingual literacy practices, oral
communicative practices involving language choice, code-switching or code-shifting, or more
recently, translanguaging. Piller (2016) usefully summarizes issues of linguistic stratification,
subordination, and discrimination in the workplace, also the theme of Duchêne et al. (2013).
The research of Roberts (2021) examines employment interviews as gatekeeping devices
for migrant applicants, whose education and work experience has been largely out of the
UK, identifying a ‘linguistic penalty’ for migrant applicants, weighing against them if their
education, training, and work experience has been in their country of origin. Taking another
perspective, Lorente (2012) has described the role of the Philippines as a sending country of
migrant labour in trying to form the migrant workforce prior to migration, pointing out that
the major focus in language and migration research to date has been on issues arising in the
country of destination.
Health
Applied linguistic research in the area of health relevant to migration has largely focused
on intercultural communication and mediation through formal or informal interpreting and
cultural brokering (Angelelli 2004). Research has focused unsurprisingly on the medical con-
sultation, emphasizing the role of the interpreter as institutional gatekeeper as well as active
partner with the physician in the diagnostic process. The interpreted medical consultation
is a salient example of the gatekeeping institutional encounters referred to earlier. From an
interactional perspective, the apparently marginal and neutral figure of the interpreter is a
powerful broker of access to medical treatment. Applied linguistic issues concern the pro-
fessionalization of interpreters, reliance on informal interpreting and cultural brokering, the
24
interactional dynamics of the interpreted interaction, the stance of the interpreter (Inghilleri
2005; Angelelli 2020).
Another strategy is to try and optimize the communication possibilities between doctors
and patients in contexts where interpreting is not available. Collins and Slembrouck (2006)
describe an inner-city health clinic where such issues are addressed through a manual for doc-
tors designed to facilitate communication. The researchers describe a variety of organizational
responses to migrant multilingualism in the health clinic, ranging from reliance on informal
interpreting, with a family member or friend accompanying the patient, to the use of profes-
sional interpreters, including phone interpreting and multilingual leaflets. In another healthcare
clinic study, Moyer (2013) investigates patient positioning and their capacity for agency in a
range of interactions.
Education and training

Historically, education and training is the most sustained area of focus for applied linguistic
work on the language needs of migrants. We can distinguish within it
1 education and training provision for adult migrants, either on arrival or ongoing (see
Cooke and Simpson 2008), and
2 the language issues involved in the education of the children of migrants in mainstream
and in complementary schooling (May 2014; Conteh and Meier 2014).
Issues in relation to item 1 include language learning and access to it through policy (Simpson
and Whiteside 2015), particularly the impact of policy about citizenship and social integration
on ESOL pedagogy (Cooke and Peutrell 2019); matters of adult language learning pedagogy
(for example, Baynham 2006); the learning trajectories of ESOL learners (de Costa 2010); and
the learning identities of bilingual learners (Norton 2013). Issues in relation to item 2 include
the impact of policy and of linguistic barriers to access to curriculum achievement in the domi-
nant language and opportunities to maintain and develop bi-/multilingual skills (Piller 2016)
and the adoption of translanguaging approaches in pedagogy (García and Li 2014; Conteh
2018). Linking to our emphasis on institutional encounters, these would include sustained
engagement with education and training, and also occasions both where access to these is
gatekept by interviews and selection processes and where significant others, such as parents
in relation to their children’s schooling, become involved (or not) in interactions with teachers
and other school representatives. Interactions with school tend to be diffuse and textually medi-
ated (Evans et al. 2016), more so than those in healthcare settings, for example.
Important studies in the education of children from migrant communities look from home to
school and back again. Gregory and Williams (2000) examine the home-school environments
of Bangladeshi children in East London, UK, and Cruickshank (2006) the language situa-
tion of teenaged students of Lebanese background in Sydney. Such studies reflect a holistic
perspective on research into language, migration, and settlement, emphasizing the interaction
between different domains typically investigated separately. Attention is also paid to the role
and functions of complementary schooling in supporting the bilingualism and cultural identity
of children from migrant families (Huang 2018).
At a policy level, the education and training of adult migrants is typically linked to a human
capital agenda, with language training for work and economic benefit predominating. Estab-
lished anxieties about integration and social cohesion, and the strengthening of the border and
boundaries of the nation-state (Khan 2016), are also, as suggested earlier, a powerful influence.
25
Transnationalism and virtual space

The nature of migration as a transnational project of trajectories and flows has been increas-
ingly highlighted by rapid change in virtual means for creating connectedness between people
separated by distance, shrinking and compressing space-time, and enabling migrants to be in
virtual contact with family and networks back home and elsewhere, regularly and instanta-
neously. Technological developments have enabled the accelerated creation and sharing of
transnational virtual spaces in ways that go well beyond the boundaries of nation-states, with
profound implications for language, identity, and belonging.
Online communication is supported by the ubiquity of mobile technology and the use of
social media to organize lives. Features such as integration, i.e. the co-existence of various
communicative modes on a single platform (Androutsopoulos 2010), support the develop-
ment of commonplace practices like transmedia meaning-making (Tagg et al. 2018), involv-
ing the combining of different media, and a great deal of movement between platforms. Early
work on language use in transnational online communication contexts focused on the pro-
duction of multilingual mixes and blends: Lam (2006) and Warschauer (2009) write about
switches to Chinese and Arabic, respectively, incorporated using English orthography. More
recently, attention is on mobile communicative resources and repertoires. Tagg and Lyons
(2021), for example, observe a process of repertoire assemblage, how semiotic resources
are co-constructed in the course of the unfolding mobile messaging interactions of Polish
women in the UK.
The growing extent of available semiotic resources affords greater range for people’s per-
formance of identities and relationships, as noted by Androutsopoulos and Juffermans (2014).
The creation of transnational multilingual identities has long been of compelling interest to
researchers (Lam 2004; King and Bigelow 2019). With a focus on community, the studies in
Leppänen et al. (2017) show how social media enables spaces in which, despite geographical
distances, participants construct versions of selves, and align and disalign with others, in col-
lectively monitored communal spaces online. Such changes in communicative practice entail
a blurring of a sharp distinction between ‘being here’ and ‘being there’, with migrants able to
maintain a virtual presence in their country of origin electronically, enabling translocal belong-
ing (Roberts 2019).
Future directions
Issues of language and migration are not set to disappear from the applied linguistics agenda.
However, how we conceive of migration is bound to develop and change. We are unlikely to
see a lessening of the desire of states for control of their borders in a period of uncertainty or of
the use of language as a gatekeeping tool in migration policy. There are disturbing signs, too,
of the stratification of labour markets mapping onto particular kinds of language competence.
Such issues are powerfully expressed by Lorente (2017), in her study of transnational domes-
tic work, another kind of policy-driven transnationalism driven by the push-pull of economic
activity and necessity. Mobility of communication, however, does not depend on people’s
physical movement, and we experience the increasing integration of digital information and
communication into everyday life, the interweaving of the physical and the virtual. These
changes work against the strengthening of national and ideological boundaries, a tension in
evidence in struggles over restrictions over Google in China and various kinds of Internet
connectedness in the Gulf states. Social media also have a proven capacity not just to inform
but to deceive, with alt-right and other actors disseminating ‘fake news’ on topics such as
26
migration. The communication landscape sketched in the media discourse section, with its
tension between traditional news media and new online platforms, is bound to be a continuing
influence on public discourses on migration.
The unpredictability of migration is central to the lives of huge numbers of people globally,
and much contemporary human mobility is anything but fluid. We may be working with an
oversimplified and restricted notion of the migration process itself, which must be expanded
to include other types of more short-term migration/mobility, such as seasonal working, serial
migration, migration sans papiers, return migration, migration associated with the collapse
of the nation-state (as documented by Vigouroux [2013] in relation to the Congo), and the
consequent needs of refugees and asylum seekers. There is a tendency for such changes and
disruptions to problematize language in some way, and if applied linguists are alert to these
problematizations, applied linguistic insights and expertise can be drawn into the search for
viable solutions.
Finally, there is also a tendency to emphasize through sociological pessimism the negative
aspects of migration and related linguistic issues. While recognizing the powerful exploitative
forces at work in the economically driven push-pull of international, transnational, and internal
migration, as well as the huge disparities in the neoliberal-shaped conditions of globalization,
where access to mobility is marked by sharp inequalities, we have also to learn to see it in a
more upbeat and positive light. It offers opportunities for agency, change, and enterprise, the
linguistic imagination and hybridity produced potentially contributing to new forms of lan-
guage and social activity, which could not have been envisaged if everyone had stayed at home.
Related topics
institutional discourse; language policy and planning; translation and interpreting; multilin-
gualism; language and translanguaging; linguistic landscape
Further reading
Canagarajah, S. (ed.) (2017) The Routledge Handbook of Migration and Language, London: Routledge.
(Wide-ranging survey of key themes relating to language and human mobility)
Collins, J., Slembrouck, S. and Baynham, M. (eds.) (2009) Globalization and Language in Contact, Lon-
don: Continuum. (Papers from the first AILA Language and Migration Network seminars)
Maryns, K. (2006) The Asylum Speaker: Language in the Belgian Asylum Context, Manchester: St
Jerome. (Linguistic ethnographic analysis of the asylum process in Belgium)
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3
Language policy and planning
Lionel Wee
Introduction
Understood broadly as interventions into language practices, language policy and planning
(LPP) has had a long and chequered history. As an academic discipline, however, LPP is rel-
atively recent in origin, having gained momentum from the drives toward nationalism and
nation building (Romaine 2021).
This overview focuses on developments within LPP as an academic discipline, whose mod-
ern history can be described in three main stages (Ricento 2000): (1) an initial stage of opti-
mism in the 1960s and 1970s that the language problems of newly independent states could
be solved via the implementation of rational and systematic procedures, (2) a period of disil-
lusionment in wake of LPP failures (1980s and 1990s) that opened the way for a more critical
and reflexive appreciation of the role that language and linguists play in society, and (3) in the
present period, a growing sense that LPP needs to be reconstituted as a multidisciplinary and
politicized approach since the issues it grapples with are complex and represent interests that
can pervade multiple levels of social life, ranging from the individual to the state and across
state boundaries as well.
It is worth viewing this history of LPP as a dynamic interplay between academic concerns,
on the one hand, and political/bureaucratic interests, on the other. Such a perspective provides
us with a better awareness of the kinds of constraints faced by applied linguistics as it attempts
to engage with real-world language-related problems.
So though it is the next section that specifically delves into the history of LPP, there is good
reason, even as we move on to the later sections, to also keep in mind the challenges that arise
when attempting to marry more intellectual understandings of language with the practical
demands faced by both policy-makers and the peoples whose lived experiences are affected by
sociopolitical decisions about language.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082637-5 31
Lionel Wee
LPP: a brief history
Developing nation-states, developing LPP

The emergence of LPP as a coherent field was closely tied to the fact that newly independent
states in the post-colonial era (mainly Asian and African) were seen as in need of appropri-
ate modernization and development programs. For these states, the concerns were multiple.
There was often a desire to reclaim some essentialized national identity and a language that
could be emblematic of this identity, as both were felt to have been lost (or least compromised)
under colonial rule. The national identity and language, however mythical, usually had to be
(re)constructed in the context of an ethnolinguistically diverse populace.
Such a situation carried the potential for inter-ethnic tensions as competing ethnic loyalties
had to be measured against any proposed candidate for national language status. But since a
significant legacy of the colonial rule was an educated elite class with affiliations towards the
colonial language, there was also the need to stem any potential conflict arising from class
divisions. Consequently, while it was essential that these states worked to forge some sense of
national cohesion, it was equally imperative that they aimed to raise the general level of educa-
tion and welfare amongst the citizenry.
The well-intentioned desire to contribute towards programs that could help cultivate
national solidarity whilst also improving on standards of education and creating opportunities
for economic growth led linguists to position themselves as expert consultants with the state
as client. Thus, LPP practitioners saw themselves as devising maximally rational and efficient
‘solutions’ to the language ‘problems’ faced by these states (Haugen 1966; Kloss 1969; Rubin
and Jernudd 1971). LPP was described by Das Gupta and Ferguson (1977: 4–6) as
those planned activities which attend to the valuation of language resources, the assign-
ment of preferences to one or more languages and their functional ordering, and developing
the language resources and their use in a manner consistent with the declared objectives
identified as planned targets . . . successful language planning, or degrees of it, can be
understood in terms of the efficacy of planned policy measures as well as the target popu-
lations’ propensity to comply with the public policies pertaining to language planning.
This desire to design programs that could contribute to public policy objectives encouraged
the construction of technical concepts and distinctions that aimed to provide linguists with the
theoretical vocabulary to systematically approach and diagnose LPP-related issues. Examples
include the following:
1 The idea of a rational model (Jernudd 1973), where alternative ways of tackling a problem
were carefully compared before settling on the optimal choice. This approach assumed
that LPP issues could be approached in terms of a cost-benefit analysis.
2 The distinction between status planning and corpus planning (Kloss 1969): the former
was concerned with official decisions about the appropriate use of a language. The latter
was concerned with developing the ‘nuts and bolts’ of language itself (its vocabulary,
forms of pronunciation, and syntax) so that a language could indeed serve its designated
function.
3 The distinction between processes of language selection, codification of the selected
language as standard or correct, elaboration of the language form where necessary, and
implementation to ensure that the standards were properly adopted (Haugen 1966). These
32
processes were typically understood to apply sequentially so that LPP would be pursued
in a manner that was organized and systematic.
Understandably, the preferred method for data gathering during this period was the sociolin-
guistic survey. LPP practitioners were mostly working at the level of the state, and the scale
of the envisaged changes made the choice of survey a practical one, as far as the tracking of
language attitude and use amongst a large population were concerned. Information gathered
via the survey was also more amenable to quantification, and relative rates of success could
then be presented in a manner that was digestible to policy-makers.
There is no disputing the fact that these concepts and distinctions, even today, continue to
serve as valuable tools when thinking about LPP. This is because, at bottom, LPP involves
making decisions about the desirability (or not) of promoting some language practices over
others. Such decisions require some appreciation of the possible relationships between forms
of language and their uses, and the ways in which these relationships might be influenced.
What was problematic in this period was the absence of a critical orientation that might have
otherwise prevented a number of assumptions from going unquestioned, such as the notion that
each nation-state would be ideally served by having just one national language; the concomi-
tant implication that multilingualism is problematic; and the belief that a developmental model
designed for one societal context could be applied to another despite significant differences in
sociocultural and historical specificities.
These assumptions often guided the enthusiastic articulation of solutions designed along
technocratic lines, when it would perhaps have been more helpful to ask if the framing of what
counts as an LPP problem was itself in need of interrogation. I say ‘perhaps’ because, to be fair
to these early attempts at LPP, it is not clear what kind of impact such a critical orientation –
had one been present – would have had on decision-makers involved in the management of
state objectives. There was always the possibility that in challenging or deconstructing a state’s
framing of problems, linguists could simply have found themselves deemed largely irrelevant
to the needs of these newly independent states.
Looking within
By the 1980s and part of the 1990s, it became difficult to deny that many of the state-level LPP
projects were failures: either the desired outcomes were not achieved, or worse, social and eth-
nic unrest continued to rise in many states despite the careful implementation of programmes.
LPP practitioners were then more reticent about acting as advisors to the state. As Blommaert
(1996: 203) observed,
The grand projects in third world nations more or less disappeared during the 1980s, either
because of manifest failure, or because of a lack of interest, resources, or political impor-
tance . . . The enthusiasm for language planning as an academic subject faded in the wake
of the collapse of state systems and economies in the third world.
This withdrawal of LPP practitioners from the role of expert consultant was accompanied by
an internal criticism of the field itself. In an incisive paper, Luke et al. (1990: 27) suggested
that LPP had been overly concerned with maintaining a ‘veneer of scientific objectivity’ and
had ‘tended to avoid directly addressing larger social and political matters within which lan-
guage change, use and development, and indeed language planning itself are embedded’. By
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Lionel Wee
viewing LPP as an essentially technocratic process of efficiently administering resources so

as to achieve specific goals, little consideration had been given to questions of how such
processes might help sustain dominance and dependency relations between groups. Indeed,
by not adequately attending to the socially and politically contested nature of language, LPP
initiatives, rather than solving problems, may in fact have simply exacerbated old problems or
even created new ones.
In a similar vein, Tollefson (1991) introduced a distinction to characterize what he saw as
two major approaches to LPP: the neoclassical and the historical-structural. The major differ-
ences between the two are summarized by Wiley (1996: 115):
1 The unit of analysis employed: While the neoclassical approach focuses on individual
choices, the historical-structural pays attention to relationships between groups.
2 The role of the historical perspective: The neoclassical is more interested in the current
language situation; the historical-structural, in contrast, emphasizes the role of sociohis-
torical factors.
3 Criteria for evaluating plans and policies: The neoclassical is primarily amoral in its
outlook; policies are evaluated in terms of how efficiently they achieve their goals.
The historical-structural is more sensitive to issue of domination, exploitation, and
oppression.
4 The role of the social scientist: Consistent with its amoral outlook, the neoclassical assumes
that the social scientist must and can approach language problems in an apolitical manner.
On the other hand, the historical-structural views political stances as inescapable so that
‘those who avoid political questions inadvertently support the status quo’.
The neoclassical approach tends to emphasize the rational and individualistic nature of choices.
For example, individuals may choose to learn a new language because of certain perceived
benefits such as access to better jobs. Or they may decide that the time and money spent on
learning a new language may not be worth the potential benefits and, hence, may not make the
effort to expand their linguistic repertoire. Whatever the outcome, the neoclassical approach
treats these as decisions that are freely and rationally made. But Tollefson emphasized that we
need to also ask questions like ‘Why must that individual expend those particular costs? Why
are those particular benefits rather than others available to that individual? What are the costs
and benefits for other people in the community?’ (Tollefson 1991: 32). These kinds of ques-
tions require attending to the sociohistorical contexts and constraints inherited by individuals
and mutatis mutandis, communities.
LPP in the 1960s and 1970s had tended to work within the neoclassical approach. Lan-
guage-related issues were treated as problems that could be rationally and logically solved by
adopting the appropriate language policy. The individuals, families, or communities that were
the targets of LPP were, by the same token, assumed to be likely to respond in a neoclassical
fashion. Consequently, a major problem was that it had neglected to take into consideration the
effects of sociohistorical factors in constraining the nature of choices.
Tollefson’s concern was that more sensitivity towards the historical-structural approach was
needed. This latter pays greater attention to the kinds of interests that particular policies may
serve. LPP that is informed by the historical-structural approach would then aim to ‘examine
the historical basis of policies and to make explicit the mechanisms by which policy deci-
sions serve or undermine particular political and economic interests’ (Wiley 1996: 32). This
understanding of LPP would have the advantage of helping practitioners be more cognisant
of the possibility that planning bodies involved in policy-making may reflect the interests of
34
dominant political groups, and this may work against any desire to achieve a broader and more
equitable distribution of social and economic resources.
As a result of these critical reflections, energies were directed more towards analyzing
language-related decisions in a variety of spheres. In addition to government-initiated deci-
sions (Pennycook 1994), there was stronger interest in schools (Corson 1989; Heller 1999),
the workplace (Gee et al. 1996), and the ways in which public debates about language are ini-
tiated, resisted, or resolved (Blommaert 1999; Cameron 1995; Milroy and Milroy 1999). The
challenges involved in trying to better understand the complex and often conflicted nature of
language in social life contributed to the re-invigoration of LPP.
Renewing LPP
In the present period, LPP has seen renewed interest and activity. Part of the excitement stems
from the appreciation that linguists need not be apologetic about representing group-specific
interests; they simply need to be clear about the nature of their involvement. Another reason
for the excitement comes from the realization that LPP is even more complex than has been
realized so far and that, if it is to be relevant as a field of applied linguistics, it will need to draw
upon the insights of multiple disciplines.
Once it became understood that LPP is always going to be inextricably intertwined with
the advancing of specific interests, linguists were able to engage in various LPP-related
activities with a clearer appreciation of their roles and responsibilities. ‘Scientific objectiv-
ity’ no longer means being blind to class interests or political factionalism. Rather, it means
being aware that by acting as expert consultant to a group, community, institution, or state, a
linguist has to be clear and comfortable with the goals of the client. Scientific objectivity, in
this case, arises from the linguist utilizing their expert knowledge to better advise the client.
This does not mean passively accepting a client’s goals since a consultancy also opens up
the opportunity for both the linguist and client to learn from each other. This exchange may
lead to an evaluation of the goals and well as a richer understanding of the social nature of
language. For example, in their own experience with medical health professionals, Roberts
and Sarangi (1999: 474) suggest adopting a stance of ‘joint problematization’, where the
emphasis is one of ‘participatory and action-oriented research’. The advantage of this, they
(1999: 498) point out, is that
[i]n presenting findings in a non-conclusive way, social scientific researchers, including

discourse analysts, can distance themselves from a problem-solver role by underscoring
the fact that practical solutions are not in a one-to-one relationship with research-based
knowledge. In other words, knowledge generated through research needs to be recontex-
tualized in a reflexive way by the practitioners.
A linguist may have a very personal commitment towards specific community goals. The
linguist is then acting as not just expert consultant but also as advocate. One example is the
master-apprentice program developed in California (Hinton et al. 2018), which aims to pre-
vent, as far as possible, the Indigenous Native American languages from dying out. The pro-
gram pairs master speakers (the tribal elders) with language learners in learning situations with
relatively modest outcomes. Apprentices are not expected to develop the same level of fluency
as the masters since many of the masters themselves may have not used their own languages
for quite some time. Rather, it is hoped that after about three years, apprentices will be able to
hold simple conversations.
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Lionel Wee
The complexity of LPP (Spolsky 2004: 39ff) comes from the awareness that it can operate
at units of varying sizes, including the individual, the social group, the state and the diasporic
community. LPP also involves ‘a wide range of linguistic and non-linguistic elements’, such as
age, ethnicity, education, gender, and religion, among others. Furthermore, LPP is not limited
to just named varieties of language (English, Spanish, Malay) but can involve smaller bits of
language (pronunciation, punctuation, word choice) as well as bigger bits (forms of discourse).
To make this complexity more tractable, LPP needs to distinguish between the language prac-
tices of a community, the language beliefs or ideology, and any efforts to modify or influence
the practices (Spolsky 2004: 5). The first two components are always present since people will
be using language for the conduct of activities, and people will also have various beliefs about
language. The third component may not be present since there may not be any actual efforts
to influence language practices. Under such circumstances, ‘ideology operates as “default”
policy’ (Lo Bianco 2004: 750).
This appreciation of the ideological basis of language practices has led to greater conver-
gences with linguistic anthropology since the latter has contributed much to understanding how
language ideologies are formed. The anthropological notion of ideology is not to be simply
equated with false beliefs. Rather, ideologies refer to the specific social positions that indi-
viduals/communities/institutions all inevitably occupy and which mediate the understanding
of sociolinguistic facts (Irvine and Gal 2000: 78–79).
Sensitivity to the contestable nature of language decisions has also meant greater attention
to variability and context. This in turn has led to a widening of the methods considered use-
ful. Because language ideologies are highly variable and context-dependent, data gathered via
the analysis of narratives, ethnographic approaches, and historically sensitive comparisons
(Ricento 2009), all came to be considered relevant, in addition to surveys. This is not to deny
the value of larger-scale statistical data, but such data are primarily ‘synoptic’ representations
that abstract away from specific situational details (Bourdieu 1977: 107). They need to be
complemented by richer understandings of the roles that actual language practices and the
valuations accorded to them play in the lives of individuals and communities.
Paralleling this interest in ideology, Lo Bianco (2004: 743, italics in original) has suggested
that in addition to corpus and status planning, LPP also needs to recognize discourse planning,
which refers to
the influence and effect on people’s mental states, behaviors and belief systems through
the linguistically mediated ideological workings of institutions, disciplines, and diverse
social formations. Although discourse is quintessentially dialogical, and by definition per-
mits contest and negotiation, planning discourse refers to the efforts of institutions and
diverse interests to shape, direct and influence discursive practices and patterns.
This suggestion that attention be paid to discourse planning is entirely congruent with the
appreciation of the fact that there is no such thing as a purely objective or interest-free pol-
icy. All such initiatives represent a specific agenda, covertly or otherwise (Shohamy 2006). A
discourse orientation can highlight the ways in which problems are framed and the interests
served in such framings (Schön 1993).
Finally, works drawing together the insights of scholars with backgrounds in economics,
political philosophy, political science, social theory, and linguistics are slowly becoming more
regularly produced (Brown and Ganguly 2003; Kymlicka and Patten 2004; Rappa and Wee
2006). This is an important development that should be further encouraged since it promises
to benefit these contributing disciplines and enrich our understanding of LPP. For example,
36
Montanari and Quay (2019) is collection that brings together diverse disciplinary perspectives
on what it means to be multilingual. And Bastardas-Boada (2013) warns against the fragmen-
tary perspectives on language policy that can result unless a conscious effort is made to adopt
a more interdisciplinary approach. Such calls for engagements across different disciplines are
important. While linguists can hope to learn more about the social and political complexities
that inevitably accompany language in social life, other disciplines, too, can grow from taking
greater note of the complications posed by language (see, for example, Patten and Kymlicka
2004: 1; De Schutter 2007: 1).
The developments described here are critical because they put LPP in a position to better
handle a number of important challenges, and it is to a discussion of these challenges that we
now turn.
Challenges for LPP

LPP is gaining in practical importance and urgency because of the way the world is develop-
ing. As a branch of applied linguistics, there is much that LPP can do to make a contribution to
debates and discussions about the role of language in a fast-changing and increasingly cultur-
ally complex world.
One significant challenge is to find ways of addressing multiculturalism. Much of the theo-
rizing regarding multiculturalism and the politics of identity has come from philosophically
inclined political or legal theorists (Benhabib 2002; Ford 2005; Kymlicka 1995; Taylor 1994)
rather than linguists. While valuable, such theorizing is usually based on an ‘outdated empirical
understanding of the concept of language itself’ and tends to be ‘unaware of important socio-
linguistic and other research on these matters’ (De Schutter 2007: 3). Where LPP is concerned,
the most prominent response has been to call for the adoption of language rights (May 2001;
Phillipson and Skutnabb-Kangas 1995). The enormous appeal of the concept of language rights
makes it all the more critical that the concept be subjected to careful scrutiny (Blommaert 2001;
Stroud 2001). For example, while language rights may be useful as a short-term measure, it is
not clear that they are tenable in the longer term. One reason for this is that there will be par-
ties who have a vested interest in maintaining their (usually hard-won) language rights, and
their motivations – such as the desire to cling to political power or to continue enjoying the
benefits afforded by such rights – can be quite independent of how effective such rights may
actually have been in addressing language issues. LPP needs to better understand the pros and
cons of language rights and, where necessary, explore alternatives. This requires combining the
insights of social and political theorists with a more sophisticated appreciation of the nature of
language (Makoni and Pennycook 2007).
The interest in multiculturalism and language rights gains further resonance because of
complications posed by the commodification of language. As Budach et al. (2003: 604, full
capitals in the original) point out,
in a new world dominated by service and information economies, globalization engenders

a seemingly paradoxical valuing of community and authenticity . . . In the new econ-
omy . . . the value of community and authenticity takes on a new shape in which COM-
MODIFICATION is central. At the same time, commodification provokes a potential
uncoupling of language and community.
Speakers and communities are likely to be increasingly caught up in the contradictions

between treating language as a mark of cultural heritage and as a skill or resource to be used
37
Lionel Wee
for socioeconomic advancement. For example, in Singapore, the policy of multiracialism aims
to guarantee equal status amongst the three official ethnic mother tongues: Mandarin (for the
Chinese community), Malay (for the Malay community), and Tamil (for the Indian commu-
nity). However, the state has argued that, in addition to heritage reasons, Mandarin should also
be learned in order to take advantage of China’s growing economy, thereby actively conceding
that instrumental value is an important motivating factor in language choice. As a result, a
growing number of non-Chinese parents want schools to allow their children to study Manda-
rin. This emphasis on Mandarin as a commodity has led to concerns within the Chinese com-
munity that the language is being learnt for the ‘wrong’ reasons: the language is being treated
less as an emblem of local ethnicity and more as an economic resource for conducting busi-
ness negotiations with China. More generally, these developments potentially undermine the
multiracial logic of the policy since the equal status that all three mother tongues are supposed
to enjoy is compromised by the fact that neither Malay nor Tamil can be claimed to enjoy the
same economic cachet as Mandarin (Wee 2003).
Thus, another important challenge for LPP is to take better account of the fact that tradi-
tional notions of ethnicity and nation do not fit easily with the multilingual dynamics of late
modern societies, which are increasingly characterized by a pervasive culture of consumer-
ism (Bauman 1998; Baudrillard 1988), where ‘people define themselves through the mes-
sages they transmit to others through the goods and practices that they possess and display’
(Warde 1994: 878). In this regard, Stroud and Wee (2007) have suggested that the concept of
sociolinguistic consumption should be given a more foundational status in language policy,
suggesting that this might offer a more comprehensive account of the dynamics of language
choice and change.
Finally, one of the most pressing challenges facing the world today is that of global migra-
tion and the related issue of ensuring the well-being and dignity of individuals as they move
across the globe in search of a better life. As many states work to accommodate the presence of
foreign workers, people seeking asylum, and other ‘aliens’ within their territories, the need to
come up with realistic and sensitive language policies will require the input of LPP specialists.
Absent such input, language policies may unfairly penalize the very people they were intended
to help. Maryns (2005) provides one such example in her discussion of a young female from
Sierra Leone seeking asylum in Belgium. Even though applicants are given the opportunity to
declare what language they want to use for making their case, Maryns (2005: 300) notes that
[a]ctual practice, however, reveals serious constraints on language choice, and these con-
straints are language-ideologically based: only monolingual standard varieties qualify for
procedural interaction. This denial of linguistic variation leads to a denial of pidgins and
creoles as ‘languages in their own right’.
The ideology of monolingualism effectively denies pidgins and creoles any legitimate pres-
ence in the asylum-seeking procedure despite the fact that for many people seeking asylum,
such mixed languages might constitute their most natural communicative codes. The move
to a foreign country is not simply a shift in physical location; it is also a shift into a loca-
tion where linguistic codes are differently valued. And the person seeking asylum is expected
to accommodate the foreign bureaucratic context despite the communicative problems this
raises (Maryns 2005: 312). In the particular case that Maryns observed, the female applicant’s
(2005: 313) ‘intrinsically mixed linguistic repertoire’ (West African Krio) was displaced by the
bureaucracy’s requirement that interviews and reports utilize only monolingual standards. The
interview was conducted in English and a subsequent report written in Dutch, neither of which
38
were languages that the applicant was comfortable with. As a result, details of the applicant’s
narrative were omitted or misunderstood, and the applicant had no opportunity to correct any
inaccuracies.
The state representatives officiating over asylum-granting procedures often conduct inter-
views with people seeking asylum in contexts where the linguistic codes being used are not
likely to be shared by those whose communicative needs are greatest. Notice that the problem
here goes much deeper than making available different languages, such as Dutch, English,
Xhosa, or Bantu. It involves a general reluctance to treat certain codes as being proper lan-
guages in the first place because of their mixed heritage. On this basis, mixed codes become
stigmatized and are automatically ruled out of official consideration despite the fact that these
codes are precisely what might be needed in order for people seeking asylum to gain a fair
hearing.
Even if granted permission to stay, challenges remain. For example, most Western countries
assume that migrants will assimilate into their new societies by learning the dominant language
(and its associated culture). This assumption is increasingly being challenged by the fact that
‘the size of minority residential communities’ makes it possible ‘that many of their members
will be able to live out their lives using only, or predominantly, the minority language’ and
also by the ‘tendency of migrants to maintain closer and more regular connections with their
countries of origin’ (Ferguson 2006: 7).
The future of LPP

The previous section highlights an urgent need for LPP to rethink the ontology of language and
seriously evaluate the material implications. For too long, LPP has worked with the conception
of language as a stable and identifiably bounded entity corresponding to established language
names, despite being aware that this overlooks ‘the problematic history of the construction of
such languages’ (Makoni and Pennycook 2007: 11).
Consider a brief example (from Makoni and Pennycook 2007: 9). Sir George Abraham
Grierson’s linguistic Survey of India, which was completed in 1928, had to face the problem
of deciding on the boundaries between languages and dialects. To do this, Grierson openly
admitted the need to invent language names while ignoring the complexities of actual language
use (see Makoni and Pennycook 2007: 10). The invention of language names performatively
called the languages into being.
This does not mean that LPP should dismiss language names as mere fiction. As meta-
linguistic labels, names very possibly orient the language practices and social evaluations of
speakers towards each other and, conversely, towards those whom they might consider non-
members of the group. But LPP needs to start being more attentive to the problematic ways
in which specific language practices get categorized under particular labels (including that of
‘non-language’) and the attendant impact of such categorizations on the social trajectories of
individuals and communities.
Similar considerations apply to concepts, such as agency, community, identity, and practice,
which have for too long tended to be treated as ‘stable and bounded’ rather than ‘shifting and
dynamic’ (Heller 2008). Consider the issue of agency (Wee 2021). Agency is typically under-
stood in human-centric terms so that it is humans who are creative, and it is humans to whom
competence in language use can be meaningfully attributed. In LPP, Spolsky (2009) has called
for attention to be given to language management, asserting ‘that it is management only when
we can identify the manager’ (2009: 6).
The idea of a manager here seems to presume an identifiable locus of human agency.
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Lionel Wee
Ahearn (2001: 8) summarizes the complicated questions about agency that arise:
Can agency only be the property of an individual? What types of supra-individual agency
might exist? . . . Similarly, we might also be able to talk about agency at the sub-individual
level . . . thereby shedding light on things like internal dialogues and fragmented subjec-
tivities?
Such complications arise because even a body, such as a government, a ministry, or a com-
munity, is really an abstraction over multiple sub-entities (themselves potentially recursively
sub-dividable) so that ‘internal dialogues and fragmented subjectivities’ apply no less to orga-
nizations and groups than they do to individuals (Wee 2018).
But there is another problem in addition to the distributed nature of agency: the tendency to
downplay if not dismiss the roles of non-human entities (Bennett 2010: 34). Artificial intelli-
gence is becoming more embedded in language and communication, often not merely aiding in
the transmission of messages but contributing to message construction and completion. Exam-
ples range from simple WhatsApp messaging to Google Assistant and Apple’s Siri. Another
example involves the concept of an echoborg. An echoborg is a person whose utterances and
gestures are determined to varying degrees by the communications that originate from an arti-
ficial intelligence program. The interactional goal is to give the illusion that one is communi-
cating with a fellow human being when in fact the communication originates from an artificial
intelligence. The human with whom one is apparently communicating is really working at the
behest of the artificial intelligence. Echoborgs can be useful since some individuals might feel
more comfortable if they think they are interacting with another human even though the kinds
of information and advice they want is better and more efficiently provided by an artificial
intelligence. This ‘synching’ of a human front with messages that are created by an artificial
intelligence raises conceptual issues such as the nature of speakerhood (Goffman 1981). Who
exactly is speaking under such a condition where the activity of speaking is distributed over
more than one entity? Is it the human extension or is it the artificial intelligence, or is such a
binary approach misguided?
LPP cannot afford to set aside these complex issues. The ideologies surrounding agency and
language use bear on questions such as who might ultimately be held responsible for a piece
of communication and how policies regulating messages transmitted via traditional and social
media could be formulated and reasonably enforced (Gourlay 2021). Especially as machines
become ‘intelligent’ agents, there is a need to anticipate the impact of technology on the con-
stitution of speech communities and how the language practices of such communities might be
managed (Kelly-Holmes 2021).
Agency, community, identity, and practice: these concepts figure, in one way or another, in
LPP studies, and unless they are reconceptualized (Pennycook 2017), LPP will continue to be
encumbered by ‘some of their built-in limitations in current confrontations with the way things
are unfolding in the world around us, confounding our attempts to understand them’ (Heller
2008: 505).
Concluding remarks
It is appropriate to end this chapter by returning to the theme of how LPP practitioners should
engage policy-makers and the general public. The critical revaluation of concepts such as
language, community, and identity is part and parcel of the intellectual maturity of the field.
But translating the insights gained by this maturity into relevant practical implications is a
40
difficult enterprise. This is because there is an inevitable lag between the scholarly critique
of concepts and the ways in which these are apprehended by the broader community. And if
policy-makers and members of the public are still operating with less nuanced understandings
of such concepts, these could make them less receptive to LPP initiatives that are grounded in
more critical orientations.
This is not to say that linguists should be considered final arbiters of appropriate LPP ini-
tiatives (recall the reference to Roberts and Sarangi’s notion of ‘joint problematization’). But
it does mean that linguists need to be more strategic about how they position themselves as
participants in language ideological debates. Specifically, they need to ask how they can resist
the pressure to oversimplify their own expert knowledge of language whilst still remaining
relevant to the ‘real’ world.
Related topics
multilingualism; bilingual education; institutional discourse; language testing; language learn-
ing and language education; ethnicity; linguistic imperialism; world Englishes; language and
migration
Further reading
Cameron, D. (2000) Good to Talk?, London: Sage. (Cameron’s work presents a highly readable and
insightful account of LPP – although this is not a term that is used in the book – in the call centre
industry and its connections to the broader global economy.)
Davis, K. and Phyak, P. (2018) Engaged Language Policy and Practices, London: Routledge. (Focusing on
the global impact of neoliberalism, this book suggests strategies by which various actors [parents, edu-
cators, community leaders] can address language-related inequities, especially in relation to education.)
Soler, J. (2019) Language Policy and the Internationalization of Universities: A Focus on Estonian
Higher Education, Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter. (Giving particular attention to higher education in
Estonia, this book examines how, as universities internationalize, English becomes both a site of
struggle and opportunity for individuals and communities.)
Spolsky, B. (2021) Rethinking Language Policy, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. (This book is an
update of Spolsky’s earlier works on language policy and language management.)
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4
Family language policy
Kendall A. King
Introduction
Family language policy is an expanding, interdisciplinary area of research which, broadly
conceived, examines what family members believe about language(s) and language learn-
ing, how family members interact with each other, and what family members attempt to do
with language, at times through explicit planning, management, or decision-making. Research
under this banner has expanded and coalesced in the last 15 years or so, and there is now an
ample body of empirical studies on myriad facets of family language policy in a wide range
of contexts. Concomitantly, researchers have engaged in robust conversations concerning how
family, language, and policy should be construed, who has been overlooked or excluded from
studies to date, and what the most appropriate objectives and methodological approaches are.
In this chapter, I provide a brief historical overview of the development of this area of work.
I then take up some of the critical and currently unfolding issues, including limitations, recent
critiques, and new directions. Next, I highlight some key developing strands of work and
methodological advances. And lastly, I consider the scope and boundaries of this area of the
research, and the potential practical applications to pressing social issues, including language
revitalization efforts and the broader struggle for raciolinguistic equity.
Early definitions of family language policy were rooted in and initially framed as extensions
of the field of language planning and policy. While the latter has tended to focus on language
policy development and implementation in official contexts such a government, schools, or
other public-facing institutions, family language policy researchers, in turn, sought to closely
examine language policy, language ideology, and language practice within the home and fam-
ily domains (King et al. 2008). Early definitions framed family language policy as ‘explicit
and overt planning in relation to language use within the home among family members’ (King
et al. 2008).
This focus on the family was driven in part by theory and research in the area of lan-
guage revitalization (or reversing language shift), which was tirelessly championed by Joshua
44 DOI: 10.4324/9781003082637-6
Fishman. This work stressed the critical role of the family in determining child language com-
petencies and by extension, ensuring intergenerational transmission and language survival.
Indeed, a central point across much of Fishman’s later work (1991, 2001), and the key take-
away from his Graded Intergenerational Dislocation Scale, or GIDS, was the centrality of the
home and family in ensuring intergenerational transmission. For Fishman, all other language
reversal efforts, including, for instance, minority language newspapers, Saturday language
classes, and radio programming, were at best biding time if they did not directly lead to restora-
tion of intergenerational transmission.
The work of Fishman and colleagues generated scrutiny of the family domain as well
as critiques of the GIDS (e.g. Romaine 2006). One problematic aspect of Fishman’s GIDS
model was the binary unidirectional manner in which intergenerational transmission was
conceptualized – that is, as something the parent or grandparent generation achieved once and
for all (or not). Luykx (2005), in early insightful research with multilingual Andean families,
argued that close analysis of family language policy, and in particular, the variable influence
of children in shaping adult language practices, was central to understanding societal shifts
towards Spanish and away from Indigenous languages, such as Quechua and Aymara. Others
pointed not only to the bidirectionality of language socialization but to questions of which
variety was being transmitted, how language competencies and preferences shifted over time,
and what multilingual, multimodal practices were families engaging in.
Given both the importance and complexity of intergenerational transmission, King et al.
(2008) suggested the productive potential of bridging the work of child language psycholo-
gists, on the one hand, and language policy scholars, on the other. While child language schol-
ars had long been interested in how children acquire first, second, and multiple languages,
they often focused on the individual child rather than the family unit. Language policy – in
particular Spolsky’s tri-part framework (2004) for language policy, which focuses on language
ideologies (what people believed about language), language policies (what people tried to do
with language), and language use (what people actually did with language) – could produc-
tively be applied to the family unit. Spolsky (2012) likewise argued for the need for more
studies to examine what he termed the internal pressures (e.g. ideologies or grandparents) and
external pressures (in particular, the school) on what he termed ‘the critical family domain’.

Over the last decade or two, as researchers of multilingualism and family language learning
have increasingly grappled with patterns of intensified migration and technological saturation,
the methodological tools and even the questions asked within family language policy have
evolved. Earlier studies of bilingual and multilingual development in the family often focused
on language learning outcomes for the child – that is, what parent ideologies and language
practices led to what child language proficiencies (De Houwer 1999, 2007; Lanza 1997; see
overview in King and Fogle 2013).
In turn, more recent work has tended to examine meaning-making and the language-mediated
experiences of multilingual families and thus posed a different set of questions. For instance,
how do families make sense of multilingualism across generations and how is language woven
into family dynamics (Zhu Hua and Li Wei 2016)? How does meaning emerge and evolve
through repeated and varied performance in everyday talk in multilingual homes (He 2016)?
How do families make decisions about language (and come to understand those decisions) in
changing contexts (Curdt-Christiansen 2016)? How do families’ multimodal communication
practices support the construction of a family unit (Kozminska and Zhu Hua 2021)? Moreover,
45
Kendall A. King
the contexts of family communication have become the target of investigation rather than
something that is assumed, as meaning is seen as both produced and interpreted within par-
ticular places, activities, social relations, interactional histories, and cultural ideologies (King
and Lanza 2019). As highlighted in the next paragraph, this shift in focus has implications for
research methodology.
Concomitantly, the study of family language policy has been appropriately critiqued for not
keeping up with the changing, variable, and divergent nature and definitions of family and for
being biased towards documenting two-parent, heteronormative, middle-class homes in which
children are acquiring more than one European language (Wright 2020). More recent work
has given greater emphasis to how these language socialization and interactional processes
play out within so-called non-traditional (e.g. adoptive, gay, single-parent) families in non-
Western, transnational, or diasporic contexts (e.g. Canagarajah 2008; Wright and Palviainen
2021). More broadly, as scholars have recognized that who we study largely shapes what
we know, the study of family language policy has increasingly focused on and intentionally
recruited a wider, more diverse range of family types, languages, and social contexts (Higgins
and Wright 2022).
One thread of this work has documented the increasingly transnational nature of family
life. Transnationalism broadly refers to the social processes by which migrants establish social
fields that cross political, demographic, social, and cultural borders, maintaining relationships
and connections that span nation-state borders. Transnational aspects of family lives have been
highlighted in recent work. Gallo and Hornberger (2019), for instance, examined the experi-
ences and language practices of families, who, due to US deportation policies, were tenuously
spread across the US-Mexico border. Likewise, Said and Zhu Hua (2019) analyzed the lan-
guage practices of one four-member family within the UK. The family’s transnational connec-
tions and investment in local transnational institutions resulted in the two boys (aged nine and
six) speaking a mixture of Yemeni, Algerian Arabic, Classical Arabic, and English.
These sorts of transnational connections are facilitated by technology, and increasingly,
the lives of many families can be characterized as digitally saturated. For instance, data from
the UK suggests that children aged five to sixteen spend an average of six and a half hours a
day in front of a screen compared with around three hours in 1995 (BBC 2015). Scholars of
family language policy are only beginning to analyze the ways that screens and technological
devices shape, limit, and/or promote varied interactional patterns among family members.
For instance, while research long suggested that children do not learn language from passive
exposure to language (e.g. viewing videos) (Kuhl et al. 2003), a growing body of work suggests
that if exposure is socially contingent – that is, if there is back-and-forth, two-way interaction –
language learning can and does take place (Roseberry et al. 2013). As interactive social media
technology become ubiquitous in many homes, this raises important questions about the nature
of family and language learning and transnationally connected families (e.g. Palviainen 2022).
The supposed overt, explicit nature of family language policy has also been examined. In
many parts of the world, in particular among the middle and upper-class families in OECD
countries, approaches to parenting are increasing defined by what has been called ‘competi-
tive’ or ‘concerted cultivation’ approaches. Indeed, family language policy has expanded as a
field in step with ‘concerted cultivation’ parenting. This term, popularized by Annette Lareau
(2003), refers to a parenting style characterized by parental attempts to foster their child’s
talents by incorporating organized activities in their children’s lives and cultivating particular
ways of adult-like talk, such as debate and negotiation. Lareau qualitatively documented the
cultural logic of this high (or hyper) investment parenting among middle- and upper-middle-
class parents in the US.
46
Economists explain this intensive parenting as not just the driver but also the result of
increasing economic inequality. Doepke and Ziliboti (2014) examined the relationships between
economic inequality in Sweden, China, Spain, and the US and preferences for intensive par-
enting styles over time. Overall, countries with high levels of economic inequality favour
pushier parenting; countries with lower levels of economic inequality favour more laissez-faire
approaches emphasizing creativity and independence. Doepke and Ziliboti further find that in
the 1960s and 1970s, when laissez-faire parenting reached the peak of its popularity, economic
inequality was at an all-time low. This make sense: given the relatively low returns to educa-
tion, there was little reason for parents to competitively cultivate their children. However, as
they note, the most recent three decades, in contrast, have seen rising inequality together with
increasing returns to education. Children who fail to complete their education are unlikely
to attain a secure, middle-class life, and consequently, parents have redoubled their efforts
to ensure their children’s educational success. They predict that if the trend towards greater
inequality continues, the current era will mark the beginning of a sustained trend towards ever
pushier parenting (2014).
The rise of pushier competitive parenting or concerted cultivation approaches has deep
implications for family language policy. Competitive parenting has given rise to an ever-
increasing number of books, blogs, advice columns, and how-to manuals aimed at soothing
worried parents’ concerns over the ‘right’ or ‘best’ approaches to promote bilingualism and to
give their children a competitive edge (e.g. King and Mackey 2007). These texts are largely
shaped by neoliberal objectives that treat language as a commodity and skill to be developed
for individual cognitive, academic, and professional gain rather than as a means for interper-
sonal connection. By many definitions, language policy requires some overt, explicit attention
to language. This trend towards ‘concerted cultivation’ suggests that such attention to language
is increasingly common in some sectors, but as Lareau (2003) and others indicate, not in all.
Thus, this attention to language teaching and use in the home, or for instance, as is described
in the next section, to at-home ‘language workouts’, has the potential to further drive existing
differences in family language practices and, potentially, other types of inequalities, as (some)
families engage in this competitive and private planning.
Current contributions and methodological advances

While family language policy researchers have increasingly engaged with broader, more
diverse and fluid definitions of family, how scholars study families and what they seek to
learn have also shifted. Indeed, as researchers of multilingualism and family language learn-
ing begin to come to terms with both material and demographic changes, the methodological
tools and even the questions asked have changed. As suggested earlier, researchers are increas-
ingly interested in how families are constructed through multilingual language practices and
how language functions as a resource for this process of family-making and meaning-making
in contexts of transmigration, technology saturation, and hypermobility. Moreover, this close
analysis of semiotic data is increasingly taken by researchers as essential to understanding its
significance, given that meaning is ‘far more than just the “expression of ideas”, and biogra-
phy, [rather] identifications, stance and nuance are extensively signalled in the linguistic and
textual fine-grain’ (Blommaert and Rampton 2011: 10). This newer work highlights identity
and agency and is more likely to draw from multiple, complementary methodological and
empirical approaches.
Recent examples include Smagulova’s (2019) use of survey and conversational analysis
(CA) to uncover the ideologies of language in Kazak language revival. Smagulova’s analysis of
47
Kendall A. King
code-switching in adult-child interactions uncovers how this reimagining of Kazakh is accom-

plished and identifies four mutually reinforcing metalanguaging practices. These include lim-
iting Kazakh to pedagogic formats, constructing Kazakh as school talk, confining Kazakh to
‘prior text’ and the co-occurrence of shift to Kazakh with a shift to a meta-communicative
frame. Smagulova’s findings expand our understanding of the discursive processes through
which ideologies of language revival are both created and sustained.
Another example: Purkarthofer (2017) critically examined the language expectations of
three multilingual couples, each with a different language background and varied experiences
of migration – and each of whom is expecting or has just had their first child. Purkarthofer
adopted speaker-centred qualitative methods, including what she defines as language portray-
als and biographic narratives, to analyze (real and imagined) constructed spaces of interac-
tion. Close analysis of three co-constructed narratives based on the expectations of the future
parents revealed the construction of the child as a multilingual self in her or his own right.
Purkarthofer’s multimodal analysis of drawings and interviews demonstrates the collective
and interactive construction of three-dimensional future family spaces and provided a window
into the parents’ imagined language future of these children. Purkarthofer’s work highlights the
importance of imagination, and the ways in which parents’ planning for multilingualism can
remain open to new possibilities.
Other researchers have introduced methods such as autoethnography to deepen our under-
standing of family language policy experiences and interactions. Autoethnography is a research
approach that explicitly acknowledges and accommodates the messy, uncertain, and emotional
nature of social life by showing people in their process of figuring out what to do, how to
live, and the social cultural meanings of their struggles (Adams et al. 2015). This approach
embraces the researchers’ subjectivity as they are the primary participant. Liu and Lin (2018)
take up this method to explore their experiences in family language planning in English as a
foreign language, a language which is non-native to both parent-authors. They develop and
share personal narratives of their bilingual parenting experience and analyze their decision-
making processes, concerns they encountered, their bilingual parenting practices, and their
reflections on their ‘journey’.
Other scholars have recently (re)examined and deepened how ‘success’ is defined within
family language policy by unpacking the nexus of a parent’s prior experiences, expectations
surrounding language use, and overt and covert language policies (Smith-Christmas et al.
2019). This work, which builds on long-term, large-scale ethnographies of family language
policy in an immigrant context (Turkish in the Netherlands), an autochthonous minority lan-
guage context (Gaelic in Scotland), and an officially bilingual state (Swedish in Finland),
underscores how it is
not simply each parent’s own sense of identity that determines the degree to which lan-
guages may be successfully maintained within the home and by whom it is done but rather
the intersection of personal identities (historical body) with wider sociopolitical realities
(interaction order and discourses in place) and the complex and multifaceted nature of
these sociopolitical identities.
(98)
In a similar vein, Sonia Wilson (2020) focuses on the experiences of children and transna-
tional families, asking how much parents should promote bilingualism and what are the costs
of pushing too hard. By emphasizing the voices of young heritage speakers within intercultural
English-and-French-speaking families, Wilson’s six case studies encourage us to prioritize
48
the emotional experience of the child rather than idealized notions of ‘successful’ balanced
bilingualism.
These post-structural research approaches have highlighted, among other dynamics, the
critically important role of the child. Revis (2019), as another example, emphasized child
agency in family language policy among a less-typically-studied population. Drawing on eth-
nographic data from two refugee communities in New Zealand, Revis provided examples of
the micro-processes of language transmission by focusing on children as powerful agents who
alternatively collaborate with or subvert their parents’ language policy. She shows how their
language choices were influenced by exposure to the educational field and alignment with their
peer groups and sometimes explicitly tied to ethnic identity constructions. Revis demonstrates
how the notion of habitus (Bourdieu 2007) mediated between structure and agency in everyday
life in migrant families. As she explains, on the one hand, children were
confined by structures that shaped their habitus: among others, they were affected by
the dominant ideologies particularly in the educational field and the rules and practices
enforced by their parents. Given the partly diverging cultural and linguistic norms and
attitudes conveyed in these contexts, the children acquired a ‘cleft-habitus’, that is a simul-
taneous sense of belonging and alienation (Bourdieu 2007: 69). On the other hand, the
children were agents of cultural and linguistic change.
(Revis 2019: 187)
Other recent research approaches, by looking closely at family interactions, have uncov-
ered routines that suggest concerted cultivation approaches to parenting. Fernandes (2019), for
instance, analyzes instructional routines, what she terms ‘language workouts’. Her examina-
tion of Swedish-Russian mother-child interactional patterns revealed use of teacher-talk regis-
ter (e.g. corrections, known-answer questions, hyper-articulation) during these workouts. Her
findings suggest that the realization of language policy in bilingual families relies not only on
parental input but also on the position of the child as a speaker and learner vis-a-vis the par-
ent, and highlights a format that allows for educational, affective, and engaging exploration
of bilingual language use with young children at home. As Fernandes explains, ‘in mobilizing
a teacher talk-register, it resembles classroom discourse and so-called home lessons. Yet, it
is specific in its sequential organization and consistent employment of a parent talk-register,
which dialectically invokes educational and intimate dimensions’ (97).
Song (2019), in turn, examined a South Korean migrant family’s language socialization
practices in a US city, presenting a sociolinguistic analysis of five-year-old child’s (Yongho)
code-switching practices. Song focuses on how the social meanings of languages and lan-
guage ideologies enacted in his home were brought into play through Yongho’s code-switching
during a dispute with his mother. The analysis demonstrated how Yongho’s code-switching
arranged and shifted different voice tones, speech acts, and stances, according to the situated
context. Song’s work highlights how Yongho’s code-switching practice ‘establishes an align-
ment with social types of persons that the particular linguistic practice indexes, through which
he shifted and negotiated his social relation to others – a submissive self in Korean and an
authoritative figure in English’ (103).
Other work has highlighted variable practices of bilingual siblings and adolescents. Kibler
et al. (2016) examined the role of older siblings in shaping language and literacy practices
in Spanish-speaking immigrant homes. They demonstrate how the older siblings serve as
resources in many Latino homes. Johnsen (2021), in turn, examined the multilingual experi-
ences of three Norwegian-and-Spanish-speaking adolescents with transnational backgrounds.
49
Kendall A. King
This piece highlights how youth continuously adapt to changing sociolinguistic circumstances
within the family. Indeed, she suggests that language competences, linguistic identities, lan-
guage confidence, and linguistic repertoires are dynamic entities that develop across the lifes-
pan. Analysis adolescents reveals how changes in their linguistic repertoires produced tensions
or conflictive feelings, opportunities, and new, hybrid practices. Her findings draw attention to
the complex ways in which young multilinguals represent and use their linguistic repertoires
and add to research that underscores the importance of considering children’s and adolescents’
agencies and perspectives.
Another expanding line of work focuses on within or cross group differences over time
or context. For instance, Lee (2021) examined intragroup variations with Korean immigrant
families residing in the US with differing transnational life trajectories. She compared three
groups: first-generation families (long-term stayers), first-generation families (short-term
stayers or recent immigrants), and 1.5-generation families (long-term settlers, with parents
having arrived in middle school years). Her data demonstrate the intergenerational impact
of intragroup diversity on language use, attitudes toward bilingualism, and future orienta-
tions. Overall, 1.5-generation Korean parents tended to report that maintenance of Korean
is based on value and strength of connections to the Korean community, while short-term
stayers saw Korean as useful only for eventual return to Korea. Long-term stayers, in turn,
tended to believe that well-developed bilingual skills increased one’s economic and life
opportunities. While all families strategically managed their language practices and poli-
cies, future orientations were crucial in shaping how resources were allocated towards the
two languages.
In a novel approach, Kusters et al. (2021), in turn, asked how intrafamily language policy is
shaped by intensive interfamily communication, in this instance, among deaf-hearing families
on multi-family holiday. They found that language use in the group shifted over the 12-day
holiday in several ways. On the one hand, some signs and words became known by more
members of the group, and thus, language use became more diverse instead of converging
towards commonly known or used signs/words across the group. On the other hand, there was
also a slight shift in the four families towards more English, a shift towards more British Sign
Language/International Sign, and a shift towards more signing and sign-speaking. Kusters
et al. (2021) note that as found in past work, family language policy is constantly negotiated
and changeable between family members and that some language practices are legitimized
over others within families. More broadly, their work points to the richness of multilingual
multimodal strategies in novel contexts.
Other recent work has examined ‘narratives of change’ among repatriated, returnee and
immigrant Russian-speaking mother identities in Finland (Wright and Palviainen 2021).
Through interviews and ethnographic field work, they demonstrate how mothers transform
their life trajectories, parenting beliefs, and ethnolinguistic identities in relation to their own
children and to other Finnish parents and in the context of migration. Kozminska and Zhu
Hua (2021), in turn, closely examined multimodal recorded moments of everyday interaction
to understand how one multilingual LGBTQ-identified family with adoptive children used
particular language practices to make meaning and to construct their family unit. Kozminska
and Zhu Hua demonstrate the ways in which individuals co-experience and co-create a loving
family life, revealing how this sort of building of family life is done together multimodally
and multilingually in English and Polish. See also Romanowski’s monograph (2021) on family
language policies in the Polish diaspora; focusing on Australia, he uses online questionnaires
and case studies of divergent family practices to reveal how policies are negotiated, contested,
and formed by both children and caregivers.
50
Taken together, these recent examples of research illustrate a commitment to close analysis
of language use in naturalistic contexts and, in many cases, to the ways in which the broader
political, cultural, and ideological context shapes family life and family language practices. As
Purkathofer (2021) notes of her research with German speakers in Norway, but it is also true
of much recent work, the focus is on uncovering the complex semiotic resources that families
use to construct and maintain family language policies and practices, especially in light of
the subjects’ positions relative to broader ideological and societal discourses. As shown ear-
lier, this newer line of work is also characterized by inclusion of broader range of languages
(e.g. signed and spoken), family types (gay, adoptive, single-parent), and contexts (including
refugee-background and short-term migratory ones).
While much of this work has focused on meaning-making and interactive processes, it is
worth noting that some scholars have continued to take an outcomes-oriented approach. Mac-
Cormac and MacCormac (2021), for instance, ask ‘in what ways do parental decisions made
throughout an immigrant child’s life course regarding language use and language learning
shape their multilingual identity and attitudes towards the use of multiple languages in their
everyday adult life?’ (36–37). Focusing on immigrant-background families residing in Canada,
they report notable differences between families with established, explicit language policies,
and those with no overt language policy. Children from families with no established language
policy reported that this ‘lack of linguistic support or strategies provided by their parents to be
detrimental to their transition into the new society’ (42); in turn, children with an established
family language policy reported a smoother transition into Canadian life.

With few exceptions, recent family language policy work has stepped away from outcomes-
oriented research, opting instead to focus on interaction as a meaning-making process. Indeed,
scholars such as Zhu Hua and Li Wei (2016) have argued for the value of examining mundane
moments in family interactions with the goal of understanding the varied experiences of
individuals and the strategies enacted to deal with multilingualism rather than on questions
of intergenerational transmission or on overall patterns of language maintenance or shift. For
their part, Hiratsuka and Pennycook (2019) offer an expansion and critique of notions of fam-
ily, language, and policy, arguing that better insights can be gained from exploring what they
call the ‘translingual family repertoire’. They suggest that rather than focusing on heritage
language maintenance efforts or some sort of explicit family language policy, attention, at
least in the one family they study, is on ‘getting by’ translingually – that is, on doing family
life with the aid of a repertoire of diverse resources. For Hiratsuka and Pennycook (2019),
‘the family repertoire’, as both ‘an enabler and an outcome of family interactions’, should be
the focus of study (749).
From one vantage point, this shift in focus prompts questions concerning the objectives
and boundaries of family language policy as an area of study. For instance, what does ‘fam-
ily language policy’ as a banner ‘buy us’ and to what extent is it a productive or useful as a
label for an area of study? Indeed, researchers from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds
have productively studied child language learning and family-based interaction for many
decades (see King and Fogle 2013, for a historical review). For instance, scholars of child
language socialization have identified interactional patterns and cultural meanings behind
those in a wide range of world contexts (Schieffelin and Ochs 1986). Researchers in the field
of childhood studies have advanced our understanding of children as agentive beings (Smith-
Christmas 2021). Child language psychologists have used quantitative measures like surveys
51
Kendall A. King
and assessments to determine links between reported parental language practices and child
language proficiencies (De Houwer 2021). ‘Family language policy’ as a descriptive label
perhaps has allowed for or even promoted a sense of coherence around a research topic and
context, providing scholars with a hook to hang their hat, so to speak. Nevertheless, as evi-
dent here, the objectives, boundaries, methods, and scope of study are highly divergent and,
indeed, far from clear or decided. Put succinctly, given the widely divergent disciplinary and
methodological orientations taken up by researchers, ‘family language policy’ as a descriptor
does not tell us overly much.
From another vantage point, this move towards ethnographic portraits of meaning-making
in families, while in step with work of colleagues in cultural anthropology and aligned fields,
does little to answer the how questions often posed by families and by minoritized language
communities in particular. Caretakers concerned with language, like many policy-makers, tend
to be more interested in data-informed recommendations concerning what practices are most
likely to lead to what outcomes. For members of endangered Indigenous language communi-
ties, these are pressing, immediate, and at times life-or-death issues for the languages in ques-
tion. Caretakers, unlike many researchers in the field, tend to ask questions like the following:
How much exposure to the target language is needed and when in the child’s life is this most
critical? How proficient must the caretaker be in the target language to provide high quality or
sufficient exposure? How can caretakers best support multiple language learning goals when a
child has development disorders or special learning needs? How can caretakers help children
develop expertise in target language when they are exposed to multiple varieties from differ-
ent family members? What is the best practice when child refuses and rejects target language
completely? Why are some speakers seemingly ‘stuck’ at the introductory level for so many
years? (King and Hermes 2014).
Most researchers of family language policy are committed to raciolinguistic equity; that
is, we share the belief that speakers of all languages are entitled to equal respect, rights, and
privileges, including the opportunity to pass on their language to their children. As McIvor
(2020) argues, applied linguists hold specific knowledge and skills that could be extended to
Indigenous language revitalization and other language minority communities to support these
aims. To ensure progress towards the goal of raciolinguistic equity, family language policy
researchers have the responsibility to ask and answer questions from a stakeholder perspec-
tive (in this case, a caretaker or parent) about language use and language learning in the home
and the policies and practices most likely to ensure intergenerational transmission. To do this
effectively, we need to be asking appropriate questions and, simultaneously, collaborating with
racialized communities and caretakers. This includes taking interpersonal and structural racism
into account as a factor which impacts intergenerational transmission.
We have many of the tools to this work already at hand. For instance, we have a solid
body of research pointing to the ways that identity and ideology matter and often serve as
constraints to transmission. We know that racist ideologies of language diminish the per-
ceived value of a language and that children are highly sensitive to these valuations. We know
that children need significant amounts of sustained, interactive exposure to the language to
develop productive competence in it. We further understand that language socialization is
two-way, interactive, and highly fluid and that any study of family language policy must
consider child agency. We also have evidence that the language policies caretakers establish,
in many cases, have lasting consequences for the well-being of the child, impacting how they
connect with family and community into adulthood. What is less clear – and what drives
many parents’ questions – is the balance or interplay between these broader constraints and
individual agencies.
52
Future directions
Equally unclear is how to balance competing and divergent research agendas and how to best
predict which direction the next generation of scholars will take this area of study. Arguably,
in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath, research on family language use and
learning is more important than ever before. Worldwide, people are spending much more time
at home, with caretakers not just parenting but home-schooling, befriending, entertaining, and
teaching their children. This is gendered work. In the US, for instance, 4.6 million women lost
their jobs since pandemic; 32% report that these losses were due to lack of childcare. Women,
long the primary caregivers with an outsized influence on language development, have been
taking on this caretaking role disproportionately. Stress, fatigue, mental health issues, and eco-
nomic challenges of extreme isolation, including the loss of ‘weak ties’, are increasingly well
documented. Further, in the US and in many other contexts, this crisis is racialized with the
most vulnerable communities disproportionately impacted. And concomitantly, recent years
have been characterized by huge increases in screen time for both children and adults and
uneven access to in-person, high-quality education.
In this dramatically new landscape, new family language policy questions have arisen,
including the following: To what extent will all this ‘at home’ time bolster or protect home
languages? What will be the long-term impact of extended school closures be on acquisition
of second, school, and societal languages? How do video technologies such as Zoom shape
these questions, given the dramatic upticks in screen time for parents and children and the
profound changes in who we interact with and how? What will be lasting impacts on educa-
tional equity and language proficiencies, given the frequently uneven access to education and
social services?
Indeed, questions of family language policy seem all the more crucial in light of the myriad
social, economic, and psycho-emotional crises brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic and
resultant extended quarantines. Worldwide, quarantines and lockdowns have tended to central-
ize the family unit but simultaneously put it under huge stress. These stressors will threaten if not
wholly reverse the gains of recent decades in gender, economic, and racial equality. Arguably,
the pandemic and the social, cultural, and economic shifts it entails have made family language
learning and use and its related questions and fields more relevant and more central than ever.
Related topics
language socialization; language policy and planning; minority/Indigenous language revital-
ization; language loss
Further reading
De Houwer, A. (2021) Bilingual Development in Childhood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
(This comprehensive review and analysis by a leading developmental psychologist explains how
different language learning settings dynamically impact bilingual children’s language learning tra-
jectories. De Houwer explains how and why children eventually learn to speak the societal language,
but they often do not learn to fluently speak their non-societal language, threatening children’s and
families’ harmonious bilingualism.)
McIvor, O. (2020) ‘Indigenous language revitalization and applied linguistics: Parallel histories, shared
futures?’, Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 40: 78–96. (Written by a scholar deeply committed to
Indigenous language revitalization, this paper considers commonalities, differences, and current and
future interests for shared consideration, collaborations, and partnerships between applied linguistics
and Indigenous language revitalization scholars.)
53
Kendall A. King
Wright, L. (2020) Critical Perspectives on Language and Kinship in Multilingual Families, London:
Bloomsbury Academic. (Focusing on historically marginalized families [single-parent, adoptive, and
LGBTQ+], this book brings together cutting-edge theory and original empirical findings to advance
the field.)
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56
5
Critical discourse analysis, critical
discourse studies, and critical
applied linguistics
Introduction
Several overviews of the emergence and the different varieties of critical discourse analysis
(CDA), critical discourse studies (CDS), and critical applied linguistics (CALx) already exist
(Catalano and Waugh 2020; Wodak and Meyer 2015; Zotzmann and O’Regan 2016; Pennycook
2001, 2021). In this chapter, we focus on the relation between context – that is, the social issues
researchers commonly address – and theoretical and conceptual developments. Our objectives
with this procedure are threefold: We aim to highlight the distinctiveness of critical discourse
approaches in applied linguistics and to provide a framework that may assist researchers in
making informed theoretical, methodological and normative choices based on the exercise of
judgemental rationality. Our overview also raises questions for critical analysts of discourse
in the face of today’s most pressing social, political, and environmental issues, such as the
undermining of democracy in the digital age, gross systemic inequality, attacks on the concepts
of truth and scientific knowledge by populists, and the ensuing global environmental crisis. In
the context of these shifts, we ask what kind of theoretical perspectives would be most suited
to understanding these problems, the role of semiosis within this and the potential for making
a difference. Here, we wish to align ourselves with Fairclough et al. (2004) by arguing that
semiotic analysis in CDA might benefit from a closer engagement with theoretical perspectives
derived from critical realism (CR) (Bhaskar 2008a [1975], 2008b [1993], 2016), particularly
around ontological realism, epistemic relativism, judgemental rationalism and truth.
Any form of CDA, CDS or CALx starts with a social problem before clarifying and analyz-
ing the role that discourse/semiosis plays therein. Despite the diversity of perspectives – from
neo-Marxism and Foucauldianism to a range of post-structuralist positions – most analyses
are not only critical and normative but also interdisciplinary, involving areas such as sociol-
ogy, philosophy, anthropology, political science, and psychology. Journals such as Discourse
and Society (established 1990), Critical Discourse Studies (established in 2004), and Critical
Multilingualism Studies (established in 2011) bear testimony to this. The name CDS indicates
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082637-7 57
a shift from an original CDA to a broader theoretical engagement with issues of reception,
contexts, methods, counter-hegemonic discourses, and reframing (Catalano and Waugh 2020).
CALx, for its part, takes up ‘issues of disadvantage . . . – structure and agency, ideology
and discourse, colonialism and decoloniality, sexuality and discrimination [and explores] how
these areas intersect with each other and how they relate to language and applied linguistic con-
cerns’ (Pennycook 2021: 20). Despite the fact that all these approaches assume that discursive
practices are closely interrelated and interact with other elements of the social and the material
‘extra-discursive’ world, the question of how this interrelationship can be conceptualized and
translated into research is, however, highly contested and dependent upon the theoretical per-
spectives adopted. The first section of this chapter therefore begins with earlier perspectives in
CDA, referencing key concepts such as discourse, ideology, critique, truth, and emancipation.
CDA originally emerged out of the field of critical linguistics established by Fowler et al.
(1979) and Hodge and Kress (1979) in the 1970s. These authors began to draw upon social
theory to understand how contextual factors influence the internal constituents and makeup
of spoken and written texts and how these discursive practices and representations in turn
influence how we understand a specific part of the natural or social world. This is succinctly
expressed in the diagram Fairclough initially developed in the 1989 edition of his book Lan-
guage and Power (Figure 5.1).
Fairclough represents discourse as operating at three dialectically interrelated levels:
My view is that there is not an external relationship ‘between’ language and society, but
an internal and dialectical relationship. Language is a part of society; linguistic phenom-
ena are social phenomena of a special sort, and social phenomena are, in part, linguistic
phenomena.
(Fairclough 1989: 23)
The three-dimensional conception of discourse corresponds to a three-dimensional method of

analysis including description, interpretation, and explanation. In a first move, a text should be
described comprehensively and systematically in terms of the semiotic resources that are used
and the meanings which this use invokes but also in respect of what may be absent and perhaps
even purposefully obscured. This allows the analyst to, secondly, conjecture about the potential
impact this text might have on readers or listeners. To this end, there needs to be an explanation of
why the text was produced in this form in a specific wider social and cultural context. The expla-
nation is closely linked to critique as the aim is to show how the misrepresentation helps to sustain
and legitimize observed social relations, which, in earlier iterations of CDA/CDS, were largely
centred upon highlighting unjust social relations, often, from a neo-Marxist and/or critical theory
perspective. Critical theory was indexed often in relation to Frankfurt School immanent critique
(Adorno 1973) and also to notions of hegemony, ideology, and distorted communication in the
works of Gramsci (1971), Althusser (1971), and Habermas (1971a, 1971b), respectively. The
focus of early forms of CDA was thus squarely on exposing those discursive practices and repre-
sentations of the world that obfuscate, stabilize, and legitimize power asymmetries, inequalities,
and injustices and for many researchers this remains the aim today. This has entailed for many the
possibility of rationally grounded truth and a commitment to human emancipation.
The counterposing of the existence of an underlying truth with an ideological false con-
sciousness or distortion of truth (Marx 1998 [1845]) began to be heavily criticized in the
1970s through post-modern philosophy, mainly through the work of the French social theorist
Michel Foucault (1977, 1989) but also others, such as Jean-François Lyotard (1984), Jacques
Derrida (1976) and Jean Baudrillard (1994 [1981]). These authors wanted to break with what
58
CDA, CDS and CALx
Process of production
Description (Text analysis)

Text
Interpretation (Processing analysis)

Process of interpretation
Discourse practice
Explanation (Social analysis)
Sociocultural practice
(Situational; Institutional; Societal)
Dimensions of discourse Dimensions of discourse analysis
Figure 5.1 Fairclough’s three-dimensional view of discourse
they saw as the Marxist dualism (ideology/truth) and regarded truth, but also other categories
like ‘liberty, autonomy, democracy and emancipation’, as contentious and problematic since
dogmatically followed they ‘can become instruments of repression, power and/or governance’
themselves (Herzog 2016: 280). Foucault understood these conceptions as closely related to
power and our knowledge of reality as always relative and discursively meditated. Rather than
primarily assuming power to be purposefully exercised by individuals or groups over others, he
placed emphasis instead on its unseen dimensions and its social distribution. These regimes of
truth, he argued, are often internalized, embodied, and enacted (1977) and thus operate unno-
ticed by individuals. From this perspective, power is unavoidable and does not only constrain
and oppress but also enables social life.
Based on the idea that we can apprehend reality only discursively, many post-modernist
and post-structuralist analysts embrace epistemic relativism – that is, they regard the very idea
of ‘truth’ and ‘objectivity’ as ideological. Instead, they emphasize the incommensurability
of different discourses and focus on their local production and effects (Lyotard 1984). This
emphasis on epistemic relativism entails a demand for reflexivity, and discourse analysts – but
likewise ethnographers or anthropologists working in this tradition – often reflect upon their
own positionality when they produce discursively mediated knowledge.
Research methods
As problem-oriented critical domains, CDA, CDS, and CALx develop their own methods
in relation to specific interests and objects of research (Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999;
Pennycook 2021). In addition to this, the approaches are highly diverse. They include the
59
dialectical-relational approach of Fairclough (2010), the discourse-historical approach of

Wodak, Reisigl, and others (Reisigl and Wodak 2001, 2015; Wodak et al. 1999), the socio-
cognitive approach of van Dijk (2008, 2015), and the CALx perspective of Pennycook (2021).
Therefore, there is no uniform methodological ‘toolbox’ in this area of research. Nevertheless,
we would like to give two brief examples which have been developed in relation to specific
objects of analysis.
Policy analysis
Policy analysis can take a variety of forms. Mulderrig (2017), for instance, has analyzed anti-
obesity campaigns in the UK. Starting from a particular social problem, the increase in obesity
in the population, she focuses on the government’s attempt to ‘nudge’ children and adults into
healthy eating behaviours and physical exercise through cartoon advertisements. To show how
the campaign both represents and fosters internalized, embodied, and enacted forms of power,
she draws upon Foucault’s work on governmentality and biopolitics and combines it with
state theory. Mulderrig’s analysis shows how the anti-obesity campaign represents and targets
mainly lower working-class families, individualizes healthcare, and is embedded in and driven
by a neoliberal austerity regime. The three intersecting discursive and multimodal strategies
she identifies are the representation of (northern, working-class) lifestyles as delinquent, a
discourse of risk and threat that intends to mobilize emotions, and the promotion of ‘smarter’
consumerism.
Metaphor analysis
Metaphors are figures of speech that generally represent an item X – for instance, an
object, subject, action, quality, or process – as something else (Y). By combining or syn-
thesizing X and Y, a new meaning emerges that shapes how we view X as certain aspects
will be foregrounded whereas others become backgrounded or entirely erased. Apart from
these cognitive effects, metaphors are also socioculturally embedded and often internal-
ized and embodied. Their potential to shape cognition and behaviour thus often go unno-
ticed. Koller (2005) has investigated how the choice of metaphors in business discourse
is driven by ideologies and how these metaphors, in turn, impact social cognition. To this
end, she analyzed a corpus of 160,000+ business magazine texts on mergers and acquisi-
tions (M&As) and found that the predominant metaphors revolved around ‘evolutionary
struggle’. This Darwinist representation of capitalist business creates the view that M&As
are part of a natural, ahistorical, and unalterable process involving masculine aggression
and the survival of the fittest, and thus, they neatly play into the currently dominant neo-
liberal capitalist order of things.

In this section, we argue that our contemporary social, political, and environmental context
is qualitatively different from that of the pre-neoliberal era of more than four decades ago.
This has implications for CDA as this poses questions concerning fundamental theoretical
assumptions about the relationship between semiosis and the social and material world
and by implication about key concepts, such as discourse, ideology, critique, truth, and
emancipation.
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CDA, CDS and CALx
Surveillance capitalism and post-truth politics

Digital technologies are in principle neutral tools that can enable people to communicate, learn,
associate, and do business in new ways. The relative lack or absence of political regulation,
however, has led to a monopolization of this sphere by tech giants, such as Google, Facebook,
Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple. These Big Five offer services that are by no means free as the
actual flow and nature of the information is highly structured through algorithms which are
programmed according to strategic interests (Archer 2020). Users’ engagement with digital
tools is harvested, automatically analyzed, and used to fine-tune business strategies and influ-
ence consumer or voting behaviour. Few authors would disagree with the diagnosis of the
adverse effects of the current configuration of the digital environment, but what is often over-
looked is that the sophisticated manipulation of thought and behaviour through algorithms also
diminishes agency. As Zuboff (2019) describes it, the digital texts we engage in at the level of
discourse are determined by an underlying ‘text’ that is designed, owned, and used by others.
Its structure is hidden from view and thus not transparent to users.
Due to the affordances of the digital environment, we live in a qualitatively different
environment with profound effects on politics: In the first instance, the public sphere has
been fragmented through social media that are used by an increasing percentage of citi-
zens to keep themselves politically informed. Social media ‘are, however a truth-less public
sphere by design’ (Marres 2018: 423) as false and misleading information can be easily pro-
duced and distributed instantaneously. The resulting echo chambers and filter bubbles have
centrifugal powers on social cohesion because they obstruct engagement with views one
would disagree with. This in turn threatens one of the fundamental principles of democracy:
informed debate and rational argumentation between parties in disagreement (Habermas
1971a, 1971b). The resulting polarization of society has diminished the sense of a shared
reality and concomitantly of what we can agree on to be ‘true’. This in turn is of strategic
interest to populist ‘post-shame’ politicians (Wodak 2019, 2020) who do not necessarily
make ‘alternative’ claims to truth but promote the idea that fundamental truth is an obsolete
category and that in the public sphere claims to truth are in equivalence and are not to be
checked against an external reality.
The consequences of these structural, technology-driven, strategic interventions have
already changed the geopolitical order, shifting entire democracies onto a more autocratic
footing, generating hatred and xenophobia, and derailing urgently necessary actions to ame-
liorate climate change. As Pomerantsev (2019) argues, we live in a world where influence
campaigns are insidious and hidden from view. In comparison to the Cold War era where
ideologies clashed, ideologies today are an afterthought as ‘information itself is now where
the action is’ (p. 21).
Of course, discourse is key to ‘post-truth’ politics as populists like Donald Trump in the
US, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Boris Johnson in the UK have successfully capitalized on the
gross injustices and discontent neoliberal policies have generated over the past four decades
and which their political parties and the economic interest groups they represent have directly
championed (Hochschild 2016). The maintenance and obfuscation of these contradictions
requires intense discursive work, for instance, through the reduction of economic, political, and
social complexities to easy ‘knee-jerk’ formulae and the deliberate provoking of social dissen-
sion by means of xenophobic nationalism and ‘culture wars’. In such contexts, the generation
and seemingly assured presentation of lies as ‘alternative facts’ and the bullying and demoniza-
tion of those espousing democratic rationalist views are all symptoms of a more intensive and
visibly desperate determination to safeguard the accumulation of capital.
61
Critical discourse analysts can and should play an important role in understanding how
these representations are constructed, what effects these discourses have on voting behaviour,
and how these debates might be reframed. An exclusive focus on semiosis would, however, be
short-sighted without dealing with ‘the generative complexes at work’ (Bhaskar 2008a [1975]:
48) which are responsible for the (re)production and maintenance of these phenomena, includ-
ing, as outlined earlier, the strategic use of computer technologies and processes of capital
accumulation. To capture this interplay, we argue that a stratified ontology is necessary (Sayer
1999), one which accounts for the different properties and powers of discourse/semiosis, tech-
nology/artificial intelligence, political economy/capital and human social relations.
Post-truth, ideological endism, and climate change

Post-truth politics overtly disregards truth and those institutions, such as academia and the law,
whose purpose it is to generate truthful knowledge (Block 2020). Post-truth politicians and
their media agents portray experts – commonly those who disagree with the capitalist-extrem-
ist and xenophobic-nationalist line of reasoning they pursue – as ‘elites’ who unduly exercise
‘inauthentic’ power over ‘the people’ and who are purveyors of ‘fake news’. In these circum-
stances, we seem to have arrived at a situation where ‘subjective opinions and unverified
claims [may legitimately] rival valid scientific and biomedical facts in their public influence’
(Harris Ali and Kurasava 2020). This has been accompanied – especially since the financial cri-
sis of 2007–2008 – by a retreat into endism. This is ‘the view that history, once real, has come
to an end in the present’ (Bhaskar 2016: 183). No new ideologies of qualitative institutional
or social change appear; only market fundamentalism remains along with the endless drive to
accumulate (Bhaskar 2002; Hartwig 2011; O’Regan 2021). This in turn has been responsible
for preventing governments from rationally assessing the systemic failures of capitalism and
taking the steps which are essential if pressing problems such as climate change and global
human inequality are to be addressed.
Climate change, as Malm (2017: 11) argues, is the prime example of the need for a histori-
cal perspective:
There is no synchronicity in climate change. Now more than ever, we inhabit the dia-
chronic, the discordant, the inchoate: the fossil fuels hundreds of millions of years old,
the mass combustion developed over the past two centuries, the extreme weather this has
already generated, the journey towards a future that will be infinitely more extreme –
unless something is done now – the tail of present emissions stretching into the distance . . .
History has sprung alive through a nature that has done likewise.
The depletion of non-renewable resources and pollution generated by industrial growth and
non-action leads to irreversible climate change and has already had devastating effects on
human society and the economy. The unprecedented public dismissal and degradation of sci-
entific advice and the role of experts thus occur at a time when science is most needed. Climate
change is commonly denied based on the claim that it has not been proven or that there is no
consensus among scientists (Oreskes and Conway 2010). Apart from the fact that doubt in sci-
ence is deliberately engineered by think tanks paid by the fossil fuel and other industries and
disseminated by media outlets affiliated with those interest groups, the claim that there is a
lack of consensus or empirical evidence represents a misunderstanding of how science should
ideally work. Agreement among all members of the scientific community – or of any commu-
nity for that matter – is not a criterion for the truthfulness of a claim. The validity of the claim
62
CDA, CDS and CALx
rests in the relation to the world it refers to. As such, scientists extrapolate and abstract from
empirical evidence to generate the best explanation or theory of the phenomenon, which can
then form the basis for concerted action.
Climate change is, however, also a perfect example of how semiosis can have effects
on the non-discursive as representations and denial of climate change influence people’s
perceptions and judgements, as well as their responses to anthropogenic climate change.
Climate change denial distributed through social and other media works back through reflex-
ive agents and institutions on other strata of the social and natural world. The withdrawal of
the US under Trump from the Paris Climate Accords and the push to further excavate fossil
fuels had real damaging effects on the natural world. Critical analysis of discourse research
can help to deconstruct and reframe such debates but only if the fundamental nature of the
problem and the role of discourse/semiosis therein is understood – namely, ‘how social rela-
tions combine with natural ones that are not of their making’ (Malm 2017: 72). To under-
stand these interrelationships, it is of utmost importance to hold the powers of nature and
society analytically distinct as Malm and other critical realists have argued. For two things
to interact, they must first be held analytically apart so that we can ‘study their difference-
in-unity – we need to know how they interact, what sort of damage the one does to the other
and, most importantly, how the destruction can be brought to an end’ (p. 61). In addition to
this, a clear conceptualization of epistemic relativism (i.e. that rationally grounded truths can
exist even though our knowledge of the world is always changing) in relation to a normative
commitment to judgemental rationality (i.e. the ability to decide on rational grounds whether
some explanations and accounts, and also particular outcomes, are better than others) is
much needed.
However, in the more post-structuralist social constructivist quarters of critical discourse
analysis, the notion of truth is often highly contested as we earlier outlined. In the context of
post-truth politics, relativist, post-structuralist, and social constructivist perspectives in the
academy have come under increased scrutiny and criticism as being complicit in the right-wing
predicament we find ourselves in (Krasni 2020; Ball 2017; Calcutt 2016; D’Ancona 2017;
Davies 2017; Kakutani 2018; McIntyre 2018). Although the two positions are entirely distinct
in their political orientations, the terrain on which some social constructivists and post-truth
politicians do converge is one where knowledge may be reduced to a social construction that
is legitimized as a regime of truth without the necessity of being referenced to an externally
grounded reality. Such regimes are realized by the simple ideological advocacy and ritual
adherence of communities alone.
In the face of mounting criticism, some social constructivists previously taking a strong
post-structuralist position have attempted to recalibrate their claims and to reclaim a nor-
mative commitment to judgement and the possibilities of scientific and ‘extra-discursive’
knowledge of the material world. Angermüller (2018), for instance, argues in an article titled
‘Truth after post-truth: For a strong programme in Discourse Studies’ that post-modern and
post-structuralist forms of discourse analysis question the notion of truth and have been
accused of ‘playing into the hands of Trump, Brexit and right-wing populists by politicising
scientific knowledge and undermining the idea of scientific truth’ (p. 1). The author wants
to avoid being associated with judgemental relativism but at the same time wants to retain
what appears to be a quasi-post-structuralist, or what we will call a ‘non-truth’ weak post-
structuralist, view of science and of ‘truths as discursive constructions’ (p. 1). He argues that
we ‘do not have to return to Truth [or to] the assumption that some ideas are inherently better
than others’ (p. 2) and that this ‘does not lead to a normative anything goes and moral relativ-
ism’ (p. 6). Angermüller deserves credit for openly addressing this problem but does not, in
63
our view, provide a justification as to why discourse researchers, especially those taking a
strong post-structuralist social constructivist view, should not think it is not possible to judge
between better or worse outcomes or that one truth claim is just as acceptable as any other
truth claim. It is because of the separation of oneself from judgemental rationalism by way of
the denial of truth that post-structuralist and also weak post-structuralist social constructiv-
ism can give no compelling reason that one outcome or argument is to be preferred to any
other outcome or argument. And yet, as Angermüller’s discussion demonstrates, there are
increasingly few, if any, social constructivists who readily embrace the judgemental relativ-
ism which this seems to entail: ‘Discourse researchers can distinguish between truth claims
with higher and lower normative quality without betraying their fundamental constructivist
orientations’ (p. 2). In this somewhat contradictory manner, a commitment to ‘non-truth’ is
still able to co-exist with a commitment to being able to make truth judgements, since the
exercise of one’s judgement is not being denied.
That said, ‘truths’ – as regularized formations and practices – are discursively constructed.
We therefore see nothing very much wrong with conceiving of these kinds of ‘truth-practices’
as regimes of signification. But this is entirely different to saying that judgemental rationalism
has no relevance or, in what amounts to the same thing, that we ‘do not have to return to Truth
[or to] the assumption that some ideas are inherently better than others’ (Angermüller 2018:
2). On the contrary, some ideas and options are indeed inherently better than others and call
for rational judgement.
In this brief overview, it has been our wish to illustrate for the reader how a realist ontol-
ogy in which the material world has its place can go some way towards resolving the dilem-
mas which we have identified once it is understood that there is no necessary contradiction
between epistemic relativism (i.e. as a problematizing practice around knowledge claims) and
the exercise of judgemental rationalism (i.e. as a commitment to social amelioration and the
ability to choose between better or worse outcomes). To be sure, a commitment to judgemental
rationality does not entail that one’s judgement is necessarily right – on the contrary. But it is
only if we assume an external – social, material, and natural – reality to exist, that our human
fallibleness as well as our possibility to make rational choices can be acknowledged. This is
also why the critical discourse perspective we are advocating is grounded in the suggested
theoretical affordances of CR.

That CDA/CDS/CALx are concerned with critical textual analysis is a truism, as the presented
examples illustrate. Analysts adopt a variety of methods and perspectives in doing what they
do. As Wodak and Meyer (2015) have noted in respect of CDA/CDS, ‘studies in CDS are mul-
tifarious, derived from quite different theoretical backgrounds, [and] oriented towards different
data and methodologies’ (p. 5). Despite this multifariousness, a number of distinct perspectives
exist, as we have noted. Amongst the more significant are those associated with a Marxism/
Foucauldianism/critical realism tradition in the dialectical-relational approach, a Habermasian
communicative action/distorted communication tradition in the discourse-historical approach,
a cognition/ideology tradition in the sociocognitive approach, and a decolonizing, problematiz-
ing, situated, collaborative perspective in CALx (Pennycook 2021). It is our recommendation
that the reader refers to these traditions and to relevant cited works for examples of how CDA/
CDS/CALx has been done (see also O’Regan 2006; Montessori 2009; O’Regan and Betzel
2016; Zotzmann and O’Regan 2016; O’Regan and Gray 2018 for examples of some of the
practical procedures which have been applied).
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CDA, CDS and CALx
Future directions
CDA, CDS, and CALx are problem-oriented and interdisciplinary in nature and committed
to social amelioration and change. This poses complex demands on analysts. As textual
analysis is seen as an entry point into the analysis and explanation of a particular social
ill and the role discourse/semiosis plays therein, there is a need to engage in depth with
theories from other disciplines about the problem itself. The publications in the journals
Discourse & Society and Critical Discourse Studies but also other outlets, such as mono-
graphs and textbooks, bear testimony to this interdisciplinarity. As we have argued in this
chapter, in some instances, the power of discourse in relation to other causally effective
mechanisms has been overrated. By paying more attention to ontological and not only
epistemological questions, communication and collaboration across disciplinary borders
could be enhanced, and CDA, CDS, and CALx could potentially make a greater impact.
This leads us to a third element of this area of linguistic analysis: changing practices for the
better. CDA has been criticized for focusing on the production and not the reception side
of discourses and is thus not able to explain how discourses are reproduced, consumed,
or challenged (Martín Rojo 2015). While this might be a valid criticism, there is also a
danger in focusing too much on the micro techniques of power alone. We would argue
instead that at the core of any critical project whose aim is social amelioration is the dif-
ference between what exists (being) and what could exist (becoming) but is not actualized
yet (absence). Despite its fundamental role, the idea of what is absent, how the situation
could be otherwise, and what difference a critical discourse analysis could potentially
make might indeed need more attention.
Related topics
critical applied linguistics; critical sociolinguistics; multimodal discourse analysis; forensic
linguistics; corpus linguistics, linguistic anthropology
Further reading
Pennycook, A. (2021) Critical Applied Linguistics: A Critical (Re)Introduction, 2nd ed., London: Rout-
ledge. (This chapter has primarily concerned itself with CDA/CDS and, to a lesser extent, with CALx.
In this revised second edition, there is a notable change of emphasis in Pennycook’s position and
makes this text a critical intervention in debates concerning the relationship between relativist and
normative positions on discourse and its analysis. As Pennycook himself now states, ‘Critical applied
linguistics must have a standpoint that critiques inequality’ (202 1: 20). This is a sentiment with which
we also agree. Not only is it the basis for our shared critical attitude in CDA/CDS/CALx, but it is also
potentially the pivot in applied linguistics and associated disciplines on which a new material unity in
critical studies of discourse may turn.)
Reisigl, M. (2020) ‘“Narrative!” I can’t hear that anymore: A linguistic critique of an overstretched
umbrella term in cultural and social science studies, discussed with the example of the discourse on
climate change’, Critical Discourse Studies, 18(3): 368–386. (This article offers a critique on analyti-
cal methods/methodologies regarding narratives through the analysis of climate change discourse. It
takes issue with the overused concepts of narrative and narration in social and cultural science studies
on climate change and argues for the need to acknowledge fallibility and judgemental rationality and
hence the possibility of a more meaningful relationship with truth.)
Sims-Schouten, W., Riley, S. and Willig, C. (2007) ‘Critical realism in discourse analysis: A presentation
of a systematic female employment as an example method of analysis using women’s talk of mother-
hood, childcare and female employment as an example’, Theory and Psychology, 17(1): 101–124.
(This article provides a useful demonstration of how CR principles concerning the stratified nature of
reality can be applied in critical discourse studies.)
65
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6
Digital language and
communication
Caroline Tagg
Introduction
In the 21st century, an ever-increasing amount of our personal, professional, and public
communication is mediated through technologies, from radio, television, and the landline to
email, mobile phone messaging, social media, and video-conferencing. This chapter focuses
primarily on ‘new’ or digital media, while recognizing that these co-exist in the contempo-
rary media landscape with older technologies. We live in what Madianou and Miller (2012)
call a ‘polymedia’ environment, in which we navigate affordances offered by different tech-
nologies and choose, for any instance of communication, the media that we feel best suits
our communicative purpose and audience, reading meaning into the media choices made
by others. As well as encompassing older and newer technologies, media communication
in this polymedia environment can be more or less synchronous or asynchronous; mass
or dyadic; top-down, commercialized, or grassroots; open or closed; written or spoken; or
local or global. Different media forms can converge within the same platform or around the
same media event so that a television programme is live-tweeted by viewers who might also
discuss the show privately on WhatsApp and read online newspaper reviews. Importantly,
despite initial perceptions of virtual communication as disembodied and separate from real-
world concerns, it is increasingly recognized that digital communication is grounded in
physical contexts, existing social networks, and wider identity projects, running parallel to
and entangled with offline actions.
For applied linguists with an interest in understanding real-world issues, linguistic inves-
tigations are increasingly likely to encompass digital language and communication. Their
questions pertaining to the role of new media focus on how communication is shaped by its
mediation through a particular technology and the implications for social practices in that con-
text. Implicit in this focus is the understanding that the process of mediating communication
will itself shape the communication that unfolds – its genre, register, participation frameworks,
and so on. Thus, applied linguists have explored, for example, the role of mediated com-
munication in language learning classrooms (Hampel 2019) and the workplace (Darics and
Koller 2018), online consumer reviews (Chik and Vásquez 2017), corporate webcare strategies
(Lutzky 2021), and health forums (Pounds 2018). Research has also explored how everyday
68 DOI: 10.4324/9781003082637-8
Digital language and communication
social and domestic interaction is altered and expanded by its mediation through new technolo-
gies (Staehr and Nørreby 2021).
This chapter explores the contributions of applied linguistics to understanding digital lan-
guage and communication in a polymedia environment whilst also highlighting ways in which
new media communication has informed and shaped thinking within applied linguistics. Impor-
tantly, the novelty of new media spaces and their apparent contrast to older forms of mediated
communication have prompted applied linguists to revisit and reimagine established concepts
such as context, community, identity, and language itself. This rethinking of key concepts has
implications that go beyond the study of digital communication and language, with relevance
for our understanding of the role of language in real-world issues more broadly.
There has long been a concern within applied linguistics to situate new media communica-
tion within the wider history of communication technologies (Baron 2000; Tagg and Evans
2020). From a transhistorical perspective, the impact of digital technology, the Internet, and
social media can be seen as developments within a broader arc of technology-related language
change. Parallels can thus be drawn between new and old media communication, and conti-
nuities as much as divergences in practice identified (Bateman 2021). Lyons and Ounoughi
(2020), for example, explore strategies for conveying location and motion across 19th-century
Alpine narratives and WhatsApp mobile messaging, and O’Hagan and Spilioti (2021) compare
the multimodal styling of self in present-day selfies and early 20th-century bookplates, high-
lighting similarities in design and identity construction despite being shaped by the ideological
values of their time. In my own work, I have explored similarities in spelling variation in 16th-
century letters and early-21st-century text messaging (Evans and Tagg 2020). Such studies
show how the enduring human need to communicate overrides technological specificity whilst
highlighting the complex intersections between language, technology, and social practice: just
as technologies shape how we can communicate, so does society shape the development and
use of available technologies in sociohistorically contingent ways. Existing social practices are
not transformed by technological developments but are remediated through new technologies
(Bolter and Grusin 2000), and it is only with time that new practices emerge. Thus, the emer-
gence and development of digital media is conceptualized less as a rupture from a pre-digital
age and more a reconfiguration of past practices.
The history of the Internet itself is emerging as an area of interest for media communication
scholars (e.g. the journal Internet Histories, launched in 2017) and for applied linguists (Her-
ring 2018; Tagg and Evans forthcoming). For example, van Driel (2018) explores the impact of
the liveblog format in comparison to that of online newspaper articles on how readers perceive
and respond to unfolding news events. Tied up in this emerging focus is an interest in the devel-
opment of applied linguistics research into the Internet and the ways in which this research has
been shaped not only by advances in technology – and associated social practices – but also by
shifts and developments in scholarly thinking more generally.
The history of language-related research into the Internet can be divided into three broadly
defined overlapping waves or phrases (see Androutsopoulos 2006 on the first two of these).
Herring (2018) starts her history of language-related research in 1983 with the emergence of
the Internet from its predecessor, ARPANET, before the introduction of the web. In 1980s
and 1990s, the Internet was dominated by elite North American English-speaking users and
included email, Usenet, Internet Relay Chat, MUDs (virtual worlds known as multi-user
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Caroline Tagg
domains), homepages, and blogs (weblogs). The early Internet was not a polymedia environ-
ment, because each Internet mode was operated by a standalone client, and so users rarely
moved between them (Herring 2018). At this time, the Internet was largely text-based, and
much scholarly interest lay in exploring how users playfully manipulated graphic resources
such as punctuation and orthographic variation to fulfil pragmatic and interpersonal purposes
(Danet et al. 1997). Of broad concern to applied linguists was the task of describing ‘the lan-
guage of the Internet’ (Crystal 2001) and understanding how technological features shaped
communication across modes, describing, for example, the language of weblogs (Herring et al.
2005) and placing them on a cline between written and spoken genres (Baron 1998). The con-
cern was to understand how online communication differed from offline communication in
terms of, for example, anonymity, identity, and community. Studies tended to be screen-based,
and data came mainly from public sites mediated by computer.
From around the turn of the millennium, there was a move away from the technologically
deterministic approach that characterized much earlier work, towards a focus on users and
an understanding that digital language was shaped not only by the technology but by social
factors. In this second wave, the concept of affordances came to underpin applied linguistics
research into media language, reconceptualizing technology as offering possibilities for social
action as perceived by users. The Internet had spread from North America across the world
and the term Web 2.0 was coined to capture the participatory, collaborative character of new
media forms. There was thus a growing diversification of users and uses and a greater focus
in applied linguistics research on sociolinguistic variation (Androutsopoulos 2006), multilin-
gualism (Danet and Herring 2007), and language mixing (Deumert and Masinyana 2008), as
well as identity and community. Although often predominantly screen-based, research began
to incorporate interview data (Androutsopoulos 2008) and to explore how mediated commu-
nication fitted into users’ wider lives, prompted in part by the emergence of social network
sites, which aimed to consolidate and expand people’s existing social networks, and by the
increasingly multimodal nature of mediated communication, enabling people to share images
and videos. There was also growing interest in mobile communication, largely in the form of
private dyadic text messaging exchanges (Tagg 2009).
In more recent years, a third wave of applied linguistics research has sought to grapple with
communication in an increasingly complex networked society, within which people, artefacts,
and ideas traverse between media platforms and offline sites (Androutsopoulos and Juffer-
mans 2014). Research has increasingly attended to the visual character of media language,
with a focus on graphicons such as emojis (Ge and Herring 2019), selfies (Zhao and Zap-
pavigna 2018), and image-sharing (Venema and Lobinger 2020). Attention has been paid to
video-mediated communication in the polymedia environment, such as video-conferencing
platforms (Cerzö 2020; Sindoni 2018) and YouTube videos (Androutsopoulos and Tereick
2015). Multimodality has come to be viewed as fluid and dynamic (Thurlow et al. 2020),
with a recognition that multiple semiotic resources are not only combined in sophisticated
and contextually relevant ways within a social media platform but are also reconfigured and
recontextualized across online and offline spaces (Leppänen et al. 2014) – for example, in the
form of memes and GIFs (Kumar and Varier 2020). The increasing convergence not only of
old and new media into the same platform but also of commercial and grassroots discourse
opens up globally circulating cultural artefacts for local recontextualization and appropriation
whilst giving ordinary people a public voice. Meanwhile, the growing dominance of the mobile
phone enables people to access platforms and apps while on the move and engaged in offline
activities, meaning that individuals are co-present in multiple intertwining online and offline
contexts (Lyons and Tagg 2019). This fluidity, convergence, and mobility has implications for
70
understanding everyday personal and social communication (Staehr and Nørreby 2021), as
well as the unfolding of participatory media events (Giaxoglou and Spilioti 2020).
Critical issues and current contributions

The study of media language and communication over the last 40 years has foregrounded
several critical issues with implications for broader understandings of language-in-use. In this
section, I focus on current contributions to context, identity, and multimodality.
In media and communication studies, ‘context’ has long been recognized as a complex
element of mediated communication. Early Internet research tended to treat mediated spaces
as devoid of place (Meyrowitz 1985), virtual and disembodied. Subsequent research argued
that mediated communication involved the bringing together of multiple places into one com-
municative space: a ‘doubling of place’ (Moores 2004). According to this view, people who
communicate through new media are located both in their physical location(s) and in the shared
communicative context created by the mediated exchange. These somewhat static views of
context have been challenged by applied linguists, for whom the context of interaction does
not exist a priori to communicative action but is a dynamic social category in its own right.
Their research details how online social spaces are interactionally accomplished and navigated
through discursive means. Jones (2010), for example, shows how Hong Kong students distrib-
ute social attention across multiple tasks and interactions – moving fluidly between playing
online games, doing homework, attending to co-present family members, and instant messag-
ing with friends – and how their ‘polyfocal attention structures’ (p. 159) serve to ground their
virtual interactions in the immediate physical context. More recent studies find that mobile
devices further encourage this fluid engagement with online and offline environments (Cohen
2015). Lyons (2014) shows how texters position themselves discursively at the multiple loca-
tions made relevant through texting, shifting between their deictic centre and that of their
interlocutor, as well as a shared virtual space. She also shows how texters make relevant their
physical contexts – and appeal to interlocutors’ lived experiences – through the discursive
enactment of non-verbal behaviours, or kineticons (Lyons 2018). Such studies challenge the
validity of distinguishing between offline and online contexts when making sense of how indi-
viduals communicate and suggest instead that mediated communication be seen as embedded
in wider shifting contexts, characterized by mobility and polyfocality.
Bakhtin’s chronotope has been applied to new media environments in language-related
work, to acknowledge the fluidity with which interactants handle the multiple time-space
arrangements that unfold simultaneously across mediated and physical spaces. Chronotopes
are spatiotemporally determined frames, which sanction particular interaction patterns and
modes of behaviour and which can be invoked in interaction by participants through the
deployment of contextualization cues, so as to frame the ensuing discourse (Blommaert and
De Fina 2017). Chronotopes are neither fixed nor pre-determined but co-constructed by inter-
actants in active, purposeful processes and are thus subject to ongoing evaluation, shifts, and
alterations. A chronotopic analysis captures the ways in which individuals negotiate shared
virtual communicative time-spaces during mediated interactions in which they are physically
separated with access to different physical contexts (Lyons and Tagg 2019). Sandel and Wang-
chuk (2020), for example, explore how dispersed followers of a Buddhist temple in Bhutan
draw on a religious chronotopic framing in co-constructing an online Buddhist community on
WeChat through various languages and modalities. In these ways, applied linguistics research
details how social processes are managed in the micro-contexts of everyday mediated com-
munications.
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Caroline Tagg
A second critical issue is that of identity. Digital language research has been pivotal in
forwarding our understanding of discursive identity construction. Early research into digital
media reflected the prevailing idea that the Internet was a liberating, democratizing space
where offline identities could be discarded and new ones assumed (Bechar-Israeli 1995). With
the development of social media and mobile devices came greater scholarly recognition of the
ways in which individuals discursively perform identities across online and offline contexts in
accomplishing locally relevant communicative activities. Vásquez (2014), for example, shows
how online reviewers on TripAdvisor foreground particular elements of identity in order to
persuade readers through identifying with them and displaying expertise. The online construc-
tion of expert identities among non-professionals in review sites (Escarena 2020), online health
settings (Rudolf van Rohr et al. 2019), and WhatsApp groups (Lyons 2020) has attracted par-
ticular attention, as users exploit offline experiences and online affordances to legitimate their
advice-sharing on real-world issues. Central to this emerging understanding of online identity
are notions of authenticity (Leppänen et al. 2015) and credibility (Meer and Staubach 2020) –
how these are indexed, negotiated, and challenged; the range of semiotic resources mobilized
in everyday processes of authentication; and the role such processes play in constructing identi-
ties which traverse multiple online and offline spaces. Meer and Staubach (2020), for example,
explore how social media influencers construct credible identities through visual and embod-
ied resources – including object placement and manipulation – in order to effectively promote
commercial products to their followers. This perspective recognizes the polycentric nature of
identity construction – the way in which interactants orient towards and shift between multiple
norms or centres of authority which provide a frame for their behaviour and self-positioning
(Blommaert 2013). The perceived novelty of online identity construction has helped fore-
ground an approach to understanding identity with relevance beyond digital communication.
Thirdly, recent years have seen a ‘multimodal turn’ in applied linguistics studies of digital
language and communication. This is part of a recognition of the multimodal nature of all
human communication and the development of methodological approaches, such as social
semiotics, which widen the applied linguistic gaze. The multimodal turn has simultaneously
gained impetus from the increasingly multi-semiotic nature of mediated communication, as
text-based forums have given way to media-sharing sites – YouTube, Facebook, Instagram,
Snapchat, and TikTok, as well as mobile messaging apps, such as WhatsApp and WeChat –
which provide access to an array of preconfigured sets of multimodal resources or graphicons
such as emojis, stickers, and GIFs. Multimodality also emerges from digital photography and
the ease with which networked resources can be copied and shared. As with identity research,
the apparent salience of multimodality online has played a key role in shaping the development
of multimodality studies in applied linguistics, which has since the turn of the millennium been
dominated by the study of digital media (Sindoni and Moschini 2021). The contemporary poly-
media environment offers a challenge to ‘traditional’ approaches to multimodality: How can
applied linguists document and explain the complex ways in which multimodal assemblages
are co-constructed, shared, and recontextualized across time and space? How can applied lin-
guists account for the multiple ways in which diverse semiotic resources are interactionally
taken up and used in identification and relational processes? Venema and Lobinger (2020)
detail how photo-sharing enables the representation and expression of self, arguing that the
materialization of memories is a key resource for maintaining close relationships. Zhao and
Zappavigna (2018) show how photos and videos of users’ physical contexts not only pro-
vide a direct window onto an individual’s world, but they index users’ perspective on a situa-
tion through gaze, proximity, and framing. Jones (2019) argues that mobile photography goes
beyond the representation of perspective to communicate ‘the embodied experience of the
72
visual’ (p. 22) – that is, to involve others in the physical experience of being there and confer-
ring on them ‘the right to look’. Meanwhile, studies of video-mediated communication have
been pivotal in developing transcription and annotation systems that decentre verbal language
and integrate multiple modes (Sindoni 2018).
Main research methods

Applied linguistics research into media language and communication has generally adopted
existing research methods, ‘fine-tuning, creatively adapting or even radically redefining them
to suit the needs and complexities of the digital environments’ (Georgakopoulou and Spilioti
2015: 4). For example, MOOD (microanalysis of online data) explores the extent to which,
and how, conversation analytic concepts can be used to understand online interaction (Giles
et al. 2017), describing exchanges as sequentially organized in ways that both resemble and
depart from spoken conversations (König 2019). One contrast between online and face-to-face
conversations is the former’s lack of synchronicity, in the sense that message production and
reception do not occur simultaneously, and receivers do not have access to a sender’s message
until it is fully formed and sent (Garcia and Baker Jacobs 1999). As a result, the constraints
that shape face-to-face interaction do not apply; messages can be produced and sent at any
time, and there is no need for interlocutors to negotiate or compete for the ‘conversational
floor’ (Beißwenger 2008). Rather than adjacency pairs, digital conversations are thus more
accurately characterized by what König (2019) calls ‘paired actions’, in which a first part
anticipates a second part which may be neither temporally nor spatially adjacent. These and
other conditions of digital communication mean that the precepts of existing methodologies
must be reworked to have relevance in mediated contexts.
Digital technologies have enabled applied linguists to both harness and exploit the oppor-
tunities offered by big data whilst also enabling and enriching ethnographic insights into
contemporary life. Within digital ethnographies, the nature of online context as described
earlier – networked, interactive, ambient – challenges the ethnographic assumption of a
bounded and clearly demarcated field site and the importance of long-term immersion in a
particular place. The discourse-oriented online ethnography proposed by Androutsopoulos
(2008) involves a reworking of participant observation as a form of ‘systematic observation’
which moves from a core discursive site – a platform such as YouTube, a Facebook group, or
a wall event – outwards through a set of interconnections towards the periphery of the field
site, following the online trajectories of people, practices, discourses, or semiotic resources.
Unlike observation in physical settings, the researcher does not necessarily gain access to the
production of posts or online text or see interactions as they unfold in real time. Also unlike
‘offline’ observation, digital ethnographers can assume the role of a ‘lurker’, reading mes-
sages and posts but not posting their own and thus invisible to other users. However, rather
than being seen as departures from ethnography traditionally conceived, these challenges have
problematized established assumptions, drawing attention to the fact that social life is never
bounded within one physical context but is always characterized by mobility and networks that
transcend particular spaces.
Discourse-oriented online ethnographies highlight the insights gained by situating digital
communications within individuals’ wider communicative practices and exploring the ways in
which individuals move across online and offline spaces. For example, in their study of young
adults at the global periphery in Bangladesh and Mongolia, Dovchin et al. (2018) engaged not
only in online observation on Facebook but also hung out with the students, asked them to
record themselves, held informal discussions with them, and interviewed them repeatedly, to
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Caroline Tagg
explore how their transglossic practices – expressions of voice which challenge social and lin-
guistic boundaries – emerged from the intersections between socioeconomic background and
digital participation. In a mobile, multi-sited ethnography, Nordquist (2017) followed students
across their everyday movements between home, educational institutions, workplaces, social
media, transit, and elsewhere, to unpack the complex ways in which they exploited multiple
literacies and resources to conform to and challenge dominant conventions and to understand
how their literacy practices were informed by their wider backgrounds, beliefs, and aspira-
tions. From this perspective, and with the growing use of mobile devices such as smartphones,
linguistic digital ethnography becomes not so much a matter of moving methods online but
incorporating mediated interactions into investigation of participants’ physical settings.
Corpus approaches to digital language (Dayter and Rüdiger 2020) can be seen as motivated
in varying degrees by two concerns: to understand how communication is shaped or extended
by digital media (Hiippala et al. 2019) or to obtain a convenient data source to shed light on
existing sociolinguistic variation (Gauthier 2021) – or sometimes both. For example, Grieve
et al. (2018) exploit a multi-billion-word corpus of American tweets to map the spread of lexi-
cal innovations such as baeless (a single person) and rekt (wrecked or intoxicated) across the
United States, visualizing the findings through multivariate spatial analysis. Access to this big
data source enables them to confirm predicted patterns of diffusion, such as the role of large
densely populated urban areas in lexical innovation, but also reveals how the mediated context
shapes patterns of lexical innovation. For example, because of the relatively high engagement
of African Americans on Twitter, the southern US city of Atlanta emerges as an important
origin of new forms (Grieve et al. 2018). As this study shows, quantitative approaches enable
applied linguists to harness the metadata attached to online data, mapping user location, and the
distribution of posts across social networks. For example, Hiippala et al. (2019) collected a cor-
pus of geo-coded Instagram posts to explore the virtual linguistic landscape centred around a
physical cultural landmark, Senate Square in Helsinki, Finland. However, despite the strengths
of big data in revealing patterns in language use, quantitative approaches alone cannot explain
how and why users draw on linguistic features to construct identities discursively. Applied
linguists are only beginning to explore how multimodal resources can be incorporated into
quantitative linguistic analysis (O’Halloran et al. 2021) and how quantitative and qualitative
analysis can be combined to overcome these limitations (Georgakopoulou 2019).
Digital language and communication research, both qualitative and quantitative, raises new
ethical challenges for applied linguists. One issue concerns the reliance on naturally occur-
ring data, together with – or rather than – surveys or interviews, for which gaining informed
consent is arguably more straightforward. For example, although in principle applied linguists
can assume that the need for informed consent and protection of identities depends in part on
a distinction between public and private sites (Page et al. 2014: 65), privacy cannot be defined
solely in terms of platform architecture and user settings. Online users often assume and expe-
rience privacy even when interacting in online spaces that are publicly open (Mackenzie 2017).
With neither the site architecture nor users’ practices as reliable indicators of privacy, research-
ers must instead seek to understand how their participants interpret privacy and reflect on the
extent to which the researcher’s use of the discourse as data breaches participants’ expectations
regarding the trajectory of their online content.
A second ethical challenge for applied linguists lies in their reproduction and dissemina-
tion of directly quoted extracts, concordances, and original images. Extracts from online data
reproduced in research publications can be used to locate the original online context, even in
apparently private spaces with end-to-end encryption, leading to the potential reidentifying of
individuals. In much Internet research, this risk can be addressed by avoiding direct quotation
74
and instead blurring words, paraphrasing, translating, and manipulating images. However, this
may be harder to justify in applied linguistics research for which precise wording or specific
multimodal choices are key. These and other challenges confirm the need for an approach to
research ethics as a contextualized process of decision-making throughout the research process
(Spilioti and Tagg 2022).
Future directions
Future directions will depend on technological developments and the reconfigured social prac-
tices that emerge from and shape media development. However, it is possible to pinpoint areas
for greater attention. Here, I identify two such areas: greater criticality and a move towards a
post-digital approach which recognizes the inherently mediated nature of much contemporary
human communication.
On the one hand, future research needs to find ways to acknowledge the role of online
platforms in constraining the kinds of communication that can take place. Existing critical
discourse studies of digital communication combine linguistic analysis with sociopolitical
critique, critically examining the flows of information in networked societies, including the
spread of misinformation, the role of micro-celebrities and influencers, and the ways in which
digital media are exploited for purposes of parody, political stance-taking, and identity posi-
tioning. A growing body of research investigates the use of the Internet for hate speech and
mobilization by far-right and misogynistic communities (KhosraviNik and Esposito 2018), as
well as online paedophile activities (Chiang and Grant 2019). However, as Sindoni and Mos-
chini (2021) put it, such practices are but the ‘tip of the iceberg’ in terms of a critical under-
standing of online power relations. As Georgakopoulou and Spilioti (2015: 3) argue, research
must focus attention on the ways in which online activities are shaped in invisible ways by
prevailing ideologies (Ledin and Machin 2021), metrics and hidden algorithms (Georgakopou-
lou et al. 2019), commercial agendas, clickbait, and advertising imperatives. Djonov and van
Leeuwen (2018), for example, put forward a critical multimodal framework to explore how
the ‘built-in semiotic regimes’ of social media platforms – by which embedded resources are
made accessible and regulated – intersect with communicative norms and shape social prac-
tice. In their social semiotic analysis of the academic network site, ResearchGate, they find
that its design is driven by commercial interests, encouraging speedy quantifiable evaluations
at the expense of deep critical engagement. Jones (2020) outlines what he calls ‘algorithmic
pragmatics’, exploring the extent to which ‘analogue pragmatics’ is relevant to online com-
munication shaped by algorithms – computer codes that guide responses to human actions
– and how existing frameworks can be adapted to account for this. He points, for instance,
to the discrepancy in how humans and algorithms infer meaning from context: while humans
rely on negotiating shared frames of reference, algorithms base inferences on access to a vast
network of interlinked contexts, making connections that are beyond human capabilities and
often guided by commercial interests. As Jones argues, applied linguists have a role to play in
equipping people with digital literacies to engage critically with the processes shaping their
mediated communication (Androutsopoulos 2021).
On the other hand, whilst recognizing the ways in which media communication is shaped
by design decisions and site architecture, future research needs also to attend to the intersec-
tions between digital media, older forms of media, and the physical world, building on existing
ethnographic work (Dovchin et al. 2018; Nordquist 2017) to develop ways in which the digital
can be understood as part of individuals’ wider lived experiences. Elsewhere I refer to this as
a post-digital approach, which recognizes that digital technologies are no longer disruptive
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Caroline Tagg
but experienced as an inherent part of being human (Tagg and Lyons 2022). A post-digital
approach involves the honing of methodologies and analytical frameworks to explore the mul-
tilayered, polyfocal communicative encounters of networked individuals across spaces. Such
research should be multimodal and multisensorial, building on conversation analytic work
into the role of sensory practices of gaze and touch in accomplishing social action (Mondada
2018) to explore the role of digital devices as tactile objects in the real world and how material
and embodied experience is entangled in and shapes media engagement (Jewitt et al. 2020). In
my own research, I approach a post-digital scenario through the notion of repertoire, focusing
on how semiotic multimodal resources, registers, and media are deployed by networked indi-
viduals across offline and online spaces (Tagg and Lyons 2022). This line of research shows
how people, material objects, virtual artefacts, discourses, devices, platforms, and apps come
together to make meaning at a time when much of our communication – at home, school, or
work; in the street; and on the move – is mediated by digital technologies.
Related topics
technology and language learning; identity; social semiotics and multimodality; language and
materiality; languaging and translanguaging
Further reading
Androutsopoulos, J. (ed.) (2021) ‘Digital language practices: Media, awareness, pedagogy’, Special issue
in Linguistics and Education, 62. (This special issue explores the implications of digital media for
critical digital literacies education, with a focus on language/media ideologies and perspectives from
the UK, Germany, Italy, Mongolia, and Bangladesh.)
Bou-Franch, P. and Garcés Blitvich, P. (eds.) (2019) Analyzing Digital Discourse: New Insights and
Future Directions, London: Palgrave. (This edited collection lays out the state of the art of studies of
digital discourse and suggests future directions, with a focus on multimodality, identity, and media
ideologies.)
Makalela, L. and White, G. (eds.) (2021) Rethinking Language Use in Digital Africa: Technology and
Communication in Sub-Saharan Africa, Bristol: Multilingual Matters. (This collection of studies
sheds light on the use of digital media across Africa, with implications for policy and the development
of an African perspective on media communication.)
Sindoni, M. G. and Moschini, I. (eds.) (2021) ‘What’s past is prologue’, Article Collection in
Discourse, Context & Media. www.sciencedirect.com/journal/discourse-context-and-media/special-
issue/1084S24MG9M. (This special issue problematizes the state of the art on media communication
by questioning the novelty of digital practices and how they should be tackled epistemologically.)
Thurlow, C., Durscheid, C. and Diémoz, F. (eds.) (2020) Visualising Digital Discourse: Interactional,
Institutional and Ideological Perspectives, Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. (This edited volume brings
together language and communication researchers dedicated to understanding multimodality in the
context of digital media, with a focus not only on everyday interaction but also institutional practices
and semiotic ideologies.)
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Androutsopoulos, J. (2021) ‘Investigating digital language/media practices, awareness, and pedagogy:
Introduction’, Linguistics and Education, 62: 100872.
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Androutsopoulos, J. and Juffermans, K. (2014) ‘Digital language practices in superdiversity: Introduc-

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7
Intercultural communication
Zhu Hua
Introduction
Intercultural communication (IC) is a field of research that cross-cuts many well-established
scholarly fields, including applied linguistics, communication studies, social psychology,
anthropology, cultural studies, sociology, education, and sociolinguistics, due to their intel-
lectual connections and shared interests in culture, communication, and group relations. Over
the years, different definitions of IC have emerged, reflecting changing conceptualizations of
culture, research priorities of the time and different disciplinary orientations. The traditional
and often cited definition of IC as studies of both interaction between people from different
cultural and ethnic backgrounds and comparative studies of communication patterns across
cultures has given way to more nuanced definitions. For example, to foreground a more
dynamic and situated approach to meaning- and identity-making and individuals’ agency,
Zhu (2014) defined IC as a process of negotiating meaning, relevance of cultural identities,
and differences between ourselves and others. Within applied linguistics, seeing culture as
membership of a discourse community and IC as interdiscourse communication – that is,
communication between members of different discourse systems (Scollon and Scollon 1995;
Kramsch 1998; see Kramsch, this Handbook, Volume 1) – has gained traction. The discourse
approach has been very helpful in providing a much-needed framework for recognizing and
embracing heterogeneity and intersectionality of cultural memberships – culture is no longer
just about nationality and ethnicity and one can belong to several discourse communities
simultaneously. This chapter reviews these shifts in conceptualization and methodological
positioning within IC, discusses contributions of applied linguistics to the field of IC, and
explores future directions.
The first milestone in the development of IC as a field is often attributed to the success and
influence of Edward Hall and his linguist colleagues, George Trager and Ray Birdwhistell,
in setting up a training course for the American Foreign Service Institute (FSI), to prepare
diplomats and business personnel before their overseas trips in the post second world war
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082637-9 81
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period (e.g. Leeds-Hurwitz 1990; cf. Kulich et al. 2020). Through interdisciplinary collabora-
tion and a vision to foreground the role of culture (otherwise seen as ‘hidden’ or ‘silent’) in
communication, Hall and his colleagues made a convincing case for the importance of culture
in communication and international relations. They also demonstrated how to bridge academic
endeavours and professional training and education.
While the vision of Hall and his colleagues’ work remains central to the field of IC
today, Kulich et al. (2020) warn us against the danger of a ‘single story’ (Adichie 2009).
Indeed, the intellectual roots of IC and earlier interventions could be traced back to sev-
eral disciplinary fields before Hall, as documented in Kulich et al. 2020. One is cultural
anthropology, known for its emic, interpretive approach to culture, as seen in a number
of influential works on Indigenous cultures (e.g. Margaret Mead’s 1928 volume with the
title of Coming of Age in Samoa) or ‘national character’ (e.g. The Chrysanthemum and the
Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture by Benedict 1946). Another related area of work came
from race and ethnicity studies aiming to understand group identities and intercultural/
interethnic relations. Examples include Gordon Allport’s contact hypothesis (Allport 1954),
which proposes that contact and cooperation among groups under certain conditions, such
as having equal status and shared goals, decrease stereotypes and prejudice, and W. E. B.
Du Bois’ notion of ‘double consciousness’ (1903), which illustrates the struggle faced by
African Americans in seeing themselves through the eyes of others. The third area is inter-
cultural education initiatives led by Rachel Davis-DuBois and her successors through a
resource centre, Service Bureau for Intercultural Education, and ‘the Group Conversation
Method’ (Davis-DuBois 1946) to promote intercultural understanding among youth and the
local communities in order to achieve integration as opposed to assimilation. These are just
some of the examples of the areas that have shaped IC as a field and have characterized its
inter- and multidisciplinary nature.
To move beyond the ‘single-story’ bias, we also need to recognize that the current his-
torical accounts of IC are largely synthesized based on what is available or accessible in a
‘single language’ (i.e. English) and a ‘single geographical area’ (i.e. The United States (US)
with some occasional recognition of the contribution from the Europe). A global look at
the history and development of language and IC studies by Martin et al. (2020) is a good
starting point for an overview of the diverse trajectories of IC research in different regions.
Some examples of major impetus for the development of IC research include: the acute need
to rebuild connections with the rest of the world and to grow their economic power in the
aftermath of the Second World War in Japan; the political debates on immigration and inte-
gration of diverse ethnic groups, the establishment of the Erasmus programme in 1987, and
the development of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR)
in Europe; and the need to train speakers of other languages and to facilitate international
exchanges in China.
These local conditions spurred the expansion, as well as diversification, of IC research
across time and space. Martin et al. (2020) acknowledged the contribution of applied lin-
guistics to IC studies in foregrounding the role of language in intercultural encounters
and the role of IC in language education, as well as in developing an interpretive research
paradigm. Within applied linguistics, IC research agendas have expanded from search-
ing for culture-specific discourse strategies and communication styles (e.g. interactionalist
sociolinguistics, such as Gumperz 1978, 1982) and language and intercultural education
(e.g. Byram 1989, 1997; Feng et al. 2009) in the early days to a more historically situated
and politically sensitive examination of the process of IC in a variety of contexts in more
recent years.
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An epistemological issue facing IC research relates to theories about cultural differences.
There are two significant paradigms. One could be characterized as ‘searching for cultural
differences’. This paradigm was born out of the need to make the case for ‘culture as commu-
nication’ in the early days, as exemplified in Hall (1959: 186). A number of noticeable works
within applied linguistics followed this paradigm. They tended to start with identifying ‘dif-
ferences’ between cultures and then attempted to account for those differences. For example,
Robert Lado’s Linguistics Across Cultures (1957) was the first attempt to make the case for
a systematic comparison of differences across languages and cultures for language learning.
The contrastive study on writing patterns by Robert Kaplan (1966), probably best known for
his doodle drawings of different ‘cultural thought patterns’, is influential in advancing ideas
about cultural differences in writing, but it was later critiqued for being ethnocentric and essen-
tialist. The identification of cultural differences in interactional and discourse strategies has
benefited from increasing attention to context, of which culture is an important factor, among
interactional sociolinguists. Studies such as Gumperz (1978, 1982) and Tannen (1984) sought
to identify differences in the ways people of different ethnicities or genders manage conversa-
tions in terms of frames of interpretation and communicative styles, such as ‘high involvement’
and ‘indirectness’. (This approach is known as ‘difference theory’.) Within pragmatics, there
was similar interest in cultural approaches to language use. Various theoretical constructs,
such as politeness and face (Scollon et al. 2012), rapport (Spencer-Oatey 2002) and cultural
scripts (Goddard and Wierzbicka 2004), are proposed to demonstrate different ‘cultural’ ways
of speaking. Meanwhile, research in cross-cultural pragmatics, inspired by the first influential
systematic investigation into similarities and differences in the realization patterns of the same
speech acts across different languages (the Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realisation Patterns
project, Blum-Kulka and Olshtain 1984), produced a large quantity of empirical evidence to
illustrate differences in communication patterns across cultures. This paradigm of searching for
cultural differences, along with the increasing number of publications on cultural know-how
for the general public, have raised awareness of cultural differences in communication – the
very mission Hall and his colleagues set out to achieve in the 1950s.
The second paradigm can be described as politics of cultural differences. In this paradigm,
the focus is not on cultural differences themselves but on how differences are constructed.
Thornton (1988) argues that cultural understanding should not be ‘simply a knowledge of
differences, but rather an understanding of how and why differences in language, thought,
use of materials and behaviours has come about’ (p. 27). Therefore, the focus should be about
understanding meanings, functions, and histories of differences rather than using the apparent
‘fact’ of differences to explain history, politics, and beliefs. As an example, Thornton illus-
trates that the perceived differences between British and Zulu cultures need to be understood
through three perspectives: historical products of social stress and warfare in the era of British
empire-building, the outcome of the increased coherence of both British and Zulu societies
through (forced) contact, and the continuum of cultural ideas and practices across the two
locations, fossilized through various means of knowledge dissemination dominant in the West
(i.e. books).
Against this context, there have been a number of efforts to shift the focus from culture-spe-
cific communication pattens to dialectic relationships between social structures and linguistic
practices (e.g. Sarangi 1994). Scollon and Scollon (2001) have called for a mediated discourse
approach, seeking to reconstitute the research agenda of IC around social action rather than
categorial memberships or cultural differences. For them, cultural memberships do not have
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direct causal status in themselves. They only become problematic when they are shown to ‘be
productive of ideological contradiction’ or when ‘the participants themselves call upon social
group membership in making strategic claims within the actions under study’. Thus, they argue
that the analyst should ask the following: ‘How does the concept of culture arise in these social
actions? Who has introduced culture as a relevant category, for what purposes and with what
consequences?’ (Scollon and Scollon 2001: 545).
These new perspectives on culture have opened up a range of new lines of investigation
among language and IC researchers. One is the exploration of how identities and cultural mem-
berships are constructed through interactions, also known as interculturality through interac-
tion research. Another is the interrogation of the ideological processes underlying IC, which
is broadly referred to as ‘critical intercultural communication’ research. This line of research
examines the impact of structures of power and socioeconomic relations and ideologies on IC,
exemplified in The Handbook of Critical Intercultural Communication edited by Nakayama and
Halualani (2010) and a collection of articles in a special issue edited by Zhu and Kramsch (2016)
on the theme of symbolic power and conversational inequality in intercultural communication.
Zhu et al. (2022) further argue to (re)focus attention to the way acts of distinction (i.e. explicit
marking, accentuating, and legitimatization of cultural differences, building on Bourdieu’s
notion of distinction, 1984, 1991) function in everyday encounters in the wider context of the
social, political, and racial polarization that has characterized the 2020s. They illustrate how the
notion of acts of distinction, supported with principles from interactional sociolinguistics and
moment analysis, can help us understand the dynamics of domination in vivo and the way that
differences are imposed, resisted, and negotiated in situated social interactions.

Globalization, the changing dynamics of geopolitics, and, more recently, the COVID-19 pan-
demic and rising nationalism have heightened the significance of intercultural issues in almost
every aspect of daily life. Some of the latest debates and contributions within applied linguis-
tics are summarized here.
Where is culture in language learning and teaching? What are the

goals of language and culture learning?
The complex relationship between language and culture has been a major concern of research
into the role of culture in language teaching and learning. Debates have been centred around the
extent to which we should pay attention to the role of culture in language learning and teaching
and what constitutes the goals of language and culture learning.
Byram, together with his colleagues, played an instrumental role in the so-called cultural
turn in language teaching in the 1990s, placing culture at centre stage in language and culture
pedagogy. In his early model for foreign language teaching, Byram (1989) includes cultural
awareness, cultural experience, and language awareness in addition to language learning. He
believes that the goal of language teaching and learning lies in developing the learner’s inter-
cultural communicative competence (ICC), which includes knowledge, skills of interpreting
and relating, attitudes (curiosity and openness), skills of discovery and interaction, and critical
cultural awareness.
Kramsch (2009) sees the purpose of language teaching and learning as developing multilin-
gual and intercultural subjects. She argues that language teaching and learning creates a ‘third
culture’, a metaphor for the ultimate outcome where learners combine their own and others’
84
cultures through language learning. She emphasizes the significance of in-between spaces
and the need for language teaching to respond to the changing social and political conditions.
Kramsch later reframes the ‘third culture’ as ‘symbolic competence’, to foreground the abil-
ity ‘not only to approximate or appropriate for oneself someone else’s language, but to shape
the very context in which the language is learned and used through the learner’s and other’s
embodied history and subjectivity’ (Kramsch and Whiteside 2008: 664). Crucially, symbolic
competence consists of an ability to frame and reframe the distribution of symbolic power in
conversational encounters,
knowing when to speak and when to remain silent, when to talk about the inequality of the
ongoing talk and when to let them pass, when to complain or counter-attack, and when to
gently but unmistakably readjust the balance of power through humor or irony.
(Kramsch 2016: 526)
Liddicoat (2014) envisages language teaching and learning as an intercultural mediation

process to ‘formulate positions between cultures as a mechanism to develop and express under-
standings of another culture’ (p. 259). And intercultural mediation involves ‘awareness of one’s
own cultural practices and expectations in relation to the aspect of language use being mediated
as well as their knowledge of the target culture’ (ibid.). Zhu et al. (2019) propose approaching
language learning as a process of translanguaging and cultural translation, whereby learners
adapt, appropriate, and transform symbolic values of sense- and meaning-making practices
that have evolved in a specific community, and transfer them to another community.
How do language, identity, and culture interact and impact

on each other?
Within the broad field of intercultural communication, we have seen the prefix ‘inter-’ gradu-
ally taking precedence over ‘cross-’, showing a growing consensus among scholars that people
of different cultural backgrounds interact with each other. ‘Inter-’ also has an edge over ‘multi-’
as in ‘multicultural’ or ‘multiculturalism’. A focus on interculturality has the potential of going
beyond the mere ‘tolerance of difference’ and ‘peaceful co-existence’ of cultural groups and
communities implied by the notion of multiculturality (Kim 2009). Within applied linguistics,
interculturality through interaction emerged as a line of inquiry with the growing recogni-
tion among applied linguists that cultural differences should not be taken as a priori nor as
static conditions. It embraces a constructivist paradigm and focuses on joint social activities
and their impact on how meaning and social identities are constructed and how participants
make aspects of their identities – in particular, ‘cultural identities’ – relevant or irrelevant
in interactions through the use of various interactional resources. Methodologically, it relies
on conversation analysis/ethnomethodology and interactional sociolinguistics and examines
interactional practices and sequences of talk to understand what participants do with cultural
memberships; what identities they orient to, align with or resist; and how they ascribe identities
to others (for a review, see Zhu 2019 [2014]).
The possibility that one can make cultural identity irrelevant to interactions is demonstrated
in Nishizaka’s seminal work (1995), in which she analyzes how a journalist oriented to his
interactional role as an interviewer and his professional identity rather than his Japaneseness
in a radio interview. Further examples of the interactive constitution of interculturality can be
found in Mori (2003), Brownlie (2018) and in two special issues of Pragmatics (Higgins 2007)
and Language and Intercultural Communication (Young and Sercombe 2010). These studies
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explore a variety of contexts and motivations for interculturality in interaction, particularly

how ethnicity and nationality can be used as resources by speakers to challenge, maintain or
transcend differences. Zhu (2010) also demonstrates how interculturality helps to understand
dynamics within groups such as migrant communities which have otherwise been researched
homogeneously.
Recently, there has been some discussion about adopting the ‘trans’ prefix as in ‘transcul-
turality’ to emphasize the fluidity of cultural identification and communication practices and
to capture a sense of moving through and across, rather than in-between, cultural and linguistic
boundaries (Baker and Sangiamchit 2019: 473; Abu-Er-Rub et al. 2019). Baker (2022) explains
that compared with the inter-metaphor, the trans-metaphor has the added benefit of transgress-
ing and transcending linguistic and cultural borders and avoiding methodological nationalism
‘that implicitly or explicitly accepts nations as given entities, in, between, or towards which
culture is said to have developed’ (Abu-Er-Rub et al. 2019: xxvii). Evidently, the idea of trans-
culturality draws inspiration from the ‘translanguaging turn’ (Li, this volume) in applied lin-
guistic and sociolinguistic research, which emphasizes multilingual language users’ capacity to
create an apparently seamless flow between languages and language varieties and to transcend
the boundaries between named languages and/or language varieties, as well as the boundaries
between language and other semiotic systems.
In a wider context, both interculturality through interaction and transculturality carry the
trademarks of post-modern, performative, and interdiscursive approaches to identity and lan-
guage which have been inspired by the mobility turn (Sheller and Urry 2006) in the social
sciences. Research from migration studies, sociolinguistics, and applied linguistics has high-
lighted the unprecedented complexity, multiplicity, and inherent contradictions associated with
‘identities in mobility’ and provided new insights into the questions of whether or to what
extent ‘fixed’ identities such as ‘ethnicity’ can be transported, imposed, assumed, or negotiated
in the context of increasing connectivities and superdiversity in every corner of the world (Zhu
2017). The emphasis of such work is on the agency mobile individuals exercise in negotiating
identities, whether they be transnational workers, international students, or displaced refugees.
Cultural differences are not just negotiable. They constitute interactional resources that people
draw upon in ‘doing’ identities, when they reference certain cultural practices, claim cultural
expertise, or invoke cultural differences through indexicality.
How can intercultural communication research contribute to equality

and social justice agendas?
For a long time, ‘misunderstanding’ has been used as a diagnostic label in the IC literature
for what goes wrong in intercultural interactions. The term, however, rests on a romanticized
notion of IC – in which problems in IC are someone’s failure to understand what is said and
can be made good if people make an effort. The reality is that parties involved in IC are rarely
in an equal power relationship. As Piller (2017: 172) points out, without studying inequality
and asking the question ‘What makes culture relevant to whom in which context for which
purposes?’ culture is ‘nothing more than a convenient and lazy explanation’.
Intercultural encounters are contact zones where ‘cultures meet, clash and grapple with each
other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery,
or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today’ (Pratt 1991: 34). Zhu
(2019) identified three practices which carry the trademarks of inequality but are rarely talked
about in the existing literature. These include the penalty for being different from norms of
dominant groups; the burden of adaptation – who is expected to accommodate whom when
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there are differences in cultural practices and who has the authority to make decisions on such
matters; and an (in)visible pecking order of cultures or cultural values which may have been
internalized by members of subordinate groups. Deepa Oommen (2016), who was born and
educated in India and now works in an American university, talks about how growing up in
post-colonial India has resulted in her internalized sense of inferiority: ‘I had unconsciously
accepted whiteness as symbol of superiority, power and dominance, and when I came to the
United States, it assumed significance in my brown body, marking it as the other when con-
trasted with white bodies’ (p. 80). Further examples of how power structure and agency are
navigated by interpreters or migrants can be found in Cho (2021) and Canagarajah (2013).
Kramsch (2016) attributes the problems in intercultural encounters to symbolic power, bor-
rowing the term from Bourdieu (1991). For Kramsch (2016), symbolic power is not something
that some people have and others do not, nor about one group dominating another. Rather, it
is about how power becomes legitimate and recognized by those who are subjected to it and
how this kind of domination is embedded in our everyday practices through symbolic systems
and forms. Zhu and Kramsch (2016) demonstrate various forms that symbolic power can take
in intercultural conversations that result in inequality and, in particular, how a conversation is
characterized by the complicity in which power is both allocated and exercised, imposed upon
and subjected to. For example, when a participant positions themselves as a non-native speaker
by saying ‘My English is not very good,’ they grant the native speaker a profit of distinction
whereby the native speaker feels entitled to correct the non-native speaker’s grammar or obliged
to compliment the non-native speaker on their English – ‘No, your English is not bad at all.’
What are the perks and perils of intercultural encounters mediated

through digital technology?
The themes in technology-mediated IC studies identified by Macfadyen et al. (2004) are still
relevant today, if not made more prominent during the COVID-19 pandemic. The following
summary combines their review and some recent literature.
Culture of the Internet. What are the nature and culture(s) of the Internet? Is the Internet
the locus of corporate control or a new social space? Is the Internet a site of creation of an
entirely new culture or an extension of existing hierarchies of social and economic inequality?
Do subcultures exist within the Internet? Why are some groups marginalized on the Internet
and how? What contributes to digital divide? How can we harness digital technology to fight
misinformation and fake news?
Language of the Internet. What are the defining features of the language of the Internet?
Do we need new analytical frameworks to examine online language and literacy practices?
Is the language of the Internet best described as digital text, a semiotic system, discourse, a
communicative tool, or multimodal communication (Schröder et al. 2023)? Do we need new
literacy skills, new forms of thinking, or digital language in order to communicate effectively
online? How does the Internet facilitate the emergence of global English and translingual prac-
tices (Li and Lee 2021), and language play and subversion (Li and Zhu 2019)?
Online intercultural communication. In what way does online IC differ from in person
IC? At the time of their review, Macfadyen et al. (2004) were concerned that the existing
available IC studies tended to borrow ready-made cultural models to explore online IC. Since
then, a few studies have emerged. These studies have probed the differences between online
and offline communication along the dimension of what is real/true versus virtual/shallow,
the control over social interactions via technologies, the degree of engagement, individual
difference in motivations, expectation, communicative norms, pedagogy of ICC development,
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Zhu Hua
interpreting/relating skills, and the degree of investment in each other (e.g. Kern and Devolotte
2018; Lawrence 2013).
Digital identity and community. How do individuals construct digital identity, online
personae or virtual ethnicity? Does technology limit or facilitate virtual identity and virtual
community? How does the deterritorialized nature of a virtual community impact the way that
community is constructed? Examples of how social media and networked communities break
down cultural borders and create new (and compromised) individual and ethnic identities dur-
ing health crises can be found in Ngwainmbi (2022).
Digital intercultural education. What opportunities and challenges do digital technology
bring to intercultural education? Are the Internet and communication technologies changing
cultures of teaching and learning, for example, creating opportunities for collaborative learn-
ing and membership of a dynamic, international, global community? How does differential
access to online learning opportunities disadvantage learners from particular groups and how
can we use the Internet to enable equal access to education? How can we counterbalance
Western dominance of online education and challenge the unquestioned implementation of
Western pedagogies in international distance education programme design? Online intercul-
tural exchange has been implemented in foreign language education since the 1990s (O’Dowd
2016) and within the context of a protracted crisis and forced immobility, such as a conflict
zone (Imperiale 2021) and the COVID-19 pandemic (Liu and Shirley 2021).
The impact of the Internet on culture. How is online IC driving social, political, and cultural
changes? Do technologies serve as agents of globalization and cultural homogenization? How
can the Internet enhance local cultural values and communicative preferences through its global
connectivity? Does online communication represent opportunities or threats to human cultures?
Main methodological concerns

There have been plenty of warnings against ethnocentrism and essentialism in IC in the lit-
erature. The former is commonly understood as the tendency to evaluate other cultures from
the perspective of one’s own culture and the latter as the categorization of people according
to essentialist qualities through the assumption that people’s attitudes, beliefs, and behaviours
are reflective and indicative of the norms of the culture they belong to. These two concerns
also apply to researching IC. For example, Sarangi (1994) critiques the practice of analytic
stereotyping, whereby analysts start with prior categorizations of participants as members of
particular cultural groups and then resort to a principle of cultural differences in accounting for
instances of miscommunication.
Other examples of conceptual and methodological concerns include methodological nation-
alism, a practice of approaching nation/state/society as a sole and/or homogeneous unit of
analysis (Wimmer and Schiller 2002). Piller (2017: 68) argues that a nation-based approach to
IC is instantiation of banal nationalism that promotes national ways of seeing the world and
‘stereotypes about essentialist and homogeneous national identity’.
Reification is another issue of concern. If a study starts with people from different cultural groups,
is it at risk of circularity or reification? This problem is well articulated by Scollon et al. (2012: 4):
How does a researcher isolate a situation to study as ‘intercultural communication’ in the

first place? If you start by picking a conversation between an ‘American’ and a ‘Chinese’,
you have started by presupposing that ‘Americans’ and ‘Chinese’ will be different from
each other, that this difference will be significant, and that this difference is the most
important and defining aspect of that social situation.
88
There is a new form of essentialism, termed as neo-essentialism (Holliday 2011; Cole and
Meadows 2013). It describes the tension in attempts to go beyond national cultures in IC schol-
arship on the one hand and, on the other hand, falling back on the traditional, essentialist use
of national culture as the basic unit.
To move away from the Eurocentric tendency in researching IC, Pörner (2014) warns us
against cultural exceptionalism among Asia-centric scholars, who, notwithstanding their good
intentions, limit one’s analysis to the essence of a non-Western or Indigenous culture, in their
movement towards de-Westernization and Indigenization. By searching for essence of a cul-
ture, however, they reproduce ethnocentrism, the very problem they set out to challenge.

The broader research agendas and scopes in the current IC research agendas have practical
implications on the way we do research. A special issue edited by Ladegaard and Phipps
(2020) calls for a translational approach to researching IC that foregrounds research as social
action. Seeing research as social action requires us to integrate IC research agendas with
current social and political issues, to embed impact in our research as opposed to seeing
research and impact as a two-stage endeavour, and to acknowledge the existence of values
of researchers and participants – for example, what motivates us to choose the topic, what we
would like to achieve beyond addressing research questions, and how these values influence
the way we interact with participants and analyze and interpret the data (Zhu 2020; Holmes
et al. 2022).
In addition, we need to revisit the relationship between researcher and participants. The
conventional research approach whereby participants appear as suppliers of data, or data itself,
does not work anymore if we see research as social action. Participants are partners and co-
agents of change. Neither are they powerless nor simply waiting there to be empowered. We
need to go about research as a process of connections and conversations. But how do we
transform the de facto positionality between the researcher and the researched and implement
the fundamental conceptual change in ways of working with participants? These are questions
that need further probing.
Future directions
The developments in the key concepts underpinning IC research and repositioning of goals of
IC research has spurred IC research to an increasingly critical and socially engaged direction,
in particular, in the following areas of conceptual debates:
Culture
What does (critical) interculturality mean? How does it help us understand society, group rela-
tion, and identity? Are we ready for transculturality? How does globalization and, more recently,
growing nationalism and tribalism impact on cultural fluidity and boundary transgressing?
Communication
Is (intercultural) communication neutral? Halualani et al. (2009) have argued that ‘the notion
of communication as an ideologically uncontaminated space allowing for the free play and
exchange of ideas between self-governing, rational agents willfully expressing themselves in a
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Zhu Hua
wide-open arena of neutral dialogue and communication’ needs to be challenged. What is lost,
gained, or transformed in the process of (intercultural) communication?
Language
What implications does the notion of translanguaging, a new way of understanding language
and communication and transcending artificial and ideological boundaries (see Li, this vol-
ume), have in furthering our understanding of IC? The ‘trans’ in ‘translanguaging’ challenges
the lingual bias in IC research and brings attention to the full range of semiotic resources for
intercultural encounters in which gesture, gaze, body movements, touch, taste, smell, colour,
materiality, and so on matter in the same way as linguistic codes. It also challenges the deficit/
difference model still prevalent in IC research and focuses on the agency of individuals in
creating, deploying, and interpreting signs for communication.
And finally, expanding scope of socially engaged inquiry. How can intercultural research
contribute to our understanding of pressing social issues and global challenges such as inequal-
ity, health crises, sustainability, the climate crisis, data-empowered societies, and conflict
around the world? Kulich et al. (2021) appeal to us to re-examine intercultural research in
relation to the COVID-19 pandemic and Zhu et al. (2022) argue to refocus attention on acts
of distinction – that is, how boundaries between groups are drawn and dominance plays out in
everyday life.
Related topics
language and culture; translanguaging; language and race; language socialization
Further reading
MacDonald, M. (ed.) (2022) ‘Twentieth anniversary special issue: Issues, controversies and difficult ques-
tions’, Special issue of Language and Intercultural Communication, 22(3): 253–411. (A collection of
papers that explore the development and trends within language and intercultural communication
research in response to four global crises: the COVID-19 pandemic, the migration crisis, conflicts, and
the digital divide. It also includes some papers on intercultural creative practices.)
Piller, I. (2017) Intercultural Communication: A Critical Introduction, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press. (This monograph provides a sociolinguistic perspective to the field of critical intercultural
communication.)
Zhu, H. (2019) Exploring Intercultural Communication, London: Routledge. (This monograph investi-
gates the role of language in intercultural communication. It uses a ‘back to front’ approach, starting
with an examination of intercultural issues in everyday life, followed by a close examination of fac-
tors and skills that lead to successful intercultural communication. It concludes with a discussion of
influential theories and methodological considerations.)
Zhu, H. and Kramsch, C. (eds.) (2016) ‘Symbolic power and conversational inequality in intercultural
communication’, Special issue of Applied Linguistics Review, 7(4): 375–529. (This is a collection of
papers that investigate how symbolic power is defined and constituted in intercultural communication
and how power inequality impacts the way language is used.)
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8
Institutional discourse
Introduction
In this chapter, we reflect on different perspectives on and approaches to applied linguistics
research in and around institutions. We do this as two members of a research and teaching
centre for applied linguistics in the UK who have both worked with institutional discourse in
our research and teaching. Though we have done so in different ways, we purposefully use our
common ground to question dichotomies that are sometimes assumed to exist in the study of
institutional discourse, such as the supposed divide between text-based, descriptive, and criti-
cal approaches. Privileging this way of describing institutional discourse inevitably means that
we have limited space to devote to typical, chronological overviews that one might expect in a
handbook chapter on the subject. For readers looking for these, we recommend excellent exist-
ing summaries of research on institutional discourse, including Sarangi and Roberts (1999),
Mayr (2015) and indeed Roberts (2011) in the first edition of this Handbook.
As both of us are involved in MA programmes that draw on the concept of institutional
discourse, we have joined forces for this chapter with the aim of helping readers navigate
this complex, often contested, and kaleidoscopic object of study. We show how institutional
discourse can be approached in a variety of ways, each with implications for how research-
ers think about discourse and institutions, as well as for ways in which they ask questions,
generate, and make sense of data. For some sections of the chapter, we separate our two
voices and disambiguate who is speaking, Zsófia or Miguel. This makes sense in particular
where we describe projects that only one of us is involved in. In other sections, however,
we write as a unified voice to provide holistic reflections. In this way, we develop and hope
to model a way in which collaboration and cooperation between supposedly different view-
points can lead to deeper understandings of situations, questions, and issues in everyday life
(cf. Simpson 2011).
In the following sections, we outline different views of institutional discourse, why it is
significant, what aspects have received particular attention, and what current and future topics
of importance might be within applied linguistics. We also present two examples from our own
recent research to demonstrate two different but complementary ways in which institutional
discourse might be studied.
94 DOI: 10.4324/9781003082637-10
Defining institutions and institutional discourse

An institution is often defined as a large entity, similar to an organization but not necessarily
commercial in nature, with various professions located within it, both physically and met-
aphorically (Sarangi and Roberts 1999). University College London (UCL), where we are
located, is one example of such an institution. It encompasses, and in some cases houses, mul-
tiple professions, and professionals – administrators, accountants, professors, teaching assis-
tants, researchers, technicians, cleaners, counsellors, managers, and security guards, to name
a few, all at varying levels of different professional hierarchies – carrying out a wide range
of interlinked activities. What unites (or should unite) these professions and professionals are
shared habitual practices (Roberts 2009: 181) – ‘how we do things around here’. These include
stable and enduring features of talk and text assembled through particular activities in social
settings (often specific to small teams, departments, or entire domains of institutions) which
bring with them their own histories and traditions – that is, ‘the institutional order’ (Mayr 2008;
see also Smith 2005). Professions do not need to be united by being co-located in a particular
space or building.
Existing research in the field has mostly focused on governmental and non-governmental
organizations and settings, such as healthcare (e.g. Moyer 2011), social work (e.g. Hall et al.
2006), legal practice (e.g. Angermeyer 2009), bureaucracies (e.g. Sarangi and Slembrouck
1996), citizen and immigration services (e.g. Codó 2008), or education (e.g. Martín Rojo
2010). In these types of institutions, it is recognized that activities, relations, and economic
outcomes are shaped by ideas, values, and assumptions of ‘good’ language, culture, identity,
nationhood, and citizenship that have consolidated worldwide since the advent of modern
nationalism in the 19th century (Bauman and Briggs 2003). And discourse has been central to
explorations of these institutions, ‘both as a locus of analysis of the transformation of practice
in such settings and as the means through which institutions narrate and legitimize the changes
they undergo’ (Codó and Pérez-Milans 2014: 1). In other words, discourse is one of the princi-
pal means by which institutions create a coherent social reality that frames their sense of who
they are (Mumby and Clair 1997) and how they do things.
In this chapter, we understand discourse as ‘a general mode of semiosis, i.e. meaningful
semiotic behaviour’ comprising ‘all forms of meaningful semiotic human activity seen in con-
nection with social, cultural, and historical patterns and developments of use’ (Blommaert
2005: 2–3). At the same time, we recognize that, although it is (often) impossible and poten-
tially counterproductive (cf. Heller 2001) to maintain a distinction between macro societal,
micro textual, and sometimes meso levels of analysis, most research will privilege certain
aspects of discourse, often for practical reasons. Readers will see this difference in emphasis in
the two examples of current research that we present further here. We hope this will illustrate
clearly that there are many ways of studying institutional discourse.
We should also note that discourse is not by definition institutional. But it becomes so when
‘participants engage in and accomplish institutionally relevant activities . . . and in doing so,
orient to the relevance of their institutional identities for the interaction’ (Drew and Sorjonen
2011: 193). One example that many of our readers will be familiar with is student assignment
marking. This is a process where institutional categories (i.e. grades) are applied to pieces of
work based on institutional criteria (i.e. marking criteria) by one or more professionals (i.e.
tutors/markers) to evaluate work produced by professionals in training (i.e. students). Although
there may be disagreement between professionals when it comes to this evaluation, discussion
95
tends to be (or should be, from the institution’s perspective) conducted in terms of the criteria
themselves. Both the professionals and professionals-to-be generally accept that this is how
student work is evaluated, thereby reinforcing institutional realities.
Typical themes of research on institutional discourse

Traditionally, research on institutional discourse has tended to examine how organizations work,
how ‘lay’ people and experts interact and how knowledge and power get constructed and circu-
late within routines, systems, and common-sense practices of work-related settings. One main
focus for investigations of institutional discourse has been (often unspoken) rules governing lan-
guage, communication, and discourse (cf. Foucault 1981) which contribute to regulating who is
or is not there, is or is not referred to or called upon, speaks or not, what can/cannot be said, and
how things need to be said and categorized. This ‘order’ has implications for how professions
are constructed and enacted, how power dynamics work, and how social inequality is produced
and naturalized at large. A focus on language allows us to show that the degree of regulation and
control being exerted is often implicit rather than explicitly coercive. An early study by Deetz
and Mumby (1985), for example, found that war metaphors used to describe the activities of an
organization can establish a framework of action and interpretation, a way of looking at things,
that makes certain executive decisions appear legitimate or ‘normal’, because they make sense
within a frame, or mindset, of battle. Recent experimental studies have confirmed that meta-
phors influence reasoning in this way because they subtly foreground some aspects of a topic or
situation while backgrounding others (e.g. Thibodeau and Boroditsky 2011).
Another important theme has been the interactional processes and rules of specific activi-
ties, such as service encounters, doctor-patient consultations, or police interviews. Here, the
attention has often been on ‘professionals’ themselves, with the aim of mapping the accom-
plishment of goal-oriented activities (such as buying-selling or breaking bad news) within spe-
cific institutions. Nowhere are institutional constraints on goal-oriented activities more explicit
than in legal contexts, such as courtroom interactions (Atkinson and Drew 1979) and police
interrogations (Heydon 2005). Heydon (2005), for instance, showed that during police inter-
views, officers (i.e. institutional representatives) use (re)formulations to summarize the gist of
what has been said by suspects to construct narratives with some details highlighted and others
missed out. This allows them to get closer to an institutionally ‘preferred version’ of events,
within the legal constraint of having to record a suspect’s version of events.
Although this kind of research does not necessarily set out to investigate inequality, in prac-
tice, interpretations do often centre around this issue. In investigating job interviews as gatekeep-
ing encounters, for example, Gumperz (1992) and later Campbell and Roberts (2007) surfaced
the specific knowledge assumptions and expectations for how responses to interview questions
should be formulated that underpin decision-making in the hiring process – and thus what the
socioeconomic consequences may be when different groups have unequal access to the required
assumptions and expectations. This demonstrates that while various approaches to institutional
discourse may start from different positions and focus on different aspects of the object of study,
there is also considerable overlap in what ends up being said about institutions. As Roberts (2011:
84) summarized, ‘Institutional discourse cannot be uncoupled from powerful discourse.’

In the last few decades, the field has progressively moved from a focus on themes presented here
to broader perspectives on how institutions and institutional discourse might affect everyday
96
lives and realities and how they get embedded in broader structural inequalities (Cameron
2000). This can be seen in analyses of institutions as ‘sites of struggle’ (e.g. Mumby and Clair
1997; Sarangi and Roberts 1999; Heller 1999), which captures the idea that meaning-making
practices, social/moral categories (about practices and participants), and other forms of knowl-
edge (re)produced, circulated, and attributed value in institutional settings
1 are always tied to wider political configurations and socioeconomic interests of those who
have sought to establish them and
2 constitute a discursive terrain in which different social groups fight over (re)defining and
controlling what counts as legitimate knowledge and participation.
Critical ethnographic and sociolinguistic research of educational institutions, for instance, has
documented how daily discursive (re)production of what counts as a ‘good student’, legitimate
knowledge or appropriate participation in a given context can hardly be detached from ways
in which class-based and racial hierarchies are reinstated vis-à-vis long-standing histories of
capitalism/colonialism (e.g. Lin and Martin 2005). Given the importance of institutions as sites
of struggle within the study of institutional discourse, regardless of perspective, we centre our
current research contributions in the next section around this issue.

Our approaches in this chapter draw on the shared assumption that daily communicative activi-
ties are a key window onto the study of how institutionally arranged social relations, cat-
egories, and knowledge are (re)made under specific socioeconomic and political conditions.
Although we focus on different institutional settings and take different types of communicative
‘texts’ as the entry point, we share an interest in exploring struggles over who gets to define
what counts as valuable ways of knowing and doing and what the consequences might be for
those concerned.
Zsófia – what is a ‘good’ death?

I, Zsófia, experienced institutions as potential sites of struggle in the context of a collaborative,
ESRC-funded research project (ES/J007927/1, PI Elena Semino) investigating what metaphors
and narratives reveal about palliative care professionals’ views of ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ deaths
(Demjén et al. 2016; Semino et al. 2014, 2018). My work tends to focus very much on (ver-
bal) language and (verbal) texts themselves, and the institutional nature of this language, or
indeed the institution itself, is rarely in focus. This is because my interest is in understanding
people’s lived experience (whether as patients, professionals, or other types of participants) of
illness, health, and healthcare through language they use to describe this. Nevertheless, since
healthcare is one of the prototypical institutions that has been the object of study in applied
linguistics (Sarangi and Roberts 1999), institutions and institutionalization do come into play.
They are either made relevant by people themselves, or the concepts are needed for making
sense of data. The study I describe here is of the second type.
As part of the multidisciplinary Metaphor in End-of-life Care project (http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/
melc/), the team, including me, interviewed 13 healthcare professionals working in leader-
ship positions in hospice and palliative care in the UK. We explored constructions of ‘good’
and ‘bad’ deaths in these interviews, focusing specifically on metaphors and narratives that
participants produced during the interviews. We noticed striking similarities across healthcare
97
professionals regardless of setting and geographical location within the UK, especially in con-
structions of good deaths. While interviewees always pointed out that a good death is a matter
of perspective and explicitly recognized that most people wish to die at home, without profes-
sional intervention, they also constructed good deaths using a limited number of recurring
metaphors, such as being ‘at peace/peaceful’, being ‘symptom-/pain-free’, having ‘open’ con-
versations with family members, and accepting death as the ‘end’ of one’s ‘journey’.
Excerpt 1
For me I suppose it’s a good death . . . it’s about peacefulness you know and having peace
being peaceful being comfortable you know being at peace with yourself but also with the
your surroundings erm being as comfortable and pain free, I think pain free is to the a the
crucial element to it
Excerpt 2
She was able to accept that it was the end so I think that’s what you would call a good
death.
Excerpt 3
So it’s having those kinds of open discussions with them to try and erm give them the
options.
The narratives describing examples of good deaths also showed remarkable consistency across
our interviewees. They invariably began at a point when a lot had already happened to patients –
they had received a terminal diagnosis and their health had deteriorated substantially – and
focused on a current difficult situation with potential to result in a ‘bad’ death (rather than the
diagnosis or deterioration). The core of the narrative was then about how this situation was
addressed by professional interventions in hospice, and changed to such an extent that the
patient had a good death. Excerpt 4 is a good example of this:
Excerpt 4
Erm I think of another gentleman who came to the hospice, he was a Portuguese speaker,
had pretty much no English at all. And he’d had recurrent hiccoughs for about five months.
And the medical team put in a referral for him to have some acupuncture. And looking
at his case history, he was getting so depressed not just with the hiccoughs but with his
diagnosis of stomach cancer. And he’d been suicidal at one stage, he was so depressed
that he couldn’t enjoy his wife’s cooking. He was in one of the wards and was desperate to
get better to go home. And we went to see him as a team and did some acupuncture, and
the recurrent hiccoughs erm reduced considerably, in the first instance and then and then
stopped and he was able to go home. And so I think that was a good piece of collective
collaborative work. To actually fulfil the wishes of you know he wanted to get home spend
a bit of time and be able enjoy his wife’s cooking. Erm he died a few months later, but I
think that was an illustration of you know an immediate sort of response to a request that
worked quite well.
The actions that constitute a successful professional intervention tended to be attributed to

a collective agent (e.g. ‘we’, ‘as a team’, ‘collective collaborative work’) and a fairly large
98
proportion of the stories consisted of reflections and Labovian evaluation (Labov 2013).
This is because death is generally considered unwelcome and associated with physical and
emotional suffering, so a positive assessment of particular deaths requires substantial and
sensitive discursive work. Interviewees tended to evaluate deaths as positive implicitly by
focusing explicit evaluation on the hospice team’s intervention (e.g. ‘good piece of . . . work’,
‘worked quite well’) as well as by using past tense or hypothetical references to negative
things that were resolved or avoided by that intervention (e.g. ‘was getting so depressed’).
In this way, narratives made the case that dying in a hospice is better than dying in hospital
or at home without any hospice care and gently countered widely held views – explicitly
acknowledged by interviewees – that it is best to die at home. These homogeneous descrip-
tions are in contrast with how patients and unpaid carers conceptualize good and bad deaths.
For example, Payne et al. (1996) found that patients’ descriptions were far more heteroge-
neous, and included ‘dying in one’s sleep, dying quietly, with dignity, being pain free and
dying suddenly’ (p. 307).
In trying to understand the professional homogeneity, our attention was directed to training
that healthcare professionals undergo as they develop in their specialism and ways in which
death was conceptualized there. Education, one means by which people become institutional-
ized, had unsurprisingly left a trace on our participants. Presenting dying at a hospice as the
best option with a unified view on benefits of intervention is a particular construction of the
story world that, on the one hand, supports the professional identity speakers wish to project
(Bamberg and Georgakopoulou 2008) and also suggests the persistence of a ‘medical model’
(see Payne et al. 1996). Zooming further out in search of explanations of our results, we noted
that narrative and metaphorical patterns that we identified in individual descriptions were also
closely related to patterns associated with so-called ‘medical-revivalist’ discourses of death
and dying that had begun to emerge in Western societies in the late 20th century (Carpentier
and van Brussel 2012; Walter 1994). Indeed, the healthcare education context that had shaped
our participants’ views was itself under influence of broader sociopolitical institutions that
value independence, self-mastery, and self-care (Carpentier and van Brussel 2012) – that is,
these are tied to a neoliberal rationality whereby individuals are made responsible for tasks
previously undertaken by welfare states.
The contrast between the heterogeneity of patient constructions of a good death and spe-
cific, homogeneous good deaths represented in professional narratives we explored is a good
example of how an institution, or discourses within institutions, might become sites of struggle.
Different ways of describing, constructing, or framing an issue or a concept can have conse-
quences for how people experience them, how they reason about them, and how they behave
in relation to them (cf. Thibodeau and Boroditsky 2011; van Brussel and Carpentier 2012). In
this case, it may influence, however inadvertently, options available to the dying. And for us,
this became the crucial focus of our discussion. If a good death is consistently framed in terms
of a death that happens in a hospice context, involving peacefulness, open conversations, and
acceptance, then hospice professionals may end up guiding patients and their families towards
this path even if patients might prefer a different approach or if real acceptance is almost
impossible to achieve (cf. Scarre 2012). As Walters put it most poignantly,
The rhetoric of palliative care sets great store by the autonomy of the individual patient
and the fulfilling of the latter’s wishes about how and where (if not when!) she chooses to
die. In reality, however, this freedom can sometimes be compromised by the pressure of
control towards what professionals consider to be a ‘good death’.
(2004: 406)
99
Of course, institutions and institutional influence are apparent in several ways in this case:
the team asked interviewees about their views of different qualities of death precisely because
the concept of ‘good death’ is known to play a central role in contemporary discourses on and
approaches to death, dying (van Brussel and Carpentier 2012; Cottrell and Duggleby 2016),
and palliative care (Smith 2000). In other words, the idea of a good death is central to the activi-
ties of hospices and palliative care organizations and this is formalized in policy documents
such as the Department of Health’s End of Life Care Strategy for England and Wales (2008),
which define exactly what is meant by a good death.
The project, and this particular exploration, did not in any way set out to investigate the
institutional making of constructions of good and bad deaths. Yet in interpreting and explain-
ing patterns the team found, they could not but look to literature on relevant institutions and
ideologies, as language ‘on the ground’ was so closely connected to them. This project may
be a more peripheral kind of institutional discourse research, but it nevertheless draws on and
contributes to concepts and ideas that are more central to the field.
Miguel – becoming employable, doing ‘good’ speculative architecture

My (Miguel’s) research on institutional discourse as a site of struggle has always examined the
entanglement of communicative practices, social relations, and wider structures of inequality
across different settings in Madrid, mainland China, London, and Hong Kong. In so doing, how-
ever, the study of such practices, relations and structures has gradually shaped my approach to
(and understanding of) institutional discourse, away from exploring how meanings, practices
and subjectivities are produced, enacted, circulated and attributed value in bounded govern-
mental spaces (e.g. schools), towards studying such issues in more complex webs that connect
various institutions and actors across transnational spaces (e.g. Pérez-Milans and Guo 2020).
This is in line with critical, sociolinguistic, and ethnographic research paying now closer atten-
tion to how the interlocking of technologies, institutions, actors, and daily meaning-making
practices enables social processes with far-reaching (self)regulatory and material effects (e.g.
Lorente 2017; Martín Rojo and Del Percio 2019).
The significance of an inquiry of this sort is revealed in research of institutional discourses
that are visibly shaped by globalizing forms of market expansion, and in this section, I focus on
graduate employability as a relevant point of reference. As universities worldwide are reported
to be impacted by internationalization policies, their traditional role in preparing students to
become ‘ideal national citizens’ of a nation-state has gradually adjusted to a new framework
whereby they appear as global brands aiming to attract students from all over the world and to
turn them into employable subjects via provision of developmental skills and knowledge with
which to access global labour markets. More specifically, universities have been turned into
key nodes within networks of governmental and non-governmental institutions that function in
accordance with market principles of supply and demand to secure a constant flow of income
from students’ registration while at the same time helping to (re)constitute transnationalized
economic niches and labour markets (Beverungen et al. 2009).
This was clear in an exploratory research project where my collaborators and I focused on
trajectories of international students enrolled in various MA programmes in London. Under-
standing the ways in which becoming a professional was discursively mediated in our research
context involved more than just gathering university curricula or prospectuses. It also required
tracking down situated processes of discourse enregisterment (Agha 2007) whereby sets of
communicative practices are socially packaged, regrouped, and recognized as emblematic of
‘being professional’ or ‘doing professionalism’ in transnational webs of institutions that linked
100
up universities, think tanks, private companies, and governmental agencies. One network that
I have examined more closely is associated with becoming a speculative architect, since one
of our participants was enrolled in a MA programme on urban planning and design. Seen as a
professional area of expertise concerned with fantastic, speculative, and imaginary urbanisms
that uses fiction, film, and performance as tools to explore implications and consequences of
new technologies and ecological conditions, speculative architecture has been described as an
attempt to carve a new professional niche.
In particular, I focused on a web of institutions and actors involved in setting up interna-
tional postgraduate programmes on speculative architecture that have contributed to establish
it as a clear genre of architecture and career path – that is, these programmes allow MA students
in urban planning and design in the UK to improve their employability by pursuing further
specialization at research institutes and higher education institutions in other countries. These
institutions and actors include Liam Young, theorist of architecture internationally acclaimed
in both mainstream and architectural media; Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today, a London-based
think tank that produces and exhibits a number of speculative architectural artefacts, such as
documentaries and short films worldwide; and the Strelka Institute, a school of architecture and
design based in Russia that has been listed among Domus magazine’s top 100 best European
architectural schools and whose board of trustees involves members of the Public Council of
the Ministry of Culture in Russia and founders of Russian-based development companies,
funds, and publishing houses.
As founder of Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today and a regular lecturer in training programmes
offered at the Strelka Institute, I took Liam Young as entry point in my inquiry, and a connector
to institutions and actors within the relevant infrastructure. I tracked down his online activities
during a period of ten years, in between 2007 and 2017, leading to a data corpus that includes
recordings of various communicative activities across different socio-institutional spaces, such
as interviews with (online and more traditional) media, public exhibitions and lectures in muse-
ums and research institutions interested in architecture and design, films and other multimodal
artefacts produced by and displayed via Young’s think tank, and educational institutions that
collaborate with him in other countries. Though such activities are communicatively arranged
in different ways according to different aims and participant actors, they all have a key distin-
guishing interdiscursivity (Silverstein 2005) feature: a salient social persona that is recurrently
performed through practice. In other words, doing speculative architecture is performed in my
corpus of data by way of enacting the figure of a professional, in this case an architect, who,
on the one hand, has a critical stance towards social inequality, and particularly with normal-
ized relationships between humans and technologies that contribute to state surveillance and
economic exploitation and, on the other, is devoted to offering or imagining alternative (i.e.
liberating) forms of social organization.
This figure of personhood is enacted through highly stylized public performances that (1)
narrate dystopic futures through the interplay of real and fictional spaces and times and (2) put
forward practical propositions for speculative intervention with economic relevance. Extract 5
shows an instance of stylized performance taken from a public lecture delivered by Liam Young at
the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles (USA), on 28 October 2015. The
lecture was video-recorded and made available on the website of Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today
(https://liamyoung.org), captioned as ‘City Everywhere: Kim Kardashian and the Dark Side of
the Screen. Multiscreen Storytelling Performance’. The video shows Liam Young standing on
the left side of the frame, next to a lectern from which he reads his script throughout the 52-min-
ute lecture. As the event begins, three wide screens to his left show changing images of Ameri-
can television personality Kim Kardashian with her name in the background, and the audience is
101
seen sitting in darkness, in front of the screens. Seven minutes into the lecture, the activity goes
as follows (see transcription conventions in the appendix):
Excerpt 5. Extract from City Everywhere
1 so what I wanna explore tonight is / who we become /
2 in this pixelated world // we become / Kimmie /
3 Kimmie is the icon / of our media architectural age /
4 and Kim Kardashian will be our guide today /
5 to help us find the city everywhere / cause Kim is / the future no one wanted //
6 uh / Kim unfortunately is also the- / the future already here //
7 she’s a creature that lives in the network /
8 she’s an animated media system /
9 she’s not just her physical self but to understand Kim /
10 and / also to understand ourselves in the architectures we inhabit //
11 you’ve gotta look / not just at /
12 our physical / and digital space / (. . .)
13 {loud music playing. Images on the central screen show the skyline of a city all made up of
14 residential skyscrapers while the screens to the sides display street images of long ques of
15 people with phenotypical characteristics often stereotyped as “Asian” waiting to enter
16 phone stores as well as of white individuals taking selfies of themselves. Music fades away}
17 with Kim we go to the residential districts /
18 it’s our first stop / in city everywhere (. . .)
19 and we put our ears to the cool bevel aluminium door of the-
20 the apartment to listen //
21 inside we hear Dury drop a Samsung Galaxy SX phone under the kitchen table (2”)
22 we hear it chime softly as it makes contact with the paper thing Samsung quiz smart power
23 charger ((mat)) //
24 we hear scream down the hallway and her husband raising the voice /
25 over the Samsung air conditioner //
26 why does the new TV say LG on it? /
27 she says/because it’s made by LG /
28 her husband replies /
29 but // our lease is up for review in three months /
30 you trying to get us thrown out? /
31 you bought an LG TV / into a Samsung housing block //
32 what the hell will the neighbours say? (8”)
33 {side screens display images of civilian protests from the air while the central screen shows
34 a ground-based angle to young males covering their faces in front of riot police}
102
35 so in city everywhere these new relationships to technology suggest /

36 new forms of community //
37 technology breeds new subcultures in city everywhere and allegiance to ba- brands /
38 Samsung or- / Apple / defines who we are much closer to our virtual community /
39 than we are to our neighbours /
40 something like the Egyptian revolution here {points at screen} was a /
41 community formed / through a network //
42 and in a way we’re not / Australian or- /
43 American anymore than / we are / believers //
44 {new images displayed on the screens, now picturing global influencers} (3”)
45 or Cumberbitches or Directioners or Little Monsters /
46 or Beyhives or KatyCats or Kayne Nation or – Kimmey {in soft laughter} /
47 {the image of Kim Kardashian is displayed on the screens}
48 {laughter from the audience} (1”)
49 oh Kimmey / Kimmey yey!
50 {laughter from the audience} (2”)
51 so the greatest force in city everywhere is the / consumption of media /
52 that / is what defines us / unfortunately {laughs} / Kimmie defines us
Liam Young combines the syncing of his voice-over flat-tone narration, music, and three sepa-
rate video feeds to move the narration from the persona of Kim Kardashian (lines 1–12) to the
residential districts in ‘city everywhere’ (lines 13–32) to Arab Spring protests in Egypt (lines
33–41) to global influencers (lines 42–52). In so doing, the persona of Kim Kardashian as an
archetypal figure of media consumption culture allows Young to construct a narrative that
foregrounds dystopian future cities in which real/imaginary physical environments and forms
of social citizenship appear as mediated by technologies in ways that contribute to enhanc-
ing surveillance (e.g. residents in the Samsung housing block risking eviction buying home
products from a different brand). He adopts a critical stance towards such forms of social orga-
nization that relies on the digital embodiment of Kim Kardashian in the form of an animated
system ‘that lives in the network’. This embodiment places Kardashian at the intersection of
past-present-future temporal references and various geographical locations whereby normal-
ized actions that are deemed to be mediated by technological artefacts get linked to unsettling
future possibilities which are, in turn, introduced as becoming present realities. Indeed, Kim
Kardashian is described both as an ‘outcome of our media architectural age’ and the undesired
future that is ‘already here’, a spatio-temporal omnipresence that drives the tour of ‘city every-
where’ by way of juxtaposing
1 images of recognizable mundane activities today that are emplaced in global urbanized
landscapes invoked via racialized depictions of people participating in them (e.g. long
ques of people with phenotypical characteristics often stereotyped as ‘Asian’ waiting to
enter phone stores or white individuals taking selfies of themselves) (lines 13–15);
2 constructed dialogues from future scenarios of technological totalitarianism (e.g. residents
in a Samsung housing block worried about eviction for buying LG TVs) (lines 26–32); and
103
3 descriptions of shifting forms of identity whereby depicted past nation-based civil-rights

movements (e.g. civil revolts in Egypt) get replaced with ridiculed media-based identifi-
cations associated with ‘global influencers’ who are labelled as ‘Cumberbitches’, ‘Direc-
tioners’, or ‘Kayne Nation’ (see also laughter from both Young and the audience in lines
46–52).
The educational institutions involved in training (and certifying) speculative architects

within the focal infrastructural web, such as the Strelka Institute, also play an important part
in the institutionalization of this enacted professional persona through scripting (i.e. stan-
dardizing) meaning-making practices concerned with item 2 – that is, the design of practical
propositions for speculative intervention with economic relevance. Aimed to grow a pool of
skilled professionals who can participate in governmental and non-governmental employ-
ability projects serving major infrastructural developments in Russia and beyond, this orga-
nization offers two English-medium postgraduate programmes. These programmes include
an MA in advanced urban design and a five-month programme called the New Normal, both
of which explicitly aim to
introduce students to the contemporary European and American design theory and prac-
tices, while at the same time offering operational toolkits for application of this knowledge
in the new markets. It helps to understand the specificity of research and design work in
highly volatile conditions of the cities in Russia, South Africa and [China], providing com-
petencies beyond traditional urbanism. The programme offers unique expertise in doing
projects and research in developing countries and economies in transition – places where
most urbanization and suburbanization is happening nowadays.
(https://strelkamag.com/en?tags=advancedurbandesign)
These two programmes involve high-stakes regulated practices where students’ learning is
packaged as a final output that is deemed to receive the scrutiny of a panel of experts and the
public in general. They conclude every year with a public presentation of students’ projects, all
of them presented by their authors in multimodal performances similar to those by Liam Young
as shown in Extract 5. Such projects, accessible on Strelka’s website, are described as ‘risky
speculations [that] became quite practical propositions for infrastructural intervention’, with
many starting ‘with concrete history’ and being performed with ‘a poetic cinematic language
[that] would provide the most direct expression of what is most at stake’. The performances,
delivered on stage in outdoor spaces in front of live audiences, all follow a very similar stylized
format: students present their projects taking the participant role of a narrator who embeds their
proposed technology in a story that unfolds in fictional and non-fictional spaces/times mixed
altogether, from past to future, and which involves utopian and/or dystopian scenarios that their
proposed interventions are supposed to address.
Taken together, these examples show the formation of the focal infrastructural web as a site
of struggle whereby stylized performances and narrated technological artefacts constitute key
discursive features in defining what counts as ‘doing speculative architecture’. These features
contribute to making this type of professional subject recognizable within new expert-based
institutional networks which provided postgraduate students with access to a valuable trans-
national network of actors, institutions, and economic markets; they allow new professionals
in urban design and architecture to become employable subjects with potential to participate
in emerging niches within yet-to-be urban spaces. Further to this, the category of ‘speculative
architect’ and the set of values (i.e. criticality) and forms of knowledge (i.e. European and
104
American academic expertise) indexed by the performance of doing speculative architecture,

constitute a ‘bundle of skills’ (Urciuoli 2008) with exchange value: they provide this new
repackaged professional subject with the necessary cultural capital, legitimacy, and authority
to operate within emerging economic niches while simultaneously helping to reinstate long-
standing colonial forms of territorial differentiation and hierarchization at a larger scale in
which European and American experts/institutions act as producers of technological forms of
knowledge that are then applied into growing economic territories.
As such, the circulation of these forms of professional knowledge and subjectivities favours
‘the recruitment of certain kinds of actors to growth hubs’ (Ong 2006: 6). On the one hand, they
offer an infrastructure that regulate a particular population, that of professional architects, for
‘optimal productivity, increasingly through spatial practices that engage market forces’ (ibid.);
on the other hand, the training component of this infrastructure relies ‘on an array of knowl-
edge and expert systems to induce self-animation and self-government’ (ibid.), this allowing
yet-to-be speculative architects to ‘optimize choices, efficiency, and competitiveness’ (ibid.)
by actively engaging in scripting the discourse register of doing speculative architecture.
Future directions and recommendations for practice

The contributions presented illustrate two (of many) possible ways of undertaking analysis of
institutional discourse. Zsófia’s interest in metaphors and narratives as the entry point to pallia-
tive care professionals’ views of good versus bad deaths places verbal language produced dur-
ing research interviews at the centre of her account, paving the way for further considerations
of wider institutional conditions under which her participants’ narrations and metaphors take
shape. For Miguel, a focus on processes of discourse enregisterment drives attention towards
the set of communicative practices that allows professionals-in-the-making to be socially
recognized as performing the social persona of a speculative architect within the logic of a
transnational web of institutions that connects universities, think tanks, private companies,
and governmental agencies. In both cases, though, a shared interest in institutions as sites of
struggle pinpoints ways in which linguistic/semiotic practices (narratives, metaphors, regis-
ters), moral categories (‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘appropriate’), and social relations (between patients and
healthcare practitioners, between knowledge producers and knowledge consumers) sustain and
get assembled under specific historical, socioeconomic, and political conditions (neoliberal
rationalities, colonial dynamics of market expansion).
We expect research on institutional discourse to continue to emphasize wider, larger-scale
social transformations both in an explanatory role and as an object of critique, in line with the
spatial, biopolitical, and affective turns experienced in social sciences more broadly (Lefebvre
1974; Foucault 2008; Ahmed 2004) and the greater focus on cultural relations between the
material environment, meaning-making, and subjectivity that they have brought with them
(Garrido 2021). At the same time, and due to the complexity of understanding these social pro-
cesses and relations, we also expect more in-depth conceptual engagement with social theory
alongside larger projects involving multidisciplinarity. This, in our view, requires an increas-
ing use of multifaceted datasets across many disciplines, with an interest in capturing the cir-
culation of knowledge, artefacts, and categories of personhood within institutional networks
and the social relations and forms of inequality that this circulation enables. It also makes it
unavoidable to foreground ways in which these institutional dynamics are entrenched with
larger histories of capitalism and colonialism (Heller and McElhinny 2017).
A focus of this sort is becoming particularly pertinent in light of the immense disruption to
working practices and working subjects that the COVID-19 pandemic brought about, trends
105
it has accelerated, and the stark inequalities that it has both revealed and exacerbated. This
has gone hand in hand – true to institutions as sites of struggle – with the emergence of social
movements challenging established institutional logics by attempting to institute or institu-
tionalize alternative ones (e.g. the commons and their challenge to capitalist frameworks, cat-
egories, and subjectivities). These spaces and institutions offer us potentially imaginative new
ways of being/doing, and we hope that future research on institutional discourse will help us
understand these processes too (MIRCo 2020).
We also believe that it is key to maintain a reflexive stance towards what we do as knowl-
edge producers who very often speak from higher education institutions and whose forms
of validation and recognition can also contribute to masking broader inequalities, especially
socioeconomic ones (Keating 2019). We work within institutions and, as the work reviewed in
this chapter demonstrates, have to assume that we are not without responsibility in the work-
ings and effects of their ways of being.
Related topics
business communication; medical communication; globalization; linguistic ethnography; criti-
cal discourse analysis; linguistic anthropology
Further reading
Sarangi, S. and Roberts, C. (1999) (Eds.) Talk, Work and Institutional Order: Discourse in Medical,
Mediation and Management Settings. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter. (This is a seminal exploration of
discourse within a range of institutional settings.)
Blommaert, J. (2005) Discourse: A Critical introduction. Cambridge University Press. (This is an essen-
tial reading on discourse.)
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9
Medical communication
Introduction
This chapter centres on medical communication between patients and doctors. Reference is
made to other healthcare professionals, recognizing the increasing diversity and range of spe-
cialisms involved in healthcare. Medical communication can be comprehensively viewed in
terms of the doctor-patient relationship, which provides the foundations for establishing trust,
rapport, and understanding, explaining diagnoses, discussing prognoses, and negotiating treat-
ment. The ways doctors and patients convey their perspectives through language determine
how the problem is understood, as well as giving the relationship therapeutic value.
The 1950s witnessed the start of a growing body of cross-disciplinary work to develop under-
standing of the doctor-patient relationship, produce insights into language use in consultations,
and engage professionals and the public in debates promoting patient involvement. Several
strands developed in parallel: the therapeutic nature of the doctor-patient relationship (Balint
1957), doctors’ consulting behaviours (Byrne and Long 1976), biopsychosocial medicine
(Engel 1977), and ethnographies of healthcare encounters (Sudnow 1967).
Balint (1957) introduced the psychosocial element into understanding patients’ problems.
Drawing on psychotherapeutic principles, Balint stressed the therapeutic value of doctors’
communication and relationship with patients, turning attention to listening to the patient and
treating their language as diagnostically and therapeutically relevant.
Byrne and Long (1976) conducted a study of over 2,000 audio-recordings of primary care
consultations. They identified six consultation phases: establishing a relationship, discover-
ing the reason for attendance, conducting verbal and/or physical examination, evaluating the
patient’s condition, detailing treatment or investigation, and closing. Byrne and Long’s analy-
ses focused on doctors’ language and actions, treating these as causal. They appraised the
effectiveness of individual consultations, describing doctors’ language use. They observed that
dysfunctional consultations tended to contain less silence. The fourth phase (evaluating the
patient’s condition) was accorded little attention, with most doctors moving from examining
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082637-11 109

the patient to detailing treatment ‘with hardly a word to the patient en route’ (Byrne and Long
1976: 50). A spectrum of consulting styles (doctor-centred to patient-centred) were observed.
Sudnow (1967) conducted an ethnographic study of death and dying, in two hospitals.
His observations of staff’s words and actions showed how death and dying is differently
pronounced for patients according to individual and sociodemographic characteristics and
how a hospital’s organization impacts communication between staff, patients, and relatives.
Sudnow described how nurses approached the relative of a dying patient in such a way as
to prepare them for what lay ahead and for meeting with the doctor before any words were
uttered. He recorded the words staff used to report a death to each other and how their reports
were differently phrased for relatives. He identified differential applications of terms such
as ‘dead on arrival’ according to an individual’s socioeconomic characteristics, highlighting
inequalities.
Understanding communication in healthcare consultations has thus evolved through com-
binations of disciplinary approaches in response to particular societal expectations (e.g. what a
patient wants from their doctor). These early studies drew on language and communication to
explain complex processes within the doctor-patient relationship.

Since the 1980s, medical communication has developed as a research field (see e.g. Ong et al.
1995; Stewart et al. 2003; Barnes 2019). Predominantly focused on general practice (fam-
ily physician) consultations, studies have highlighted a range of communication features and
dimensions playing a part in healthcare.
Language and communication in the general practice consultation

General practice consultation studies include empirical analyses of details of language use and
interaction, explorations of patients’ and doctors’ perceptions and communication experiences,
and conceptual studies of patient-centredness and shared decision-making.
Conversation analysis research has focused on consultation activities. Heritage and Stivers
(1999) identified how doctors’ ‘online commentaries’ during physical examination can pro-
vide reassurance, justify a forthcoming diagnostic evaluation, and shape patients’ expectations
towards ‘no-problem’ explanations. Stivers (2005) described different formats for doctors’
presentations of non-antibiotic treatment recommendations, showing that doctors who provide
a specific, positive recommendation, followed by a negative one, are most likely to obtain
patient acceptance.
Discourse analytic studies have addressed themes such as patient narratives, how decisions
are managed and negotiated, and cultural inferences and interpretations. Studies adopting a
narrative-based approach (Greenhalgh and Hurwitz 2004) have attended to how symptom-
atic information provided by a patient is contextualized through the ‘story’ they tell in con-
sultations. In hearing patients’ stories, doctors begin the cognitive processes of prediction,
evaluation, planning, and explanation through the patient’s words and connections between
symptoms, events, and illness episodes.
In research on decision-making, Elwyn et al. (1999) identified that primary care consulta-
tions containing conflict about treatment for upper respiratory tract infection exhibited none
of the ideological competencies of ‘shared decision-making’. To address differences in under-
standing between patients and doctors, Elwyn et al. argued that detailed empirical research
and revision of shared decision-making concepts are required. Land et al.’s (2017) systematic
110
review of interactional linguistic research on shared decision-making, which recommends

investigation of a range of secondary care settings.
Roberts et al. (2005) explored how patients with limited English and culturally diverse
communication styles consulted with doctors in the UK. They identified four dimensions
contributing to misunderstandings: pronunciation and word stress; intonation and speech
delivery; grammar, vocabulary, and lack of contextual information; and styles of self-pre-
sentation.
In a study of the relationship between patients’ expectations, consultation characteristics,
and healthcare outcomes, Mercer et al. (2016) found that patients in areas of socioeconomic
deprivation had less desire for involvement in decisions and perceived their doctors as less
empathic than those in affluent groups. This and other studies highlight the scope for more
research addressing equality, diversity, and inclusion through language use in healthcare com-
munication.
While much of the research on communication in the consultation centres on words used
and how they are said, some specifically consider the relationship between verbal and non-
verbal elements. For example, Ruusuvuori (2001) discriminated between patient-embodied
actions and patient-inscribed actions that draw on information sources such as case notes,
showing how doctors’ bodily movements can present problems for patients in determining
whether the doctor is listening and can disrupt the flow of talk. In paediatric consultations, gaze
direction has been noted to be one communication practice through which doctors’ questions
target either the child or the parent as respondent (Stivers 2001).
Observational, survey, interview, and focus group studies have explored patients’ health
and illness beliefs and doctors’ responses (e.g. Britten et al. 2000), patients’ views of patient-
centredness (e.g. Little et al. 2001), doctors’ views of shared decision-making (e.g. Elwyn
et al. 2000), and trust, empathy, and validation (Wright et al. 2004; Dieppe et al. 2020). Britten
et al.’s (2000) study combined audio-recorded consultations and semi-structured interviews to
explore prescribing misunderstandings. The 14 categories of misunderstanding identified were
all associated with a lack of patient participation in the consultation and carried potential or
actual adverse outcomes: for example, the patient deciding not to take a prescribed medicine.
Britten et al. found that patients’ preferences and expectations about medicines were rarely
voiced in the consultations and doctors were unaware of their relevance for successful pre-
scribing. Little et al.’s (2001) survey of patient-centredness demonstrated that patients valued
communication and partnership highly in consultations. Elwyn et al.’s (2000) exploration of
doctors’ views concerning shared decision-making, through focus groups, revealed doctors’
ideological principles and consultation practices, adding to existing models (e.g. Towle and
Godolphin 1999): participating doctors stressed the importance of portraying options before
sounding out the patient’s wishes for involvement in decision-making. Wright et al. (2004)
interviewed patients with breast cancer, finding that they valued trust in doctors’ expertise
above the communication skills (e.g. demonstrating empathy) doctors are traditionally taught.
They gauged trust in terms of displays of technical expertise, ‘being frank’, and ‘answer[ing]
questions without hesitation’.
This research has been paralleled by conceptual work on patient-centredness (e.g. Stew-
art 2001), patient participation (e.g. Coulter 2002) and shared decision-making (e.g. Towle
and Godolphin 1999), reflecting the shift from a paternalistic view to one where the patient
brings their expertise and knowledge to the consultation and shared decision-making can occur.
Research has also identified how these ideals may be realized in practice, exploring the patient’s
role in decision-making, to identify strategies for patients to benefit most from consultations
(Tuckett et al. 1985); how patients interpret measures of their involvement (Entwistle et al.
111
2004); the various forms patient participation takes (Collins et al. 2007); and how to establish
effective, negotiated, collaborative partnerships in consultations (Fischer and Ereaut 2012).
Taken together, these studies afford a view of the healthcare consultation in which dif-
ferent applications of language research combine to provide insights into details of interac-
tion and language use (word choices, treatment options phrasings, non-verbal cues) as well
as patients’ expressed views and preferences, their interpretations of the care they receive,
and doctors’ intentions and ideals. These observations help build understanding of how
the doctor-patient relationship, as the foundation of effective healthcare, is established and
maintained.
Extending the view beyond the general practice consultation

Research has extended to other types of healthcare consultation, allowing comparative research
across clinical settings and health professionals, to identify unique and shared communication
features. Studies in hospital consultations involving carers, nursing, pharmacy, physiotherapy,
and complementary and alternative medicine, for example, all illustrate dimensions for further
research.
Salter et al.’s (2007) study of pharmacists’ home visits to the elderly revealed how phar-
macists’ advice may be ill-fitted and met with resistance. In a comparison of GP and hospital
surgeon’s decision-making, Braddock et al. (1999) found that both groups infrequently had
complete discussions of treatment decisions with patients. Coupland et al. (1994), studying
doctor-patient communication in a geriatric outpatients’ clinic, observed doctors continu-
ing social, conversational lines, when patients indicated readiness to move to the medical
agenda. Beresford and Sloper (2003) documented influences of chronic illness and parental
involvement on adolescents’ communication with doctors. They discovered how the series of
questions deployed by doctors to monitor everyday illness management deterred adolescents
from participating, how talking with parents provided opportunities to rehearse concerns
before consulting with the doctor, and how a sustained relationship with their doctor enabled
adolescents to talk openly about adherence to lifestyle and treatment. In complementary and
alternative medicine research, randomized controlled trials have explored whether the prac-
titioner-patient relationship can enhance treatment effects. Kaptchuk et al.’s (2008) study
with three participant groups (one receiving real acupuncture, one sham acupuncture, and
one no acupuncture) revealed no therapeutic difference between sham and real acupuncture
groups, suggesting that the process of receiving care may have its own beneficial placebo
effect, and highlighting the therapeutic effects of communication and the patient-practitioner
relationship.
Such studies invite comparison and further research: the ways doctors engage with patients
in conversation as well as formal interaction, blurring distinctions between social and medical
talk; how a policy intervention, such as pharmacists’ home visits to the elderly, may be ill-fitted
to certain healthcare contexts or professional roles; ways of isolating communication’s thera-
peutic effects; and communication features that promote patients’ participation.
Cultural and linguistic diversity

Cultural and linguistic healthcare research (Roberts 2007) has explored differences in cultural
understandings of illness, the influences of multiple languages in a consultation, and how per-
ceptions of race, education, and social class shape doctor-patient communication.
112
Kirmayer and Young (1998) report in their review of physical symptoms in the absence of
pathology, that while this phenomenon is observed across all ethnocultural groups and societ-
ies studied, there are significant cultural variations. One possible explanation is that patients’
reports of bodily symptoms encode cultural models that furnish their vocabulary for describ-
ing symptoms, as well as a means of explaining them. One cultural difference concerned how
distress is expressed: for example, the idiom ‘heart distress’ among Iranians is a culturally
prescribed way of talking about grief (Kirmayer and Young 1998: 424). More recent research
(Bayliss et al. 2014) suggests that cultural factors influence not only how patients present
symptoms but also each stage of diagnosis and management.
Research on consultations involving more than one language has explored the linguis-
tic challenges such consultations present, as well as highlighting features of language use
pertaining to all consultations. Studies have shown how interpreters not only convey the
meaning of the patient’s words but also are pivotal in negotiating and achieving interac-
tional goals, with consequences for care. Reporting symptoms and arriving at a diagnosis
can be shaped by what the interpreter says and how they present the patient’s problem in
medical and lay terms. Davidson (2000) found that in consultations with English-speaking
doctors, Spanish-speaking patients were left with unaddressed concerns, and Bolden (2000)
found that the interpreter was oriented to achieving the goals of history-taking in what they
perceived to be the most efficient manner, editing out patient information and words they
considered irrelevant. Where the patient and doctor speak different languages, patients have
reported less-than-satisfactory interpersonal care, with or without an interpreter. In such
consultations, patients are more likely to have their comments ignored (Rivadeneyra et al.
2000), and in the absence of an interpreter, discussion of health promotion is limited (Ngo-
Metzger et al. 2007).
Racial and ethnic disparities in quality of care for those with access to a healthcare system
exist in the utilization of diagnostic procedures and therapeutic interventions. One root cause
is variations in patients’ ability to communicate their symptoms to a doctor who understands
their meaning, expectations of care, and adherence to lifestyle and medication regimes (van
Ryn and Burke 2000). Stivers and Majid’s (2007) study of doctors’ questioning in consultations
about routine childhood illnesses demonstrated the effect of parents’ race and education on
whether physicians select children to answer questions. Black children and Latino children of
low-education parents were less likely to be selected to answer questions than their same-aged
white peers, irrespective of their education.
Linguistic analysis as a diagnostic resource

A recent advance in applications of linguistics to medical communication concerns how
patients’ language use can be a diagnostic resource. In psychiatry, doctors depend on
patients’ language for diagnosis and treatment, but how words actually function in consulta-
tions to influence diagnostic reasoning and treatment decisions remains under-researched
(Fine 2006).
Schwabe et al. (2008) have identified features of patients’ language that may be instrumen-
tal in differentiating between epileptic (ES) and non-epileptic seizures (NES). Patients with ES
provide coherent accounts of individual seizures, relate subjective seizure experiences and use
consistent metaphoric conceptualizations. Patients with NES tend not to volunteer subjective
seizure symptoms, give accounts that are difficult to understand, and are inconsistent in their
choice of metaphors.
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The patient’s illness experience

Increased emphasis on listening to and understanding the patient’s perspective has invited
reconsideration of how, through medical communication, patients can inform medical under-
standing of particular diseases, the nature of pain and how it may be described, and connections
between symptoms.
One example is patients whose symptoms are not easily defined or explained according to
current knowledge and understanding of physical pathology. Medically unexplained symp-
toms (MUS) not only present a cognitive challenge for doctors in making confident use of the
label but also pose a linguistic one: how to explain and negotiate the ‘unexplained’. Theoreti-
cal understanding of MUS initially led researchers to conceive of these problems as caused
by underlying psychological disorder (Lipowski 1988). Applications of linguistics have led
to more fruitful ways to understand MUS. Analyses of consultations have revealed complex
interactions and negotiations whereby patients assert authority over their condition (Peters
et al. 1998) to shape the consultation and its outcomes, securing referral to specialists (Salmon
et al. 1999). A particular tension, played out through language use, has been highlighted, in
which both patients and doctors use scientific discourse but for different reasons: the doctor
to maintain distance and expert stance and the patient to engage the doctor (Chew-Graham
et al. 2008). Analyzing patients’ perceptions of their symptoms revealed that, rather than hav-
ing unidimensional causal beliefs, individuals with MUS had multifaceted understandings of
their condition that recognized psychosocial factors (Peters et al. 2009). Patients’ own rich ill-
ness models contrasted with their perceptions of doctors’ more simplistic understanding. This
led to patients’ mistrusting their doctors, limiting the information they disclosed. Empathic
responses to emotional cues appear critical for reassurance and building trust among patients
with MUS (Epstein et al. 2007). A recent systematic review (Stortenbeker et al. 2020) high-
lights the importance of attending to linguistic and interactional features of patients’ symptom
presentations, as tailoring medical explanations and responses accordingly enables effective
management and care.
Influences of technology
Influences of new technology on medical communication have been manifold: electronic
patient records, email for consulting, telephone helplines, templates and aids for decision-
making, and remote, online, and telephone consulting (Downes et al. 2017).
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a major impact on how patients communicate with doc-
tors in many countries, with an increase in remote consultations via email, telephone, and video.
Remote consultations may increase access to some patient groups but limit access to others
and may not be as information rich as if face-to-face (Hammersley et al. 2019). The range of
remote consulting formats provides opportunities to research this linguistically (Greenhalgh
et al. 2016): to explore the nuances of language use, the impact of lack of non-verbal cues
(eye contact, body language), scope for building and maintaining rapport, and how vulnerable
groups adapt to remote technologies.
The presence of the computer in consultations hinders and promotes communication, reveal-
ing dimensions of non-verbal and verbal activity. Hsu et al. (2005) observed that doctors’ base-
line communication skills (verbal and non-verbal) were amplified, positively or negatively, by
the introduction of a computer. Margalit et al. (2006) found that time gazing at the screen was
inversely related to clinician engagement in psychosocial questioning and emotional respon-
siveness, and time spent typing was inversely related to the amount of dialogue. McGrath et al.
114
(2007) found that patients exploited silences created by the doctor’s use of electronic patient
records to ask questions.
Cultural models, broader discourses, and media representations

While research on language and medicine has centred on examining the structure and content
of the doctor-patient encounter, communication realms beyond the consultation have also been
investigated.
Bell’s (2009) study of cultural models of chemotherapy expressed in a cancer support group
shows how patients’ understandings of chemotherapy diverge from biomedical treatment
models. Iedema’s (2007) investigation of the discourse of hospital communication explores
complexities of the healthcare system and shows how health professionals are compelled to
reinvent their communication strategies to manage changes in the system and their relation-
ships with each other. Through textual discourse analysis of policy documents and interviews
with policy-makers and stakeholders, Shaw and Greenhalgh (2008) assessed how policy has
shifted healthcare research away from independent enterprise towards a strategic resource and
‘population laboratory’ for large-scale clinical trials.

The diverse methods employed to study medical communication include conversation analysis
(Heritage and Maynard 2006), interactional analysis (Roberts et al. 2005), and coding schemes
(Roter and Larson 2002); corpus linguistics (Harvey et al. 2007); surveys (Little et al. 2001);
semi-structured interviews (Wright et al. 2004); focus groups (Bell 2009); observation and eth-
nography (Sudnow 1967); document analysis (Shaw and Greenhalgh 2008); and randomized
controlled trials (Heritage et al. 2007).
Regardless of the methods, researching medical communication presents ethical dilemmas
and sensitivities that shape the nature of the data and its analysis. Obtaining consent, position-
ing recording equipment in a clinic or home, being party to a person’s experience of illness: all
bring further insights. During data collection in a cancer drop-in centre, Watts (2008) reported
how her position shifted from initiating contact, asking direct questions, and doing the talking
to one in which participants chose the point of contact and topic of discussion, seeking her out
to report how they were managing, often during crisis.
Particular methods (or combinations) may be more suited, in researching aspects of medical
communication. Harvey et al. (2007: 772) argue that, in researching adolescent health com-
munication, corpus linguistics enables description of a distinctive ‘genre’ of messages about
sexual health. Comparative keyword analysis, employed by Seale et al. (2006) in exploring
gender differences in patients’ talk about cancer experience, represents a use of software for
corpus linguistic analysis to conduct comparative qualitative analyses of large datasets. Con-
versation or discourse analysis of recorded consultations has been productively combined with
interviews exploring participants’ perspectives and measuring outcomes (Barry et al. 2001).
An important distinction concerns the aims and effects of descriptive, compared to evalua-
tive, approaches. Is the purpose to describe what happens, or does the research aim to improve
the quality of healthcare? This inevitably shapes the choice of methods and the results. For
example, in coding consultations, some schemes make assumptions, such as what constitutes
‘good’ or ‘bad’ communication (Hall et al. 1987), while others, not based on a particular prem-
ise, allow testing of theories (e.g. Salmon et al. 2006). Some, like the Patient Enablement
115
Index (Mercer and Howie 2006) or VR-CoDES-P (del Piccolo et al. 2011) combine a research
schema with evaluation of doctors’ consultation skills.
Some studies highlight how chosen methods allow unexpected findings to surface.
O’Riordan et al.’s (2008) study of ‘likeable’ patients employed concordance software along-
side interviews, to discover themes: for example, the words ‘time’ and ‘years’ recurred fre-
quently, revealing how continuity in general practice nurtured relationships with patients.
Many studies involve comparison (e.g. professional versus conversational talk; one disease
setting, or professional culture, with another; patient’s versus doctor’s perspectives), reveal-
ing points of difference and similarity for investigation. For example, distinctive features of
doctors’ versus nurses’ communication with patients highlight complements between them for
multidisciplinary healthcare (Collins 2005; Rowbotham et al. 2012; Scholz et al. 2020).
Effects of language use and communication on healthcare outcomes

Increasingly, communication is recognized as impacting on healthcare outcomes. Communi-
cation can positively influence adherence to treatment (Dowell et al. 2002). Studies explor-
ing socio-relational factors, such as patients’ satisfaction and feelings of ease, show that
greater consultation length and continuity of care are positively correlated with patients’
satisfaction (Mercer and Howie 2006). In consultations where patients perceived that they
found common ground with their doctor in decision-making, there were significantly fewer
referrals and investigations over the following two months (Stewart et al. 1997). Research
has also shown how patients’ recall and understanding of information may be influenced
through communication; Britten et al. (2000) noted that doctors could avoid misunderstand-
ings by asking patients directly what they thought about taking medicines. In a randomized
controlled trial, Heritage et al. (2007) found that, depending on doctors’ phrasing to elicit
concerns (‘anything else’ vs ‘something else’), the patient may be more or less likely to men-
tion what is troubling them.
Medical education
Developments in medical education have given prominence to the importance of communica-
tion training, pre- and post-qualification. This training is modelled on professional guidelines
for good medical practice (General Medical Council 2020) that pay close attention to the
communication competencies and standards required for maintaining caring relationships with
patients. Clinician educators are expected to bring knowledge of communication and related
research, as well as medicine, to their teaching. Communication training involves patient per-
spectives, with actors providing safe space to practise (Pritchard et al. 2020) and patients as
real-life informants with illness narratives to explore (Muir 2007).
Medical communication curricula are increasingly informed by research. The content
employed across the UK for consultation skills teaching is based on the Calgary-Cambridge
framework (Kurtz et al. 2005) compiled from consultation research. Curricular design has also
been informed by the literature, taking an integrative view of the consultation (Stewart et al.
2003) in which clinical, biomedical tasks are fused with psychosocial dimensions and patients’
perspectives.
Medical education is a growing field of research in which linguistic approaches are employed
to inform analyses and to define areas for study. For example, regarding communication skills
assessment, Roberts et al. (2003) video-recorded students’ consultation performance in clinical
exams and analyzed these recordings to investigate interaction features that lead to students
116
being assessed as ‘good’ or ‘poor’ communicators. They were able to show, through reference
to a range of constituents, how stronger candidates were ‘empathetic’ (responding attentively
and using joint problem-solving) and weaker candidates were ‘retractive’ (responding inap-
propriately and demonstrating insensitivity to patients’ understandings). Humphris and Kaney
(2001) devised a coding scheme to assess students’ communication development throughout
their training. Students’ performance improved over a 17-month period, but their knowledge
and understanding at initial assessment did not show the predicted association with subse-
quent communication skills performance. Analyses of doctors’ postgraduate consultation skills
assessments (Campion et al. 2002) identified that doctors find ‘explanation and planning’ chal-
lenging and generally underperform in this area. A recent systematic review (McLoughlin et al.
2018) pinpointed factors influencing performance and examiners’ assessment and impacting
on language and communication, including gender, ethnicity, and variations in the empathy
demonstrated. Peters et al. (2011) found that medical students were confident in structuring
and managing interaction flow but least confident in managing emotional encounters, an aspect
qualified doctors also find challenging.
Conceptual understanding of medical communication is also being advanced through
applied linguistics research. Dynamic relationships between patient participation, cultural
competency, and ethnolinguistic diversity (Betancourt et al. 2003; Rocque et al. 2019) are con-
tinually reconsidered in light of ongoing diversity and changes in ethnic and sociodemographic
compositions of patient and doctor populations.
Future trajectory and new debates

Medical communication research is an expanding field, in which linguistic expertise plays an
increasing part, offering exciting opportunities for cross-disciplinary dialogues.
Many areas remain under-researched: such as consultations involving different languages
(Shaw and Ahmed 2004; Rocque et al. 2019). Certain linguistic approaches remain under-
used: for example, dialect variation and linguistic accommodation can be employed to study
professional cultures and communication practices in consultations for inclusive healthcare,
and multidisciplinary studies, combining linguistics with health and social sciences, enables
investigation of the relationship between culture, communication, and health inequalities for
refugee and migrant populations (Piacentini et al. 2019).
Applied linguistics also offers avenues to explore how the language we use to describe med-
ical communication creates a particular impression or reality, such as the term ‘patient-centred
care’, or to help challenge assumptions in medical communication practice: for example, how
precisely can the roles of relatives (as carer, interpreter, advocate) in a consultation facilitate
the patient’s participation, and in what ways?
By the same token, medical communication has much to offer applied linguistics. Medical
communication compels researchers to make language-based studies relevant to healthcare
professionals’ and patients’ experience. It is useful to consider whether the ways we apply
linguistics to medical communication do translate into practice and what is relevant to profes-
sional and patient experience (Roberts and Sarangi 2003). For example, when it is advocated
that health professionals ‘weave between’ medical and patient perspectives (Stewart et al.
2003) how does this translate into the language of the consultation? While medical students are
taught skills such as summarizing or particular phrases to use (in eliciting patients’ concerns for
example), how doctors use such skills and techniques in everyday practice, and to what effect,
remains unclear. Developing methods and approaches for creating linguistic interventions to
improve healthcare outcomes, based on descriptive research studies, will enable observation
117
and measurement of the value of applied linguistics in medical practice and its contributions to
patient experience and healthcare outcomes (Barnes 2019).
The medical consultation and the patient-professional relationship are coming under new
forms of scrutiny as healthcare systems and research methods evolve. Consultation research is
increasingly diverse, including the range of healthcare professional encounters with patients,
uses of Internet and remote consulting, consultations in different languages, and commentar-
ies and debates on the patient-healthcare professional relationship. This reflects healthcare’s
growing complexities and degrees of specialization.
From the research methods perspective, there is likely to be continued refinement and
interfacing with other disciplines (Candlin and Candlin 2003). Comparative and longitudi-
nal research, using combined methods, will promote further systematic, detailed exploration,
facilitated by shared databases (Herxheimer and Ziebland 2008; Jepson et al. 2017). Compari-
sons between ordinary conversation and medical and other institutional encounters will enable
healthcare communication to be precisely located and comprehensively understood.
Summary
This chapter reviews research concerning language use in medical communication. The doctor-
patient relationship has provided the impetus for a broad range of studies investigating dif-
ferent dimensions of medical communication. Conceptual and empirical work has sought to
describe the constituents of patient-centred approaches in healthcare delivery, from the level of
individual words and actions in consultations, patient and health professional perspectives and
experiences, and ideological and policy-driven discourses. Medical communication research
has employed novel uses of linguistic methods of analysis. These applications of linguistics
help promote understanding of how healthcare is delivered to and taken up by patients and are
proving increasingly relevant to healthcare education and practice.
Related topics
clinical linguistics; institutional discourse; intercultural communication; conversation analy-
sis; linguistic ethnography
Further reading
Balint, M. (1957) The Doctor, the Patient, and his Illness, New York: International Universities Press.
(This pioneering work focuses attention on the patient as a person in the consultation and on the
patient’s language.)
Heritage, J. and Maynard, D. W. (eds.) (2006) Communication in Medical Care, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. (This collection of studies in primary care illustrates the potential of applying
detailed analyses of language use in interaction to the study of medical communication.)
Kurtz, S., Silverman, J. and Draper, J. (2005) Teaching and Learning Communication Skills in Medicine,
2nd ed., Oxford: Radcliffe Medical Press. (Kurtz et al. provide a comprehensive review of medi-
cal communication research, in their internationally recognized framework for teaching consultation
skills to doctors.)
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10
English for professional
communication
A critical genre analytical perspective
Introduction
English for professional communication, as understood today, represents a development
that integrates three main areas of study. The first one is English for specific purposes
(ESP), which draws its strength from linguistics, particularly sociolinguistics, through
the analyses of functional variation in language use. In fact, the ESP tradition can be
considered an outcome of various forms of academic and disciplinary discourses within
the framework of register analysis (Halliday et al. 1964) and genre analysis (Swales 1990,
2004, 2009). The second one is the business communication tradition that has been influ-
enced by communication studies, which has several dimensions, including organizational
communication, management communication, and corporate communication. Unlike
ESP, which draws its inspiration from language description, none of these rather different
sub-areas of communication studies have traditionally relied on various communication
theories. It is interesting to note that these major traditions (i.e. ESP and communication
studies) developed almost independently of each other and remained so for a long time.
The third tradition, which seems to have influenced both these approaches to specialist
language teaching and training, is the analyses of functional variation in academic and pro-
fessional genres. Although analysis of linguistic variation, either as register or genre, did
not have much of an impact on business communication earlier, it started influencing the
design and implementation of both the ESP and the business communication programmes
in the last few years, which has brought the two approaches close to each other. This over-
lapping interest in the analysis of discourse variation has also made it possible to view the
two approaches as English for professional communication (EPC), which is represented in
Bhatia and Bremner (2014) as follows:
We would now like to give more substance to this view of professional communication as
emerging from the recent works published in these areas of study and application. Let us briefly
look at the historical developments in the field.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082637-12 123

Figure 10.1 English for professional communication overlaps
Historical perspective
English for specific purposes (ESP)

ESP has frequently been driven by descriptions of restricted uses of language, initially identi-
fied as register (Halliday et al. 1964) and then as discourse (Widdowson 1973) with emphasis
on coherence and organization. Register analysis drew its inspiration from the work of Hal-
liday et al. (1964) on functional variation in English, which put forward the notion that ‘lan-
guage varies as its function varies; it differs in different situations’ (87). A variety of language
distinguished according to its use was deemed a register. Halliday et al. further argued that
registers could be differentiated as sub-codes of a particular language based on the occurrence
of lexico-grammatical features. It was possible, thus, to characterize the registers of individual
disciplinary discourses by identifying the use of an above-average incidence of specific sets of
lexico-grammatical features. There have since been several studies identifying and describing
typical characteristics of academic and professional registers, such as scientific English, busi-
ness English, and legal English (cf. Waters 1997; Biber and Conrad 2019).
In its earlier incarnations, ESP focused on English for science and technology (EST), fol-
lowing which, in the early 1990s, English for business purposes (EBP) became a more domi-
nant area of study because of the globalization of trade and commerce, leading to the increased
movement of business professionals across territorial, linguistic, cultural, and sociopoliti-
cal boundaries. This new business environment was buffered further by the advancement of
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English for professional communication
multimedia and increased dependence on it by businesses and industries, with the result that
the business professionals found themselves operating in a much more vibrant international
marketplace. This sociocultural development led to research initiatives such as American busi-
ness communication (cf. Reinsch 1996), correlating with the EBP/ESP tradition, the latter of
which was typically British and European (Dudley-Evans and St. John 1998; Christian 1999,
Hagen 1999; Bargiela-Chiappini and Nickerson 2001). Of course, a key advantage in identify-
ing and analyzing ESP genres was using them as input for ESP and business communication
programmes. For example, business communication became an effective and efficient way
of training uninitiated learners or early-career professionals about the intricacies of business
practices through study of both written and spoken modes.
Business communication
Bargiela-Chiappini and Nickerson (2002), in their special issue of International Review of
Applied Linguistics (IRAL) on business communication, presented business communication
as talk and writing between individuals whose main activities and interests were in the
domain of business and who come together for the purpose of doing business within a corpo-
rate setting, whether physical or virtual. In this regard, business communication seemed best
understood as a discipline integrating communication in various business contexts, includ-
ing organizational, corporate, and management. Business communication research received
attention from various disciplines, training institutes, departments, and schools, including
English, business and management, speech communications, and even information technol-
ogy. The breadth of focus, over time, led to a lack of ‘comprehensive theoretical grounding’
(Shelby 1988: 13) or what Suchan and Charles (2006: 393) referred to as a specific research
identity, since
different disciplinary homes result[ed] in our using theories, frameworks, and informa-
tion sources that lack[ed] significant overlap. This lack of overlap contribute[d] to the
shapelessness of our field . . . [making] it difficult for us to define to our stakeholders and
ourselves the work we do and the value it provides.
However, interdisciplinarity across seemingly diverse disciplines must not be seen as under-
mining the contribution that each discipline makes towards a better understanding of the
nature and function of communication in professional and corporate settings. Instead, it is a
recognition of the complex and dynamic nature of the corporate world’s discursive realities
that should be engaged with through multiple as well as complementary perspectives. Rogers
(2001: 16) further reiterates that ‘there are signs that we’re growing more comfortable with our
plurality, even beginning to acknowledge some of its value.’ In addition, the multidisciplinary
convergence is not an entirely foreign concept as far as business communication research
is concerned, as academics in this discipline have been ‘navigating multiple disciplines and
diverse methods for some time now . . . diversity in backgrounds, cultures, approaches, and
institutions has become central to our identity’ (15). The ability of business communication to
draw from different fields only emphasizes its ‘unique place at the intersection of business and
communication’ (Reinsch and Lewis 1993: 450). Any research pertaining to the influence of
globalization necessitates
multiparadigmatic approaches [to] facilitate the work of scholars who find both value
and disappointment in various theoretical perspectives but who understand the need to
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acknowledge and integrate multiple approaches in an effort to clarify complex and obscure
human and organizational phenomena.
(Ulijn et al. 2000: 310–311)
Register and genre analysis

Due to a perceived simplification of the relationship between linguistic analysis and pedagogic
materials, as suggested by Halliday et al. (1964), there was also concern on the part of teachers
regarding the lack of disciplinary knowledge of the professions they were required to serve
(Swales 2000).
ESP practitioners were well equipped to carry out relatively ‘thin’ descriptions of ESP
discourses . . . [but what] they principally lacked was a perception of discourse itself
and of the means for analysing and exploiting it – lacunae that were largely rectified by
the 1980s.
(Swales 2000: 60)
This encouraged some researchers (Swales 1990; Bhatia 1993) to consider the aspect of dis-
course variation as genre with emphasis on wider context and conventions of language use
(see Bhatia 2004 for a detailed account of the development of genre analysis; see Flowerdew,
this Handbook, Volume 1). Both these approaches to discourse, as register and genre, have
predominantly focused on language use in specific domains with varying degrees of atten-
tion to the contexts in which these discursive actions take place and are interpreted and often
exploited. Consequently, in the last couple of decades, genre analysis has become a favoured
framework for the study of professional practice as well as design of ESP programmes. The
use of genre theory has become key in analyzing professional and academic discourses
(Compagnone 2015; Zhu et al. 2016; McCarty and Swales 2017). Genre analysis has also
become increasingly multi-perspective (Bhatia 2004, 2017) through an integration of vari-
ous methodologies (Zhang 2007), such as textography (Swales 1998; AlAfnan 2016), corpus
analysis (Fuertes-Olivera 2007; Hüttner et al. 2009; Singh et al. 2012), cross-cultural and
intercultural perspectives (Ibrahim and Nambiar 2012; Kruse and Chitez 2012), and multi-
modal analysis (Bateman 2014; Hiippala 2014; Hafner 2018; Doody and Artemeva 2022).
The implication for ESP is thus that text-based analyses of ESP discourses are increasingly
inadequate in accounting for the typical use of language in various professional, particularly
business contexts.
One of the key aspects of genre analysis was that it considered communication not simply as
a matter of putting words together in a grammatically correct and rhetorically coherent textual
form but also as having a desired impact on how members of a specific professional community
viewed it and how they negotiated meanings in professional documents. In this sense, written
communication is regarded as more than knowing the semantics of lexico-grammar; it is a mat-
ter of understanding why members of a specific professional or disciplinary community com-
municate the way they do. This includes consideration of the discipline-specific knowledge of
how professionals conceptualize issues and talk about them to achieve their disciplinary and
professional goals. Often it is found that outsiders to any professional community are not able
to follow what specialists write and talk about, even if they are able to understand every word
of what is written or said. And being a native speaker, in this context, may not be an added
benefit if one does not have enough understanding of the more intricate insider knowledge,
including conventions of the genre and professional practice. Widdowson (1998) highlights
126
this aspect of communicative efficiency when he indicates that genre analysis seeks to identify
the conventions for language use in certain domains of professional and occupational activity.
He further points out that it is a development from and an improvement on register analysis
because it deals with discourse and not just text. It seeks to reveal how lexico-grammatical
forms realize the conceptual and rhetorical structures and modes of thought and action, which
are established as conventional for certain discourse communities. Genre analysis, thus, is
about the conventions of thought and communication that define specific areas of professional
genres and activities.
Critical issues
In distinguishing critical issues in the further development of ESP and professional commu-
nication, we need to consider what Rogers (1998), with a background in management stud-
ies, implies to be key concerns. These include a joint and complementary focus on teaching
and research in business communication, a more considered focus on authentic texts, the
importance of continued multidisciplinarity in research, and consideration of cross-cultural
communication contexts and intercultural negotiations. Rogers also argues that language
learning, linguistic analyses, and discourse patterns are some of the main areas of research
and investigation. In her subsequent study, Rogers (2000) says that in text-based genre analy-
ses, there is a strong tendency to conceptualize communicative purposes in terms of the
strategies of the speakers or writers, but such purposes cannot be fully understood without
some understanding of how they are interpreted by members of the specialist community,
for which she recommends user-based analyses. Rogers (2000) thus extends the boundaries
of genre analysis to take it beyond the text to context and audience response, looking for the
relevance of user-based analytical tools to analyse a small corpus of CEO presentations in
the context of earning announcements. It comes to no surprise then that in much of Rogers’
work we find a fine integration of not simply the two strands of business communication
and EBP but also of genre analysis. Similarly, Charles (1996) tries to fill this gap between a
contextual business approach and a linguistic text-based approach by analyzing the ways in
which the extra-linguistic ‘business context shapes negotiation discourse, and thus creates
a mutual interdependency’ (20). Relatedly, Nickerson (1998), in her survey of the impact
of corporate culture on non-native corporate writers working in a multinational and multi-
lingual context and adopting an interdisciplinary approach incorporating ESP research and
organizational theories, accounts for the general patterns of communication found within
multinational corporations.
Drawing attention to cross-cultural communication contexts, Gimenez’s (2001) study of
business negotiations focuses on cross-cultural negotiations and communication styles, reveal-
ing that ‘cultural differences seemed to be overridden by the status-bound behaviour of the
negotiators’ (188). Vergaro (2004) implements a contrastive study to investigate the rhetorical
differences between Italian and English sales promotion letters, considered quite formulaic, to
explore how information is presented and what rhetorical strategies are used to obtain compli-
ance by a given readership in each culture. Planken (2005) explores how facework is used to
achieve interpersonal goals in intercultural sales negotiations by undertaking linguistic analy-
ses of rapport management that in a negotiation context is aimed at building a working relation-
ship. From a communication-based angle, Varner (2000) views intercultural communication
differently from intercultural business communication. He mentions that in intercultural busi-
ness communication, the business strategies, goals, objectives, and practices become an inte-
gral part of the communication process, helping create a new environment out of the synergy
127
of culture, communication, and business. He further argues that just as the study of culture is
not an end in itself, in the study of
intercultural business communication, the communication has a business purpose . . .

channels, levels of formality, use of technology, content, and style of delivery are influ-
enced by cultural and business considerations. The objectives of the business, the level
of internationalization, the structure of organization . . . help determine the intercultural
business communication strategy.
(Varner 2000: 48–49)
Bhatia (2004, 2008, 2010) argues that the study of conventional systems of genres (Bazerman
1994) often used to fulfil the professional objectives of specific disciplinary or professional
communities may not be sufficient to understand the complexities of business communication.
A comprehensive understanding of the motives and intentions of business practices is possible
only if one goes beyond the textual constraints to look at the multiple discourses, actions,
and voices that play a significant role in the formation of specific discursive practices within
the institutional and organizational framework. As such, Bhatia (2010) develops the notion
of ‘interdiscursivity’ as a function of appropriation of contextual and text-external generic
resources within and across professional genres and professional practices. Similarly, Brem-
ner (2008: 308) favours a more comprehensive understanding of interdiscursive voices in any
system of activity. He points out that genres are interconnected in wider systems of activity,
and they influence each other in the system. As such, a
key feature of intertextuality to consider, then, is that it is not simply a link between texts,
but a phenomenon that helps shape other texts: as genres combine to achieve different
goals, they contribute to the development of new genres as they are recontextualised . . .
the generic, linguistic and rhetorical choices that a writer makes will be influenced by the
texts that precede or surround the text under construction and will in turn have an effect
on the final textual product.
(Bremner 2008: 308)
Insights from current research

Recent work in critical genre theory (see Bhatia 2004, 2008, 2017) has clearly demonstrated
the need to consider professional practices in addition to the discursive practices in specific
professions. Let us briefly turn to some of the key developments in critical genre theory.
Critical genre analysis

Genre analysis does not consider communication as just a representation of meaning through
discursive artefacts; it is an attempt to understand why members of a specific disciplinary or
professional community communicate the way they do (Bhatia 1993, 2004). This requires a
shared understanding and discipline-specific awareness of how professionals conceptualize
ideas, issues, arguments, and so on and talk about them to achieve their disciplinary and pro-
fessional goals. Many of these crucial aspects of shared understanding in genre studies have
traditionally been subsumed under context, which has often been assigned varying degrees of
importance in the analytical literature in genre studies. However, in more recent literature, it
has been assigned an increasingly prominent role, thus redefining genre as a configuration of
128
text-external and text-internal resources, highlighting, at the same time, two kinds of relation-
ships involving texts and contexts. As Bhatia (2010) points out,
Interrelationships between and across texts focusing primarily on text-internal proper-

ties are viewed as intertextual in nature, whereas interactions across and between genres
resulting primarily from text-external factors are seen as interdiscursive in nature.
Bhatia (2017) considers three main aspects of critical genre analysis:
• Interdiscursivity
• Professional practice
• Multi-perspective approach
He considers interdiscursivity as central to our understanding of the complexities of profes-

sional genres, which are typical of professional, disciplinary, institutional, and other workplace
contexts. Let us discuss two of the key aspects of critical genre analysis – namely, interdiscur-
sivity and professional practice – which are centrally relevant to our discussion here.
Interdiscursivity
Most professional genres operate simultaneously across four somewhat different yet overlap-
ping levels to construct and interpret meanings in typical disciplinary, institutional, or profes-
sional contexts. It is interesting to note that though the ultimate product is the text, it is made
possible by a combination of complex and dynamic range of resources other than what in
linguistic and earlier discourse analytical literature is viewed as lexico-grammatical, rhetorical,
and structural (Bhatia 2004). The other key contributors that make professional communica-
tion possible are conventions of the genre in question, the understanding of professional prac-
tice in which the genre is embedded, and the culture of the profession, discipline, or institution
that constrains the use of textual resources for a particular discursive practice (Bhatia 2017).
These two kinds of semiotic resources – text-internal and text-external – are exploited by
specialists to achieve their specific objectives, but they also operate as constraints on most
forms of discursive practices. Text-internal resources have been well-researched within the
discourse and genre analytical literature highlighting the notion of intertextuality; however,
text-external resources, which include the conventions that constrain generic constructs and
professional practices and, perhaps more appropriately, specific disciplinary cultures that moti-
vate these discursive and professional practices, have not been paid adequate attention. As an
example, one can look at products from pharmaceutical companies that are invariably accom-
panied by leaflets which give details of the product, its composition, its effectiveness, and its
contraindications, but they often include promotional elements as they compete with other
products. This interdiscursive hybridity in the form of mixed genres represents two distinctive
spheres of activity (i.e. medical and marketing). Similarly, hybrid generic patterns are typically
used in corporate annual disclosure reports as hybrids of reporting and promotional genres (see
Bhatia 2010 for a detailed account of corporate annual reports). Another typical example would
be the so-called advertorials in newspapers and magazines, appropriating semiotic resources
across two different genres: the editorial and the advertisement.
Comprehensive analysis of professional communication, therefore, needs to consider and
account for all such semiotic resources, including textual, intertextual, genre conventions,
and other constraints on professional practice and culture. Interdiscursivity can be viewed as
129
appropriation of text-external semiotic resources across genre conventions and specific aspects
of professional practices, cultures, or identities. Appropriations across texts thus give rise to
intertextual relations, whereas appropriations across professional genres, practices, and cul-
tures constitute interdiscursive relations.
Writing in the professions, whether in law, business, or media, is essentially an interdiscur-
sive phenomenon, which takes place in socio-pragmatic space (Bhatia 2010) where professional
identities and, more specifically, participant relations are negotiated through a dynamic range of
different voices to achieve specific professional goals and objectives. One of the reasons for this
interdiscursive character of professional writing seems to be the consequence of widespread col-
laboration within and across specific communities of practice (Ede and Lunsford 1990; Wenger
1998), where collaborative writing is pervasive in contemporary workplaces. In the PR industry,
for instance, this kind of collaborative effort involves a variety of clients and PR specialists
across specific firms, at one level, and within a specific firm itself, different members of the
team are involved in the designing and writing of specific document. This aspect of interdis-
cursive collaboration in the construction of PR contexts, whether they are company and client
meetings, advertisements, press releases, web designs, or proposals, reflects Bakhtin’s (1987)
assertion that all texts are essentially heteroglossic in nature. Fairclough (1995), similarly, reiter-
ates that that interdiscursivity highlights the normal heterogeneity of texts in being constituted
by combinations of diverse genres and discourses transforming the past or prior texts into the
present. Consequently, Bhatia (2010) provides a comprehensive view of interdiscursivity in
genre theory, especially in the context of professional genres, viewing it as creative appropria-
tion or manipulation of prior formulations of discursive actions within and across professional
practices and cultures to construct new and creative forms of professional genres.
Professional practice
As discussed, recent studies have focused increasingly on text-external factors and contextual-
ization which contribute to the construction, interpretation, and analysis of the textual genres
intertextually (Foucault 1972) and interdiscursively (Fairclough 1995; Candlin and Maley
1997; Bhatia 2004, 2010, 2017). In professional and institutional contexts, particularly, one
needs to integrate textual as well as practice-based contextual analyses to have a comprehen-
sive view of communication. In order to better understand how professionals conduct their
day-to-day business, we need to understand how discursive practices are related to profes-
sional, organizational, and institutional practices (Schnurr 2013). The focus in discourse analy-
sis, therefore, must be on the description of discursive interactions, distinguishing them from
what might be regarded as institutional interactions as well. Discursive interactions represent
the actual instances of genres constructed and interpreted by members of professional com-
munities in the process of accomplishing their professional practices, whereas institutional
interactions are those that provide the essential background discourses that represent the shared
beliefs, professional values, and codes of conduct that all members follow in their everyday
business. The analysis of language in production and consumption of knowledge activities
within disciplinary contexts needs to focus on disciplinary and/or professional genres that
are the ultimate products of the interactions that members of professional communities are
involved in and on the spoken and written organizational discourses that they participate in as
part of their professional routine. Any analysis of organizational or professional practice needs
to consider the related discursive practices, as it is precisely this relationship between discourse
and expert behaviour that often constitutes actions linked to displays of professional expertise
(Candlin and Candlin 2002; Philips et al. 2004).
130
Despite the various approaches discourse analysis has developed in different contexts, and
for different purposes, these approaches share a concern for the analysis of discursive prac-
tices to understand better the disciplinary, institutional, organizational, or professional prac-
tices of specialist communities (Compagnone 2015). Critical genre theory is an attempt to
integrate many of these concerns in a multi-perspective analytical framework that focuses
on professional practice in addition to discursive practice (see Höög and Björkvall 2018; Ge
and Wang 2019; Yu and Bondi 2019; Qian 2020). This is especially necessary given the rapid
expansion of digital genres of professional communication to explore which researchers have
increasingly turned to critical genre theory to account for creative manipulation of professional
resources in the pursuit of specific professional goals. For example, Bhatia (2018, forthcom-
ing) focuses on the digital beauty industry to investigate the interdiscursive construction of
expertise on YouTube educational tutorials to account for the way YouTubers establish them-
selves as both engaged and interactive participants of the YouTube community. At the same
time, they discursively exploit the boundaries between the expert and lay person by drawing
on their discursive competence, disciplinary knowledge, and professional practice. Similarly,
Sokół (2022) draws on the notion of interdiscursive performance and ecolinguistics to inves-
tigate the interdiscursive practices that lifestyle vloggers engage in to construct their expertise
and credibility when performing eco-activism on YouTube vlogs. Feng (2019) explores how
social media has transformed the marketization of university communication by analyzing
recruitment posts on WeChat in China. He finds, amongst other things, an interdiscursive mix
of a wide range of communicative functions, particularly the co-existence of policy discourse
and promotional discourse and the use of personalized language and multimodal resources to
engage readers’ interest and to build solidarity.
Implications for English for professional communication

We have presented in this chapter, the current view of professional communication as an inter-
disciplinary area of study and application, which may be viewed as an integration not only of
two rather distinct approaches to the teaching and learning of English – ESP and business com-
munication studies – but also enriched by multidimensional and multi-perspective analyses of
systems of professional genres and practices (Bhatia 2017). We have also tried to point out that
advances in the field of genre analysis, particularly the effort to go beyond the textual arte-
facts to investigate context of various kinds, including intertextuality and interdiscursivity, are
crucial to a comprehensive understanding of professional communication. Drawing on critical
genre analytical framework, we highlight the following areas of challenge and further work.
Accounting for professional practice

Traditional genre analysis has encouraged analysts to focus on idealized and somewhat pure
generic forms and, in the process, overlook the realities of the professional world. So it is nec-
essary to understand and account for professional practice rather than just the discursive prac-
tice of these professionals. It is important to analyze the discourses often used by specialists
but also account for how they exploit such discourses in achieving their everyday professional
tasks. The focus should remain on ‘how language participates in the performance of profes-
sional tasks, creating environments, identities, social relations’ (Bonini 2010: 485). Profes-
sional genres and professional practices are invariably seen as complementing each other, in
that they not only influence each other but are often co-constructed, thus making it necessary
for the intended users of such genres to interpret them in a much wider socio-pragmatic space
131
(Bhatia 2004), with particular attention to intertextuality and interdiscursivity, as well as the
professional practices they often realize in specific contexts.
Demystifying the interdiscursive nature of professional genres

With the use of digital modes of communication in public life, and the more recent increase
in the interdisciplinary nature of academic and professional discourse, manipulation of genre
conventions by expert members of professional communities has become a common strategy
to signal private intentions within the framework of socially shared generic conventions (Bha-
tia 2010). Appropriations across professional genres, practices, and cultures tend to encourage
experts and experienced writers to look for innovative strategies to achieve their individual
and professional objectives. In the context of such manipulation of interdiscursive resources
by members of professional communities to construct generic hybrids, one of the main con-
cerns of critical genre analysis is to account for such appropriations and point out that these are
legitimate appropriations and creative extensions of available linguistic and generic resources,
not necessarily flouting conventions. Accounting for such innovative appropriations is crucial
for our understanding of professional practice.
Providing evidence-based pedagogical insights for EPC

Although genre theory so far has been able to offer significant linguistic insights for the teach-
ing and learning of languages under ESP (Swales 1990; Bhatia 1993), the learners have been
constrained in two important ways: firstly, they remain exposed to ideal and pedagogically
convenient forms of genre and so have often been surprised by the complex realities of the
professional world, and secondly, there has been a significant gap between the perceptions of
genre analysts and those of practising professionals. There has considerably less shared interest
in each other’s professional objectives and practices; in fact, the two communities often give
rise to contestations rather than shared understanding. A good understanding of discursive and
professional practices can also help EPC course designers and practitioners to bridge this gap
between the academy and professional world.
Understanding professional communication as interdiscursive performance

As discussed in the preceding sections, genres are invariably used to give voice to profes-
sional practices or actions which need to be integrated with discursive practice to study inter-
discursive performance of professionals in their day-to-day activities (Wei et al. 2020). The
tendency to focus entirely on textual space, undermining socio-pragmatic space, can prevent
analysts from arriving at evidence-based insights about the use of professional discourse to
achieve professional objectives. There are two sides to this issue – first, from the point of
view of the writer primarily responsible for the discursive construction of the text and, sec-
ond, from the recipient of the text who is responsible for the uptake. Thus, we need a shift in
focus from an exclusive linguistic description of genres towards a more comprehensive and
grounded analysis and explanation of the conditions of production and reception of genres
and their communicative purposes. Interdiscursive performance thus accounts for not only
the discursive and professional practice in interdiscursive contexts but also the recipient’s
uptake in professional contexts. Bhatia (2017) sums up some of the key concerns and per-
spectives in critical genre theory to account for interdiscursive performance in professional
contexts.
132
Figure 10.2 Theory of interdiscursive performance
Finally, to conclude, it may be said that research in areas such as the relationship between dis-
cursive activities and professional practices in most disciplinary, professional, and institutional
contexts (Bhatia 2006, 2008) is still in its early stages, and a lot more work is needed before
we can find more comprehensive and convincing answers to the question that Bhatia (2004: 9)
raised – why do most of the professionals from the same disciplinary culture construct, inter-
pret, and use language in specific rhetorical situations more or less the same way?
Related topics
genre analysis; institutional discourse
Further reading
Bhatia, V. K. (2004) Worlds of Written Discourse: A Genre-Based View, London and New York: Con-
tinuum. (It offers a comprehensive genre analytical framework for the study of discursive practices in
a variety of different business and disciplinary contexts in the real world.)
Bhatia, V. K. (2017) Critical Genre Analysis: Investigating Interdiscursive Performance in Professional
Communication, London: Routledge. (It presents the most recent updates on and specification of criti-
cal genre theory integrating discursive and professional practices in various professional contexts and
demonstrates the analysis and its use in English for professional communication contexts.)
Smart, G. (2006) Writing the Economy: Activity, Genre and Technology in the World of Banking, London:
Equinox Publishing. (It is an engaging and well-researched analysis of an important banking institution.)
Swales, J. M. (1990) Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. (It is an excellent exposition to the origin of genre in English for academic purposes.
It is a must for anyone interested in the study of genre analysis in applied linguistics.)
Swales, J. M. (2004) Research Genres: Explorations and Applications, Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press. (It is very comprehensive and useful book for the teaching and learning of academic
English, with particular reference to research writing.)
133
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11
Identity
Introduction
Interest in identity in the field of applied linguistics and language education is best understood
in the context of a shift from a predominantly psycholinguistic approach to language learning
to include a greater focus on sociological and anthropological dimensions, particularly with
reference to sociocultural, post-structural, and critical theories (Norton 2013; Mackey 2015;
Preece 2016; Norton and De Costa 2018). Such research suggests that the extent to which
a person speaks or is silent has much to do with the extent to which the speaker is valued
in any given institution or community (Bourdieu 1991). In this regard, social processes and
structures marked by inequities based on such categories as race, gender, class, and sexual
orientation may serve to position people in ways that silence and exclude. At the same time,
however, people may exercise human agency to resist marginalization, claiming identities of
competence and power (Miller 2014). Of central interest to researchers of identity in applied
linguistics is that the very articulation of power, identity, and human agency is expressed in and
through language. Language is thus more than a system of signs; it is social practice in which
experiences are organized and identities negotiated.
Identity researchers in applied linguistics are interested in relationships between speakers
and the larger social world, with an important focus on language learners and teachers. They
examine ways in which affective factors, such as motivation and extroversion, are socially
constructed, changing across time and space, and possibly co-existing in contradictory ways
within a single individual (Darvin and Norton 2015, 2023). Equity is a central concern, includ-
ing attention to ways learners and teachers challenge essentialist ideologies (e.g. narrow
assumptions about what it means to be ‘woman’ or ‘Muslim’). A commitment to equity is also
reflected in identity researchers’ examination of promising practices for supporting learners’
diverse identities and expanding their range of imagined identities across time and space. At
the same time, there is acknowledgement that classroom pedagogy alone cannot fully address
systemic injustices that result in the marginalization of certain individuals and groups due to
specific identity features. Critical perspectives and critical pedagogy thus go hand in hand with
identity work, seeking ways to construct more equitable systems in and beyond the classroom,
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082637-13 137

including attention to material conditions that give rise to inequities in power and learning
opportunities (Block 2017; Morgan 2017).
This chapter traces the genesis of research on identity in applied linguistics from the 1970s
to the present day, focusing on some of the major theoretical influences on identity research.
The main issues include changes to theories of language and theories of the individual, drawing
particularly on post-structuralist theory and conceptions of power. Current research focuses on
intersectional negotiation of diverse identity dimensions, the theory of investment in language
learning and teaching, teacher identity and social change, and language and identity in a digital
world. This chapter addresses prominent methods of identity research and then turns to impli-
cations of identity research for classroom practice. It concludes with a discussion of future
directions for research with respect to translanguaging and new materialism.
In the 1970s and 1980s, language education scholars interested in identity tended to draw
distinctions between social identity and cultural identity. While social identity was seen to
reference the relationship between individual language learners and the larger social world,
as mediated through institutions, such as families, schools, workplaces, social services, and
law courts (e.g. Gumperz 1982), cultural identity referenced membership in a particular ethnic
group (such as Japanese or Somali) that shares a common history, a common language, and
similar ways of understanding the world (e.g. Valdes 1986). However, as Atkinson (1999) has
noted, past theories of cultural identity tended to essentialize and oversimplify identity in prob-
lematic ways. In more recent years, the difference between social and cultural identities is seen
to be theoretically more fluid, and the intersections between social and cultural identities are
considered more significant than their differences. In contemporary research, discussed more
fully in this chapter, identity is seen as socioculturally constructed in relations of power that are
frequently inequitable. The Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, launched in 2002,
as well as other key journals in applied linguistics, ensures that issues of language, identity,
and learning remain at the forefront of research in applied linguistics and language education.
Changing conceptions of language

One of the main issues in applied linguistics research on identity concerns post-Saussurean
theories of language, which are associated, amongst others, with the work of Bakhtin (1981),
Bourdieu (1991), Hall (1997) and Weedon (1997). These theories build on but are distinct
from structuralist theories of language. For structuralists, the linguistic system guarantees the
meaning of signs (the word and its meaning) and each linguistic community has its own set
of signifying practices that give value to the signs in a language. Post-structuralists have cri-
tiqued these theories of language on the grounds that structuralism cannot account for struggles
over the diverse social meanings that can be attributed to signs in a given language (Norton
and Morgan 2020). The signs /success/, /education/, /time/, for example, can have different
meanings for different people within the same linguistic community. While structuralists con-
ceive of signs as having idealized meanings and linguistic communities as being relatively
homogeneous and consensual, post-structuralists take the position that the signifying practices
of a society are sites of struggle and that linguistic communities are heterogeneous arenas
characterized by conflicting claims to truth and power. Thus, language is not conceived of as
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Identity
a neutral medium of communication but is understood with reference to its social meaning in
a frequently inequitable world.
In post-structuralist theories of language, there is much interest in the way power is impli-
cated in relationships between individuals, communities, and political entities (McKinney
2017; Norton 2021). Identity researchers often draw on Foucault (1980) and Bourdieu (1991)
to better understand how power operates within society, constraining or enabling human action.
Foucault (1980) argues, for example, that power is often invisible in that it frequently natural-
izes events and practices in ways that come to be seen as ‘normal’ to members of a community.
Bourdieu (1991), who is particularly interested in language and symbolic power, notes further
that the value ascribed to speech cannot be understood apart from the person who speaks, and
the person who speaks cannot be understood apart from larger networks of social relationships.
Every time we speak, we are negotiating a sense of self in relation to the larger social world and
reorganizing that relationship across time and space. Our race, gender, class, ethnicity, sexual
orientation, and other characteristics are all implicated in this negotiation of identity.
Changing conceptions of the individual

In the 1970s and 1980s, much research on language learning investigated the personalities,
learning styles, motivations, and other unique characteristics of individual learners, and
conceived of language learners with reference to relatively fixed and long-term traits. Such
research was consistent with humanist conceptions of the individual dominant in Western phi-
losophy, which presupposed that every person – the ‘real me’ – had an essential, unique, fixed,
and coherent core. In post-structuralist theory, however, the individual is conceived as diverse,
contradictory, dynamic, and changing over historical time and social space (Weedon 1997;
Kramsch 2009; Norton 2013). As Weedon (1997) notes, it is through language that a person
negotiates a sense of self within and across a range of sites at different points in time, and
language contributes to a person’s ability to gain access to powerful social networks. From a
language educator’s perspective, the conceptualization of subjectivity as multiple and chang-
ing offers opportunity, and indeed responsibility, to support learners to negotiate their identi-
ties in ways that maximize their right to speak. While some identity positions may constrain
opportunities for learners to speak, read, or write, other identity positions may offer enhanced
sets of possibilities for social interaction and human agency.
Such post-structuralist theory has great relevance for applied linguistics theory in that it pro-
vides insight into the conditions under which language learners speak, read, or write (McNamara
2012; Norton and Morgan 2020). In those contexts in which a language learner is valued and is
in a subject position of relative power, the learner will be encouraged to engage in social interac-
tion; in those contexts in which a learner is marginalized and powerless, opportunities for social
interaction will be more limited. However, in post-structuralist theory, structural constraints and
social conditions do not entirely determine the social trajectories of individuals. Through human
agency, language learners who struggle to speak from an identity position of relative powerless-
ness may be able to reframe their relationship with their interlocutors and claim alternative, more
powerful identities from which to speak, thereby enhancing language learning (Miller 2014).

As recent identity research suggests, identity needs to be interrogated in the face of globaliza-
tion, including attention to ways that experiences of transnationalism shape language prac-
tices, investments, and identities. Processes relating to globalization and transnationalism have
139
led to increasing multilingualism in schools and society and the production of what Higgins
(2015) has called ‘millennium identities’, which index the diverse and complex mechanisms
that produce linguistic and cultural hybridity in many 21st-century contexts. At the same time,
the forces of neoliberalism (see Block et al. 2012; Heller and McElhinny 2017), which entail
deregulated markets, heightened individualism, marketization of activities and institutions, and
the pursuit of profit, have had concomitant effects on the identities of language learners and
teachers. Dynamics relating to both globalization and neoliberalism, as well as colonialism
and post-coloniality, have propelled English to a status of unparalleled prestige, with signifi-
cant implications for identity negotiation amidst processes of learning, teaching, and speaking
English, the subject of much identity research. In this changing global landscape, research on
intersectionality, investment, language teacher identity, and digital technology is vibrant.
Intersectionality and diverse identity dimensions

While some identity research focuses primarily on a particular dimension of identity, such
as gender, race, ethnicity, religion, or social class, most identity researchers agree that any
analysis is incomplete without paying heed to ‘the necessarily intersectional nature of iden-
tity’ (Block and Corona 2016: 507). With origins in Black feminism (e.g. Crenshaw 1989;
Hill-Collins and Bilge 2015), intersectionality acknowledges that different identity dimensions
cannot be understood in isolation from each other. As Crenshaw (1989: 140) asserts, ‘because
the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that
does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in
which Black women are subordinated’. Current applied linguistics research on intersectional
dimensions of race, social class, and sexual orientation is particularly dynamic.
With regard to issues of race, Motha’s (2014) work reminds us that the teaching of English
remains contested territory, inscribed by race. Examining the anti-racist work of four English
as a Second Language (ESL) teachers, Motha (2014) unpacks the myth of race neutrality in
Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) and reveals how ideologies of
native-speakerism, ‘standard’ language, and empire perpetuate racial hierarchies in American
public schools. In a study examining intersections of race, gender, and sexuality, Appleby
(2014) found that academic identities of white Western men teaching English in higher educa-
tion in Japan erased their embodiment of race, gender, and sexuality, making invisible idealized
white Western masculinities that may inadvertently reproduce forms of racialization, sexism,
and patriarchy. Focusing on race in Second Language Acquisition (SLA), Anya (2017) exam-
ined how Blackness shaped African American study abroad students’ intersectional identity
negotiation, intercultural experiences, and investments in learning Portuguese in Afro-Brazil-
ian communities. Investigating complexities of race in post-apartheid South Africa, Kerfoot
and Bello-Nonjengele (2016) demonstrated how South African children’s fluid and strategic
linguistic practices deconstructed racial categories and denaturalized previously enforced rela-
tionships between specific linguistic forms and certain racial and ethnic categories. Future
work on race and its intersection with other identity dimensions will continue to address the
long-standing native- and non-native-speaker distinction, which continues to be resilient in
mainstream second language identity research (Jain et al. 2021).
The role of social class in language learning and teaching is gaining increasing attention
in identity research, supported by Block’s (2014) seminal contribution. Most work on social
class in applied linguistics draws on Bourdieusian conceptualizations of class, understanding
social class to be built on Bourdieu’s (1991) constructs of capital, habitus, and field. A spe-
cial issue on social class, edited by Kanno and Vandrick (2014), in the Journal of Language,
140
Identity
Identity, and Education, demonstrated the urgency of examining materially mediated sources
of inequality in language education. Prominent themes in social class work include transna-
tionalism, English learning, and investment. While recognizing that the emergence of neolib-
eral post-industrial economic structures may render traditional notions of ‘middle class’ and
‘working class’ defunct (Savage et al. 2013), Darvin and Norton (2014) argue that class dif-
ferences continue to impinge on the life trajectories of migrants, in visible and invisible ways.
They draw on research with migrant learners in Canada to illustrate how migrants operate
with a transnational habitus, continually negotiating their class positions. Working with more
privileged learners, Shin (2014) examined how Korean secondary school students studying
abroad in Toronto responded to ‘linguistic and racial stigmatization and downward social
mobility’ (Shin 2014: 101) by performing elite transnational Korean identities. Ironically,
by engaging in upper class consumption of Korean language and culture in Toronto, these
Korean students constrained their acquisition of English linguistic capital, the class-inflected
objective of their migration.
With Nelson’s (2009) ground-breaking work on LGBTQ+ learners paving the way, sexual
orientation is gaining prominence in identity research in applied linguistics (Gray and Cooke
2019). For example, through critical reflection on past teaching experiences, Rhodes (2019)
developed strategies to positively address sexual identity in the adult English language class-
room, while Paiz (2019) presented an approach for the queering of English language teaching,
including an increased emphasis on LGBTQ+ inclusivity in teacher preparation and curricular
materials. In the context of Japanese SL/FL classrooms, Moore (2019) investigated interper-
sonal factors shaping queer L2 learners’ decisions surrounding identity management, expand-
ing his analysis in Moore (2023), which highlights ways that institutional policies and practices
impact queer learners’ well-being. Future work will continue investigating how queer inquiry
can be more fruitfully applied in language education, teacher education, and materials devel-
opment.
Identity and investment

The sociological construct of investment, conceptualized by Norton in the mid-1990s (Norton
Peirce 1995; Norton 2013) and developed more fully with Darvin (Darvin and Norton 2015,
2023), continues to impact applied linguistics research across global sites (e.g. Barkhuizen
2016; Bemporad 2016; Cole et al. 2016; Anya 2017; Donehue 2017; Jiang et al. 2020; Clé-
ment and Norton 2021). Conceptualized as a complement to the psychological construct of
motivation (Dörnyei and Ushioda 2009), investment research has found that a learner may be
a highly motivated language learner but may nevertheless have little investment in the lan-
guage practices of a given classroom or community, if it is, for example, racist, sexist, elitist,
or homophobic. Despite being highly motivated, a learner can be excluded from the language
practices of a classroom or perhaps resist certain classroom practices, and in time be positioned
as a ‘poor’ or unmotivated language learner.
To capture a changing social order characterized by technological innovation, mobility,
and unpredictability (Blommaert 2013), Darvin and Norton (2015, 2023) have developed an
expanded model of investment, which occurs at the intersection of identity, capital, and ideol-
ogy. (See Figure 11.1.) Through this critical lens, researchers and practitioners can examine
more systematically how microstructures of power in communicative events are indexical of
larger ideological structures. By providing a multilayered and multidirectional approach, the
model demonstrates how power circulates in society and constructs modes of inclusion and
exclusion through and beyond language.
141
Figure 11.1 Darvin and Norton’s model of investment (reprinted from ‘Identity and a Model of
Investment in Applied Linguistics’, Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 35, p. 42;
copyright 2015 by Cambridge University Press; reprinted with permission)
Since its inception, the model of investment has been used as a heuristic to frame diverse
research studies of both language learners and teachers. For example, in a study of two grade
3 French immersion classrooms in Quebec, Canada, Ballinger (2017) drew on the model to
examine the extent to which learners are invested in languages of instruction, French and Eng-
lish. The researcher drew links between the more equitable social status of the two languages
and the use of these languages in peer interaction. In a New Zealand context, Barkhuizen
(2016) examined how language teacher identities are constructed in and through narrative,
drawing on the investment model as a theoretical lens. Recognizing that ‘investment indexes
issues of identity and imagined futures’ (Darvin and Norton 2015: 39), Barkhuizen analyzed
the lived stories of one teacher, Sela, as they unfolded across personal, institutional, and ideo-
logical contexts. In a study of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) instructors in South Korea,
Gearing and Roger (2018) used the model to analyze to what extent teachers were invested in
learning and using the Korean language. Their study showed how their investment was shaped
by perceived inequities of power between themselves and local communities of practice, their
attempts to negotiate membership into these communities, and the ways they were positioned
as native English speakers. As demonstrated in the Douglas Fir Model of SLA (Douglas Fir
Group 2016), investment has become foundational in applied linguistics research, with much
potential for interdisciplinary links (Clément and Norton 2021), and continues to have much
potential for future research in the field (De Costa and Norton 2016).
Language teacher identity

Language teacher identity (LTI) has become an increasingly vibrant site of identity research
over the past two decades, as attested to by a mushrooming number of edited volumes and
journal special issues devoted to this area in recent years (e.g. Cheung et al. 2015; Varghese
142
Identity
et al. 2016; Barkhuizen 2017, 2021; De Costa and Norton 2017; Yazan and Lindahl 2020).
There is growing recognition of the centrality of identity to language teaching and language
teacher education, with De Costa and Norton (2017: 7) asserting that ‘language teaching is
identity work’ and Kanno and Stuart (2011: 249) naming the development of teacher iden-
tity as ‘the central project in which novice L2 teachers are involved’. A significant theme in
language teacher identity work is the role of native-speakerist ideologies in the experiences
of non-native-English-speaking (NNES) TESOL teachers, including the intersections of iden-
tities related to NNES, race, and nationality (Aneja 2016; Canagarajah 2017; Wolff and De
Costa 2017; Swearingen 2019).
As Norton (2017: 81) states, ‘language teacher identity indexes both social structure and
human agency’. Indeed, much language teacher identity literature emphasizes the agency of
teachers in improving student learning and working towards equity and transformation (e.g.
Miller et al. 2017). Morgan (2017: 206) understands teacher identity as ‘a key source of agency
for social change’, while Higgins (2017: 39) positions language teacher identity research ‘as
a form of activism’. At the same time, there is recognition that language teacher identities are
negotiated in complex relationships with the micro, meso, and macro social structures and
power relations (Douglas Fir Group 2016; De Costa and Norton 2017). Block (2017: 35) thus
reminds us that teachers do not have ‘unfettered agency’ and argues that ‘LTIs are changing
as the political economy that envelops them changes, and this reality needs to be taken on in
future LTI research’.
Amidst recognition that ‘becoming a teacher is nothing short of identity transformation’
(Kanno and Stuart 2011: 239), there are calls to place language teacher identity development
at the centre of language teacher education (e.g. Kanno and Stuart 2011; Varghese et al. 2016;
Shank Lauwo and Norton, in press). In response, Fairley (2020) conceptualized a model of
LTI-centred language teacher education that is competencies-based and focused on the devel-
opment of LTI that is transformative, agentive, and advocacy-oriented. While most teacher
education-oriented LTI studies have focused on preservice TESOL teachers, Shank Lauwo
et al. (2022) examined LTI in elementary preservice teacher education in Canada, finding
race and language learning histories to impact the equity-oriented approaches teachers bring
to plurilingual classrooms. Most recently, Barkhuizen (2021) has extended identity work in
teacher education to focus on language teacher educators, examining how language teacher
educators negotiate and are ascribed various identities in professional contexts and offering
40 research questions pointing to robust future directions for language teacher educator iden-
tity research.
Identity in the digital world

The affordances of digital technology have been investigated by a number of scholars inter-
ested in identity and language learning, and this trend will likely strengthen in future years
(Lam and Warriner 2012; Darvin 2016). Thorne et al. (2015) have found that digital interac-
tion offers particular affordances in the construction of identities of competence. In the context
of digital storytelling, Johnson and Kendrick (2017) demonstrated how affordances of the
multiple modes of digital technology supported refugee-background youth to express difficult
knowledge and construct identities of accomplishment, overcoming language barriers to utilize
rich communicative repertoires. Examining social class dimensions of digital literacy, Darvin
(2018) demonstrated how material conditions of adolescents of contrasting class positions
help produce contrasting practices and dispositions towards digital technology, with significant
implications for their respective accumulation of cultural and social capital.
143
However, as informative as this work has been, Prinsloo (2020) argues that much of the
digital research on language education has focused on research in wealthier regions of the
world and that there is a great need for research in poorly resourced communities to impact
global debates on new technologies, identity, and language learning. Conceptualizing digital
media as placed resources operating differently in different contexts, Lemphane and Prinsloo
(2014) found that the contrasting digital practices of urban township children and suburban
middle-class children in South Africa represent situated sociopolitical norms reflecting their
class differences, suggesting that digital media may actually widen class-based inequalities. In
the context of an after-school journalism club in Kenya, Kendrick et al. (2019) found that social
practices surrounding digital technology enabled girls to claim identities of power, as they
used digital technology to develop practices and identities as activists addressing injustices
in Kenyan society. In a Ugandan context, Stranger-Johannessen and Norton (2017) examined
how teachers exercise their agency by using one particular resource, the African Storybook
initiative, an online digital platform with children’s stories. The model of investment (Darvin
and Norton 2015) was used analytically to understand teachers’ investments in the African
Storybook, its impact on their teaching, and their changing identities.
Research methods
Post-structuralism’s understanding of identity as a negotiated social practice, always embed-
ded within networks of power, has methodological implications. Researchers adopting a
post-structuralist lens to investigate the intersections of language and identity pay particular
reflexive attention to the entanglement of their own subjectivities in local contexts and the
research process in general (Norton and Early 2011; Moore 2016; Prior 2016). Research-
ers’ own multiple and shifting identities shape the particular research questions they ask,
the methods used to answer them, and the kinds of stories participants share with them. In
Moore’s (2016) study of a community English class for queer learners in Japan, he enhances
his thematic analysis by foregrounding his position as one of the volunteer teachers of the
class, critically exploring the tensions emerging from competing interpellations of queer iden-
tities by the teachers and students. Innovative work by Prior (2016) combines conversation
analysis with a discursive constructionist approach to investigate how he, as the researcher,
and his participants – many of whom identified outside of heterosexuality – discursively co-
constructed and co-managed emotions as social actions through their talk-in-interaction. In
addition to a consideration of researcher identity, Norton and De Costa (2018) have identified
a number of methodologies that have been helpful in identity research, providing a com-
prehensive review of narrative inquiry, conversation analysis, and linguistic ethnography in
identity research.

The relevance of identity research for classroom teaching is of much interest to language
educators in diverse regions of the world. By addressing identity in the language classroom,
teachers are able to design learning activities that recognize the rich diversity of learners and
affirm the cultural, linguistic, and semiotic knowledge that they bring to class. Central ques-
tions teachers need to ask concern the conditions under which learners will speak, which iden-
tity positions offer greater opportunities for access to powerful networks, and how to best
support the collaborative creation of power (Cummins and Early 2011). Learners who may be
marginalized by virtue of gender, race, ethnicity, or social class can be supported to reframe
144
Identity
their relationships with the social world in ways that amplify their agency and heighten their
investment in learning and knowledge production.
Many identity scholars point to ways in which multilingual and multimodal pedagogies,
often in consort, can support identity affirmation and negotiation by making visible and build-
ing on learners’ diverse linguistic and semiotic repertoires. Shank Lauwo (2018), for example,
examined how translanguaging pedagogies, including Tanzanian children’s authorship of tri-
lingual multimodal stories and identity texts, supported learners to claim agency as language
experts, co-teachers, and knowledge producers while supporting language learning and devel-
opment of critical literacies. Focusing on refugee-background youth’s multimodal literacy
practices, Kennedy et al. (2019) examined how emergent multilinguals in the United States
used multimodal journaling and poetry writing to author unique identities that resisted static
identity categories while negotiating bicultural Chin (Burmese) American identities. Drawing
on a range of literacy and multimodality studies in East Africa and Canada, Kendrick (2016)
points to how engaging with multiple modes, such as imaginative play, drawing, and multi-
modal role-play, provides opportunities to rehearse and try on an expanded range of identities.
In a practitioner-oriented volume on teaching English Language Learners (ELLs) through a
multilingual lens, Cummins and Early (2015) offer concrete strategies for how to centre learn-
ers’ multilingual and multimodal competencies, funds of knowledge, and lived experiences in
order to maximize identity affirmation and empowerment.
In recent years, digital storytelling has become a popular identity text project encouraging
learners to claim multimodal and often multilingual authorial agency (Stranger-Johannessen
and Norton 2017). Dagenais et al. (2017), for example, detail how teachers used ScribJab, a
digital platform for composing multilingual, multimodal stories, to validate students’ diverse
linguistic repertoires, arguing that assessment of multilingual, multimodal compositions is
essential for them to be taken seriously as ‘real school’. With evidence from a university-based
EFL classroom in China, Jiang et al. (2020) demonstrated how digital storytelling can support
teachers’ identity negotiation and investment. Significantly, as Hare et al. (2017) detail, some
Indigenous communities are embracing digital storytelling as a means of revitalizing their lan-
guages and cultures, and digital storytelling is bolstering efforts to work towards reconciliation
and to centre Indigenous stories and perspectives in imaginations of Canada’s national identity.
Future directions
Identity and translanguaging

Amidst the recent flurry of attention to translanguaging in applied linguistics (Li 2018), the
intersection of identity and translanguaging is emerging as a generative area of inquiry (see
Shank Lauwo and Norton 2023). Translanguaging, as a bottom-up counter-hegemonic prac-
tice, can productively disrupt limiting and prescriptive identity categories and create space for
hybridity, transformation, and the emergence of new identity possibilities. Destabilizing one-
to-one equations of language and identity, translanguaging enables people to claim a ‘hybrid
language space to identify and ethnify – choosing who they want to become beyond traditional
linguistic and exact ethnic affiliations (Nkadimeng and Makalela 2015: 7). Translanguaging
offers fertile ground for the examination of ‘third space’ identity negotiation (Guzula et al. 2016;
Li 2018), polyphonic identities (Shank Lauwo 2018), investment (Shank Lauwo 2021), and
translation (Doherty et al. 2022). Dynamics relating to increasing transnationalism, complexity,
and the ubiquitous nature of digital technology will render the intersections of translanguaging
and identity an increasingly vibrant area of research in applied linguistics in years to come.
145
Identity and new materialism

While post-structuralist theories provide insight into identity as a site of struggle across time
and place, there is a growing body of research that seeks to better understand the ways in which
the material world is entangled with the human world and how bodies and objects interact in
complex and unpredictable ways. Applied linguistics scholars such as Toohey (2018), Penny-
cook (2018), Dagenais (2020), and Canagarajah (2018) draw on the work of Barad (2007) and
other post-humanist scholars to redefine identity not only in terms of social activity but also
in relation to the socio-material world. As Dagenais (2020: 558) notes, ‘What distinguishes
theories of the social from theories of the socio-material, however, is that in the former mate-
rial processes are seen as a backdrop to human activity, whereas in the latter they are viewed
as central in shaping phenomena’ (Canagarajah 2018). Future research on identity that adopts
a socio-material lens will impact the theoretical landscape of applied linguistics in exciting
ways, particularly given the increasing importance of digital tools in our multilingual and
multimodal world.
Related topics
psychology of language learning; multilingualism; gender and sexuality; language and race;
posthumanism and applied linguistics; languaging and translanguaging
Further reading
Anya, U. (2017) Racialized Identities in Second Language Learning: Speaking Blackness in Brazil, New
York: Routledge. (This award-winning book examines how Blackness has shaped African American
study abroad students’ intersectional identity negotiation. It focuses on students’ intercultural experi-
ences and investments in learning Portuguese in Afro-Brazilian communities.)
Barkhuizen, G. (ed.) (2017) Reflections on Language Teacher Identity Research, New York: Routledge.
(This highly readable collection of reflections on language teacher identity presents key ideas, theo-
ries, and methodologies about language teacher identity in a succinct and engaging style.)
Darvin, R. and Norton, B. (2015) ‘Identity and a model of investment in applied linguistics’, Annual
Review of Applied Linguistics, 35: 36–56. (This award-winning article presents an expanded model
of investment, occurring at the intersection of identity, capital, and ideology. It applies the model to
research in the digital era.)
Norton, B. (2013) Identity and Language Learning: Extending the Conversation, 2nd ed., Bristol: Mul-
tilingual Matters. (In this highly cited second edition, Norton develops her construct of identity as
multiple, a site of struggle, and subject to change across time and space. An afterword by Claire
Kramsch addresses Norton’s impact on the field with respect to the three influential concepts of iden-
tity, investment, and imagined communities.)
Preece, S. (ed.) (2016) The Routledge Handbook of Language and Identity, Oxon: Routledge. (This
37-chapter volume provides a comprehensive and highly readable overview of research on language
and identity in the field of language education and applied linguistics. Contributors are leading
researchers from diverse regions of the world.)
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12
Gender and sexuality
Helen Sauntson
Introduction
Language, gender, and sexuality emerged as a field of study within applied linguistics in the
1970s and, since then, has grown to become a popular and politically relevant area of study
and research. In its broadest terms, the field highlights the role of language in understanding
issues, identities, relationships, and debates relating to genders and sexualities. Whilst early
work in the field tended to focus on identifying and describing differential linguistic behaviour
by women and men, contemporary research now focuses more on the ideologies which under-
lie notions of gender and sexual difference, where they come from, and why they still persist.
They also question the very existence of any of the ‘differences’ identified in earlier research
or whether the research itself was designed in such a way that it was instrumental in creating
ideologies of language and gender difference.
Whilst scholars such as Sunderland (2014) and Freed (2014) acknowledge that there are,
undoubtedly, still many structural inequalities around gender and sexuality in most societies,
they importantly link inequality and difference to linguistic representation rather than linguis-
tic behaviour. For this reason, they argue that it is still valuable and important to research dif-
ference but only in terms of represented difference, and it is this principle which has become
a characteristic of the field at the time of writing (and explained further in the sections which
follow). For example, it is now considered less useful to ask about how men and women talk
(characterized by early work in the field), but more useful to investigate how men and women
(and other genders) get represented across texts and contexts (characteristic of contemporary
research). The main questions in current language, gender, and sexuality research, then, tend
to focus on examining why and how ideologies about gender and sexuality get embedded in
language in different text types and contexts.
In language-focused research on gender, it is well-documented that early work in the field
was historically characterized by the theoretical approaches of ‘deficit’, ‘dominance’, and
‘difference’ more or less consecutively. As stated in the introduction, these early theoretical
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approaches to language and gender (sexuality did not appear until later) tended to focus on
identifying ‘gender differences’ in language – for example, how women and men talk differ-
ently. Regardless of some differing interpretations of language data, most early gender and
language research (up to the 1970s and 1980s) tended to view language as merely reflecting
‘gender differences’, which were presumed to already exist. A common criticism is that this
work therefore failed to ask what gender actually is, and it often inadvertently tended to end up
reinforcing gender stereotypes rather than challenging them.
More recent approaches to gender and language differ in that they question this assumption
and actually take an interrogation of that assumption as their central point of inquiry. Rather
than language simply reflecting gender differences, current research views gender (and now
sexuality as well) as being discursively constructed through language. This means that gen-
der and sexuality are not necessarily seen as existing outside or prior to language. Rather,
language itself is one means through which gender and sexuality are brought into existence.
These approaches to gender and language (which emerged mainly from the 1990s onwards)
are often referred to as discourse or discourse-based approaches (see, for example, Baker
2008; Ehrlich et al. 2014; Sunderland 2004). These types of approach are important because
they draw attention to the fact that gender is a construct or a ‘fiction’ which is usually upheld
through the widespread circulation of populist assumptions about gender which are often not
true. Gender is also frequently constructed binary, with the differences between women and
men, feminine and masculine, and so on being emphasized and exaggerated, whilst the many
similarities and non-binary aspects of gender are often ignored and downplayed. Thus, when
researchers do ask questions about difference in relation to language, gender, and sexuality,
Sunderland (2014) argues that questions need to focus on the ways in which women and men,
and boys and girls, are represented through language. In other words, it is important to exam-
ine representations of gender difference in order to expose them with a view to problematiz-
ing and challenging them.
The development of the field has also seen an increasing influence from queer theory in
recent years, with the concurrent development of the approach of queer linguistics (see, for
example, Leap and Motschenbacher 2012; Motschenbacher and Stegu 2013) being a key char-
acteristic of the field from the 1990s onwards. Within queer theory, particular use has been
made of Butler’s (1990) work on performativity and how this social theory of gender and
sexuality was influenced by, and now continues to inform, linguistic studies. According to
Butler, gender (and sexuality) is something that we do, not what we are (in other words,
gender is conceptualized as a verb or process rather than a noun or a state) and gender is per-
formed through language and other semiotic modes. Butler describes gender as ‘an enactment
that performatively constitutes the appearance of its own interior fixity’ (1990: 70). What this
means is that, through performing gender, one simultaneously constructs one’s subjectivity and
gendered identity and conceals the means by which that identity has been constructed so that
it appears as though it has not been constructed at all but simply occurs ‘naturally’. In Butler’s
notion of ‘performativity’, identities do not pre-exist but rather are brought into being by a
series of ‘citational’ acts – including linguistic acts – which are understood to produce those
identities in fluid and variable ways.
Whilst a common misreading of Butler’s work assumes that gender and sexuality can be
performed at will, this is actually an oversimplification and what Butler in fact argues (espe-
cially in her later work) is that gender and sexuality are ‘an improvisational possibility within
a field of constraints’ (2004: 15) and that both gender and sexuality are mobilized and incited
by social constraints and distinguished by them. Butler introduces the idea of ‘hierarchies
of constraint’ which come from essentialized ideologies of gender and sexuality. Idealized,
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or hegemonic, masculinities and femininities stereotypically associated with heterosexuality

are ranked higher than more marginalized genders often associated with non-heterosexual
identities.
This is one of the reasons that the field of language, gender, and sexuality has experienced
a shift away from an almost exclusive focus on gender to a more integrated consideration
of the interrelationship between language, gender, and sexuality. Cameron (2005) notes that
the study of language and gender started to give greater prominence to sexuality through-
out the 2000s which increasingly incorporated considerations of ‘queer’ gender identities and
explorations of the relationship between gender and heteronormativity. In linguistics, work by
Cameron (1997), Coates (2007), Leap (1996), Morrish and Sauntson (2007), Motschenbacher
(2011), and others has shown that the semiotic resources associated with gender categories are
deployed as a means of constructing sexual identities in and through discourse. Gender and
sexual identity cannot be separated as the construction of both identities tends to rely on the
same discursive resources.
In sum, the field has been largely characterized by a historical shift away from focusing on
language and gender difference, to questioning the very concept of difference. Queer theory
has helped to reconceptualize both gender and sexuality in ways which have significantly
moved the field forward in recent years. As part of this, the role that language plays in these
gender and sexuality reconceptualization processes has become a critical issue in contempo-
rary research.
A number of existing textbooks and handbooks provide further information about the his-
torical development of the field of language, gender, and sexuality. See, for example, Angouri
and Baxter (2021), Baker (2008), Ehrlich et al. (2014), Harrington et al. (2008), Jule (2017),
and Talbot (2010).

An overarching critical issue in language, gender, and sexuality research is its concern with
exposing and addressing gender- and sexuality-based inequalities in their various linguistic
manifestations. Queer linguistics has become a crucial approach for interrogating and under-
standing how gender- and sexuality-based inequalities are produced, reinforced, and some-
times challenged through language. The application of queer linguistics to analysis of a range
of linguistic data and contexts encompasses many of the critical issues and topics currently
being investigated in the field. Underpinning queer linguistics, queer theory is helpful for
language, gender, and sexuality research because it takes ‘normality’ itself as its main object
of investigation. Rather than presenting gender as an a priori category – as something which is
already there waiting to be ‘discovered’ – queer theory interrogates the underlying precondi-
tions of gender identity and how these may be enacted and formulated in discourse. One of its
main aims is to challenge all forms of gender- and sexuality-based essentialism (the assump-
tion that identities are innate and static and can be reduced to simple binaries) and to focus,
instead, on how gender and sexuality identities and normative ideologies are constructed –
partly through language. In this way, it is consistent with the discourse-based approaches to
language, gender, and sexuality that emerged out of critiques of the older approaches and their
problematic preoccupation with gender difference.
Like queer theory, queer linguistics takes ‘heteronormativity’ as its main object of critical
investigation. Heteronormativity is defined by Cameron (2005: 489) as ‘the system which pre-
scribes, enjoins, rewards, and naturalises a particular kind of heterosexuality – monogamous,
reproductive, and based on conventionally complementary gender roles – as the norm on which
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social arrangements should be based’. Queer theory interrogates the underlying preconditions
of heteronormativity and presents a unified view of gender and sexuality in that it recognizes
that cultural ideologies of gender normativity are bound up with assumptions of heterosexual-
ity. Butler (1990) develops this notion in her claims that heterosexuality is naturalized by the
performative repetition of normative gender identities. Thus, the principle of queer theory
that claims an integral and definitional relationship between gender and sexuality is of central
importance to queer linguistics and its applications.
Queer linguistics draws on the principles of queer theory and applies them to the study of
language. Motschenbacher and Stegu (2013: 522) helpfully define queer linguistics in concise
terms as ‘critical heteronormativity research from a linguistic point of view’. Most definitions
and explanations of queer linguistics within the broader field of language, gender, and sexual-
ity are based around the concept of heteronormativity and use it as a theoretical and analytical
starting point.
Queer linguistics provides a helpful theoretical framework for examining a range of critical
issues and topics in the field, focusing on how normative and non-normative (queer) construc-
tions of sexual identity are enacted through and inscribed in language practices and how these
language practices may effect particular discourses of sexuality. And queer linguistics ques-
tions how language functions to construct particular binaries relating to gender and sexuality
(man and woman, gay and straight, etc.). Previous work by McElhinny (2014) and Zimman
et al. (2014) importantly note that, in the past, these binaries have actually been useful in lan-
guage, gender, and sexuality research in that they have been used as a strategic and political
tool for rendering women (and sexual minorities) more visible rather than treating men (and
heterosexuals) as representative of all language users. This can still be useful in contemporary
language, gender, and sexuality research as long as the binary categories are not treated as a
priori or pre-existing language, are not seen as static, and are examined critically.
Within language, gender, and sexuality, queer linguistics is also applied to the critical inves-
tigation of heterosexual identities and desires, as well as those which are sexually marginal-
ized. Cameron and Kulick (2003) note that research on language and sexual minorities tends
to focus on analyzing linguistic manifestations of homophobia and other kinds of sexuality
discrimination, whilst queer linguistics more broadly encompasses an analysis of discursive
formations of all sexual identities, including heterosexualities. Part of this analysis involves
exploring the linguistic means by which heterosexuality comes to be seen as the assumed
default sexuality, whilst other sexualities become marked as non-normative. Furthermore, it is
certain kinds of heterosexualities which are privileged (e.g. monogamous, dyadic, focused on
marriage and reproduction), and this is also a concern of queer linguistics (also discussed by
Leap and Motschenbacher 2012). What we can take from queer linguistics is that there also
needs to be more critical scrutiny of how privileged forms of heterosexuality are discursively
formed in applied contexts with a view to ultimately challenging and changing such practices.
With this in mind, intersectionality (Crenshaw 1989) is a concept which is gaining traction
in the field in order to acknowledge and understand how sexuality can involve more than
the hetero-homo continuum. For example, identities and relationships may be discursively
constructed as normal/not normal in relation to other social dimensions of identity such as
ethnicity, age, and social class. Intersectionality in language, gender, and sexuality research is
discussed further in the ‘Future directions’ section.
More recently, scholars have been embedding queer linguistics into the wider approach
of critical applied linguistics in order to analyze and problematize discursive constructions
of heteronormativity in specific contexts. Critical applied linguistics has been defined as ‘the
practice of applied linguistics grounded in a concern for addressing and resolving problems
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of inequality’ (Hall et al. 2017: 18). According to Hall et al. and Pennycook (2021), critical
applied linguistics is an approach to language study which addresses a specific problem, argu-
ing that the identification of a ‘real-world’ problem should be informed by the people who
experience it. But their definition does not address key theoretical issues which have emerged
from queer linguistics and are potentially useful to the field of applied linguistics more broadly.
This has led to the integration of critical applied linguistics into queer linguistics by some
scholars (e.g. Sauntson 2018a; Knisley 2022). Variously referring to queer applied linguistics
as QAL or ALx, this new approach is loosely defined as critical applied linguistics which is
informed by queer theory/queer linguistics and which is applied to addressing social concerns
with inequalities around gender and sexuality.
The influences of queer theory and the development of queer linguistics, and subsequently
queer applied linguistics, described above have meant that the field has become increasingly
concerned with conducting empirical research which aims to challenge binary and static con-
structions of gender, sex, and sexuality. As stated in the introduction, this shift has resulted
in a greater focus on linguistic representations of gender and sexuality rather than a focus on
the linguistic behaviour of groups and individuals. Furthermore, these theoretical shifts have
initiated a re-evaluation of the categories themselves with questions asked about how language
functions to actively produce socially contingent categories of sex, gender, and sexuality. The
very idea of binary constructs in relation to both gender and sex has been criticized by a num-
ber of queer linguistics scholars in recent years (see, for example, the contributions in Zimman
et al. 2014). But an important point is also made by Barrett (2014) who notes that, despite the
challenging of binaries in queer theory, they do often have material consequences (i.e. their
‘reality’ is felt and experienced in physical and observable ways). Phenomena such as gender
pay gaps and the numbers of hate crimes committed against gender and sexual minorities, for
example, are well-documented examples of structural inequalities between women and men
and people of differing genders and sexualities. This means that language analysis can exam-
ine gender binaries and ‘difference’ as long as it is in a way which explores how the physical
and material effects of gender ideologies are experienced and constructed through language.
Furthermore, Davis et al. (2014) suggest that gender and sexuality binaries should not neces-
sarily be rejected or understood as oppressive. Rather, they urge researchers to be sensitive to
how binaries work in particular sociocultural contexts and to pay attention to contextual detail.
Drawing on intersectionality theory, they also encourage researchers to consider how binaries
relating to gender and sexuality always intersect with other social categories and systems.

Current contributions and areas of research within the field are diverse and ever-expanding.
Thus, what is covered in this section is necessarily selective and focuses on areas of research
which are proliferating and receiving much attention at the time of writing. The best way for
readers to keep up-to-date with current contributions and research is to consult the two main
academic journals in the field (Gender and Language and the Journal of Language and Sexual-
ity), as well as the book series referenced in the ‘Future directions’ section of this chapter. There
are also a number of published and regularly updated handbooks which provide overviews of
current research in the field.
One key area of research which has remained present in the field since its inception focuses
on an exploration of how gender and sexuality identities can be produced through conversa-
tional interaction in informal situations and in institutional contexts. In this area of research,
attention is paid to how recent work on gender and interaction has incorporated a consideration
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of sexuality alongside gender (in line with the principles of queer theory and queer linguis-
tics) and has focused on how participants themselves produce and often problematize gender
and sexuality categories. Some empirical studies on private contexts draw on interactionist
sociolinguistic approaches to analyzing interactional data, whilst others utilize the tools of
conversation analysis more explicitly to analyze how gender is produced in conversational
interaction. Work examining the linguistic construction of gender and sexuality identities in
more institutionalized settings has focused on contexts, such as education, workplaces, medical
and healthcare settings, and legal settings.
A further key area of research within the field focuses on linguistic representations of gen-
der and sexuality in the media (see also Tagg, this volume). Media texts are considered to be
central sites where discursive constructions of and negotiations over gender and sexuality take
place. Therefore, research in this area investigates the multiple ways that language can be used
in various media texts (including those which are multimodal) to construct certain kinds of men
and/or women. Researchers have conducted empirical studies which have focused on a range
of media texts using different analytic methods in order to uncover and problematize gender
and sexuality ideologies in media texts. The types of media texts examined include newspaper
articles, print and online personal advertisements, lifestyle magazines, image banks, websites,
posters, and merchandise. This, of course, is by no means an exhaustive list of the types of
media texts that can be examined in language, gender, and sexuality research.
In more recent years, increasing attention has been paid to the role of language in relation
to discursive constructions of gender and sexuality in forensic contexts (see Chapter 19, this
volume). The field of forensic linguistics more broadly is concerned with applications of
linguistic analysis to the law. This includes diverse topics, contexts, and data types, such as
courtroom language and interaction; legal documents; police interviews with witnesses, vic-
tims, and those who have been arrested; and forensic analyses of voice. Within this specific
area of language, gender, and sexuality research, work has been conducted examining some
potentially challenging and sensitive topics, such as gendered and sexual violence, harass-
ment, and consent and coercion. An increase in media attention to linguistic issues such as
consent is also highlighting the growing importance of this field of research not just within
the academic study of language, gender, and sexuality but in the wider social world. Key top-
ics within this area include semantic issues around understandings of consent. This includes
some analysis of people’s understandings of consent, how consent is represented in texts, and
how ideas about consent (and the credibility of victims, witnesses, and defendants) can be
manipulated through the use of language in trial interaction. Another focus involves analyz-
ing how ideologies of gender and sexuality are produced in trial and tribunal interaction from
rape and sexual assault cases.
As stated earlier, the field of language, gender, and sexuality has become increasingly con-
cerned with challenging binary and static constructions of gender, sex, and sexuality, and work
has drawn attention to how ideological concepts such as ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ can
be ‘detached from the bodies to which they are ideologically linked, with language playing a
crucial role in this process’ (Davis et al. 2014: 3). This is perhaps highlighted the most clearly
when examining the practices (including language practices) of those who live as gender-
variant or transgender, and this is another key area of research that has been growing within
the wider field of language, gender, and sexuality in recent years. Existing work on language,
transgender, and gender variance falls into three broad areas: socio-phonetic studies of voice;
discourse analysis studies of how language practices work to construct identities for transgen-
der and gender-variant speakers; and representations of transgender identities in the public-
facing texts, such as news media.
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A further key area of research contributions to the field focuses on structural inequalities
in language and language use and the way that these inequalities function to produce dis-
criminatory effects in terms of gender and sexuality. Whilst early work in the field focused
almost exclusively on the types of sexist language targeted at women, more contemporary
work explores other forms of gender- and sexuality-based discriminatory language, such as
homophobic and transphobic language. In all of the research on discriminatory language, atten-
tion has been paid to both forms of direct or overt discriminatory language but has also exam-
ined indirect or subtle forms of discriminatory language (including how silence can function to
produce discriminatory discourses relating to certain kinds of gender and sexuality identities).
Analysis of the language of discrimination potentially has useful synergies with other areas
of applied linguistics which address issues relating to minoritized or oppressed social groups,
such as race and ethnicity and those with minoritized language backgrounds (see, for example,
Delfino and Alim, this volume, and Hornberger and De Korne, this volume).

The field lends itself to highly varied ways in which aspects of language, gender, and sexuality
can be investigated. Motschenbacher (2011) and Motschenbacher and Stegu (2013) argue that
queer linguistics lends itself well to an eclectic combination of linguistic analytical methods
(or methodological pluralism) in order to provide mutually qualifying positions. Leap (2020:
48–49) has also referred to a ‘scavenger methodology’ as being particularly appropriate for
queer inquiry across a range of disciplines, including applied linguistics. In work which applies
queer linguistics, various established methods are therefore drawn on in order to analyze dif-
ferent types of language data. Some of the most commonly used methods and analytical frame-
works in contemporary language, gender, and sexuality research include (but are not restricted
to) conversation analysis, corpus linguistics, critical discourse analysis, feminist post-structur-
alist discourse analysis, multimodal critical discourse analysis, linguistic landscapes, variation-
ist and interactional sociolinguistics, sociophonetics, linguistic anthropology, and linguistic
ethnography. All of these (and other) frameworks can sit within broader approaches such as
queer linguistics. Whilst queer theory and queer linguistics can orient the researcher theoreti-
cally (which then helps to identify the priorities and purposes of the research), the analytical
frameworks can then offer ways of looking at language in specific datasets in order to realize
those theoretical priorities.
Some of the frameworks used in language, gender, and sexuality are covered elsewhere in
this Handbook (see, for example, the chapters on discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, critical
discourse analysis, linguistic landscape, and social semiotics and multimodality). Other volumes
include more extensive information about a range of methods used in the field (e.g. Angouri and
Baxter 2021; Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 2013; Ehrlich et al. 2014; Harrington et al. 2008).

The field of language, gender, and sexuality has real-life implications for and applications
in a wide range of contexts, including education, workplaces and employment domains,
law, media, politics, and activism. Education (including language education) is of particular
interest to the wider discipline of applied linguistics. Key interventions in language educa-
tion have focused on challenging heteronormativity in textbooks and other learning mate-
rials (e.g. Pakula 2021; Pakula et al. 2015), interventions focused on classroom practices
(e.g. Motschenbacher 2011; Sauntson 2018a; Nelson 2006), ‘queering’ curriculum content
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(e.g. Nelson 2006; Paiz 2020; Pakula 2021; Sauntson 2018a, 2018b, 2020), and incorporating
gender and sexuality diversity awareness into teacher training (e.g. Motschenbacher 2011).
Researchers such as Paiz (2020) and Nelson (2006) have highlighted a need to routinely con-
ceptualize English language classrooms as ‘multisexual’ and present data to show that doing
so can enhance the classroom and learning experience for all learners.
In education beyond ESOL and language learning, research has recommended ways in
which language can be used in classrooms and curriculum documents to create greater vis-
ibility and positive discourse around gender and sexuality diversity (e.g. Sauntson 2018a).
Furthermore, recommendations have been made for paying closer attention to language in the
context of gender- and sexuality-based bullying in schools, with researchers such as Motschen-
bacher (2011) and Sauntson (2018a) calling for all educational inclusion and anti-bullying
policies to include a clear focus on language. This includes not only language which tackles
overt forms of homophobia but also language which fill the ‘absences’ and ‘silences’ around
difference and gender and sexuality diversity which currently pervade schools in many areas
of the world (e.g. Sauntson and Borba 2021).
In the domain of employment and workplaces, recommendations have been made for pro-
fessional communication, particular in relation to issues of gender and leadership (e.g. Angouri
et al. 2021; Baxter 2010, 2017; Mullany 2007). In legal contexts, work by scholars such as
Ehrlich et al. (2016) has been influential in drawing attention to the coercive discourse often
used in North American rape and sexual assault trials and how this needs to be challenged as
part of the pursuit of justice in sexual offence cases. And work focusing on language, gender,
and sexuality in media texts continues to increase awareness of the ways language can be used to
reinforce damaging and restrictive ideologies, again with a view to challenging those ideologies.
Leading language, gender, and sexuality scholars such as Freed (2014) and Cameron (2014,
2021) have, for some time, been questioning why language, gender, and sexuality scholarship
is relatively infrequently taken up by practitioners outside academia when compared with
other areas of applied linguistics research. Both observe that, despite scholarship continually
challenging static and binary notions of gender and sexuality, popular accounts of ‘male and
female language’ often remain pervasive and unchanged in the public domain. Freed notes that
a considerable amount of print media continues to characterize women’s and men’s language as
different with no reference at all to academic scholarship that has been conducted in language,
gender, and sexuality for the past three decades. This, in itself, is a problematic area that is
currently receiving attention by scholars in the field. Cameron observes that popular public
ideologies about gender and language continue to differ greatly from social and linguistic reali-
ties as analyzed by scholars. One probable reason relates to public resistance to relinquishing
the idea of binary gender and accommodating to greater variability within and across gender
identities and behaviours. Freed (2014: 640) refers to a ‘fear of gender instability’ amongst the
public, probably rooted in a gradual collective realization that gender ideologies which have
been held for a long time are increasingly under threat. Both Freed and Cameron call for lan-
guage, gender, and sexuality researchers to concentrate their efforts more on making inroads
into challenging public discourses on gender, sexuality, and language and argue that one of
the main future directions of the field needs to focus on increasing its public engagement and
take-up by practitioners, policy-makers, and activists.
Future directions
There continues to be an increasing scholarly interest in the field as evidenced through the
introduction of two journals dedicated to the topic in recent years (Gender and Language;
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Journal of Language and Sexuality) and the increased expansion of the field’s main profes-
sional network – the International Gender and Language Association (IGALA). During this
time, the British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL) has set up a dedicated special
interest group in the area of language, gender, and sexuality. Even more recently, two new
book series dedicated to publishing research in the field have emerged – Palgrave Studies in
Language, Gender and Sexuality and Cambridge Elements in Language, Gender and Sexual-
ity. These are in addition to the already-established Oxford Studies in Language, Gender and
Sexuality series. A review of recent themes and priorities within these series, journals, and
organizations suggests a number of continuing and emerging future directions for the field.
There continues to be a growing body of research which examines diverse masculinities
and femininities across different international and cultural contexts, some of which includes
currently under-researched contexts, such as Africa, Italy, Japan, Russia, and South Asia. There
also continues to be a growing interest in researching language in relation to ‘queer’ gender and
sexuality identities, again in a range of transnational contexts (e.g. Baker and Balirano 2018;
Barrett 2017). This includes investigations not only into language and minoritized sexualities
and genders (e.g. bisexuality, asexuality, polysexuality, transgender) but also language and its
relationship to marginalized forms of heterosexuality and non-binary gender identities. Related
to this is research which focuses on gender- and sexuality-based discrimination in language
and, importantly, how these forms of discriminatory language intersect with other forms of
oppression and marginalization (such as those associated with race, ethnicity, nationality, and
social class). Indeed, as stated earlier, there is a significant interest in examining the inter-
sectional dimensions of language, gender, and sexuality at the time of writing. Starting from
the idea that gender discrimination may be compounded by other identity positions and that
there needs to be recognition of heterogeneity amongst women and men, Crenshaw’s (1989)
theory of intersectionality provides a helpful framework for exploring the diverse ways in
which language, gender, sexuality, race, age, class, nationality, and a range of other facets of
‘identity’ intersect to produce particular identifications and linguistic practices. The concept
of intersectionality disrupts the notion of a singular and coherent identity in relation to gender
and sexuality and recognizes that there is no one way to be a woman, man, gay, straight, and
so on. Lazar (2017) highlights that this concept of intersectionality is particularly important
in contemporary language, gender, and sexuality research because it encourages researchers
to view identities as plural, intersecting, and mutually constitutive rather than as isolated cat-
egories. Levon (2015) notes additionally that intersectionality reminds language, gender, and
sexuality researchers that no one category (e.g. ‘woman’ or ‘lesbian’) is sufficient to account
for individual experience. Levon does point out that intersectional approaches do not neces-
sarily need to be applied to all research investigating language and identity because, at times,
identities such as gender and sexuality are clearly foregrounded. However, in certain research
projects, an intersectional analysis may be more appropriate and effective to make sense of
how people use language to mutually constitute multiple identities which include gender and
sexuality. This is an issue which is likely to continue to receive much attention in language,
gender, and sexuality in years to come.
In recent years, the field has partly been characterized by a recognition that the majority of
research has taken place and been published in the Global North, leading to a relative invis-
ibility of issues that are relevant in other global settings. Alongside redressing this balance by
focusing more on exploring issues relating to the Global South, another direction being taken
by the field at the time of writing is to focus more on issues of migration, transnationalism,
and globalism. There is also recognition within the field that much research has focused on
English; therefore, another area ripe for development examines languages beyond English and
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multilingualism in relation to gender and sexuality. Lazar defines a transnational perspective

as examining ‘contextualised concrete local instances of stereotypes in conjunction with a
wider lens on other local and specific instances, so that transnational connections and patterns
across locales can be brought into relief without making sweeping generalisations’ (2017: 576).
In an increasingly globalized and mobile world, Lazar posits that transnational perspectives are
useful for the study of language, gender, and sexuality because they can account for widespread
phenomena, such as gender and sexual stereotyping, which often transcend national contexts.
Another significant growing area is that which examines language, gender, and sexuality
in digital and virtual settings (e.g. Myketiak 2020). A continued global increase in the use of
digital communication is likely to mean that this aspect of research in the field continues to
grow. Digital platforms such as social media provide spaces where language users can explic-
itly respond to rapidly changing geopolitical situations and events in ways that never used to be
possible. These platforms, therefore, provide rich sources of data for examining how language
is used in politically and socially charged situations in relation to gender and sexuality. Current
research, for example, examines language, gender, and sexuality in online contexts in relation
to issues such as terrorism, COVID-19, rape culture, activist movements (such as MeToo,
Everyday Sexism, Everyone’s Invited, and Black Lives Matter), and issues relating to ecologi-
cal and environmental justice.
In terms of methodological and analytic frameworks, the field is following broader develop-
ments in applied linguistics in its increased use of forms of multimodal discourse analysis and
creative inquiry (see Toohey, this volume). It is generally acknowledged that the field lends
itself well to interdisciplinary research and to using combinations of different methods and
techniques of linguistic analysis. The methodological pluralism of queer linguistics (and queer
applied linguistics) is often innovative and is likely to continue making significant contribu-
tions to the development of inquiry in applied linguistics more broadly.
Related topics
discourse analysis; critical discourse analysis; institutional discourse; identity; language, race,
and ethnicity
Further reading
Angouri, J. and Baxter, J. (eds.) (2021) The Routledge Handbook of Language, Gender and Sexual-
ity, London: Routledge. (The Routledge Handbook of Language, Gender, and Sexuality provides
an authoritative overview of the field and is a useful and up-to-date companion to the Routledge
Handbook of Applied Linguistics. The Handbook contains detailed information about methodologies,
theoretical frameworks, empirical studies, real-world applications, and suggestions for further reading
which cover an extensive range of topics within the field.)
Motschenbacher, H. (2010) Language, Gender and Sexuality: Poststructuralist Perspectives, Amsterdam:
John Benjamins. (Motschenbacher’s volume is one of the few monographs dedicated to providing a
detailed explanation of queer linguistics and its contributions to the field of language, gender, and
sexual identity. The author situates queer linguistics within broader post-structuralist approaches and
provides illustrative empirical analyses of language data to exemplify the approach. The book deals
with repercussions of the discursive materialization of heteronormativity and gender binarism in vari-
ous kinds of linguistic data.)
Sauntson, H. (2020) Researching Language, Gender and Sexuality: A Student Guide, London: Routledge.
(This volume is a textbook written primarily for undergraduate and postgraduate students of English
language, linguistics, and gender studies. Drawing on international research, it leads readers through
the process of undertaking research in order to explore how gender and sexuality are represented
and constructed through language. Chapters within the book contain information about theories and
160
methodologies used within the field, as well as empirical case studies that relate to a range of topics
and contexts.)
Zimman, L., Davis, J. and Raclaw, J. (eds.) (2014) Queer Excursions: Retheorizing Binaries in Language,
Gender and Sexuality, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Zimman et al.’s edited volume directly
addresses problems with binary concepts in language, gender, and sexuality as a way of demonstrating
that researchers must be careful to avoid the assumption that their own preconceptions about binary
social structures will be shared by the communities they study. Each contributing chapter offers a dis-
tinct perspective on gender- and sexuality-related binaries and their various relationships with language.
Overall, the volume advocates for a retheorization of gender and sexuality binaries that pays careful
attention to engagement with speakers’ own orientations to dichotomous systems in a range of contexts.)
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13
Language and race
Introduction
While spanning multiple disciplines and approaches, the dedicated study of language, race, and
ethnicity has mainly developed within sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and applied
linguistics. In recent years, these subfields have been in closer conversation theoretically and
methodologically, given the interdisciplinary approach referred to as raciolinguistics, the
emerging area of inquiry that applies the diverse methods of linguistic analysis to ask and
answer critical questions about the relations between language, race, and power (Alim 2016a:
27). While outlined in Alim (2016b), a few tenets are worth highlighting here. First, researchers
in raciolinguistics are committed to theorizing language and race together, paying particular
attention to how these social processes mediate one another and are mutually constitutive.
Second, the field emphasizes the linguistic and discursive construction of race and ethnicity,
while simultaneously noting their endurance as social realities for subjugated racially and
ethnically minoritized populations, (im)migrants, and other oppressed groups. Third, the field
takes a comparative approach to better understand the role of language in maintaining and chal-
lenging racism as a global system of capitalist oppression. Fourth, scholars have begun to take
intersectional approaches that understand race as always produced in conjunction with class,
gender, sexuality, religion, (trans)nationalism, and other axes of social differentiation used in
complex vectors of oppression. Researchers in the field of language and race also consider the
implications of their work on language education.
At the outset, it is imperative to state that Black linguists, for well over half a century, have long
written about the relationship between language and race and between language, capitalism,
and colonialism. For many, these issues were inextricable. To pioneering sociolinguist Geneva
Smitherman, the linguistic question was never just about language; citing Fanon and others
early on, she argued that it was about how Africans survived colonialism, imperialism, enslave-
ment, and ‘the conditions of servitude, oppression, and life in America’ (1977: 2) in order to
‘create a culture of survival in an alien land’. To answer any question about Black language,
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082637-15 163

then, one had to begin with when ‘Africans’ became ‘Negroes’, or ‘at least as far back as 1619
when a Dutch vessel landed in Jamestown with a cargo of twenty Africans’ (4–5).
Another pioneering theorist of language and race, Arthur Spears, emphasized that the ter-
ror, violence, and brutality of these systems are not only the macro-contexts within which race
and language are produced, but white supremacy comes to depend on the idea of race and,
therefore, processes of racialization for its continued propagation (1999). As Spears (2020)
consistently argues, we need to approach questions of language and race by attending to the
‘political-economic pentad’, which includes global economic exploitation, the state, ideology-
coercion for the purposes of social and resource control via regime maintenance, and the socio-
economic, authoritarian, and patriarchal nature of oppressive systems. Smitherman and Spears
were also two of the four editors of a major linguistic anthropological project, an important
precursor to raciolinguistics, Black Linguistics: Language, Society, and Politics in Africa and
the Americas (Makoni et al. 2003). Further, Black writers and intellectuals like James Baldwin
(1981 [1979]) wrote over 40 years ago that debates about Black language have ‘nothing to do
with the language itself but with the role of language. Language, incontestably, reveals the
speaker’. It is not the presence of the sounds but rather the presence of the speakers – the Black
sons and daughters of people who would have otherwise been born on the African continent
were it not for the terror of enslavement – that reveals their complicity with the imperialist,
white settler colonial-capitalist system from which they continue to benefit.
US sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists have long been interested in many of the
same political and social issues facing Black people with regard to language and race. One
was the racialized educational inequality that quickly became evident in the wake of school
desegregation (Brown v. Board of Education 1954). According to the dominant perspective at
the time, glossed as deficit theorizing, Black students appeared not to read or communicate as
well as white students due to purported linguistic and cognitive deficiencies caused by poverty.
But sociolinguists who developed descriptive studies of Black language and other ethnolects,
as well as anthropologists who studied the communicative practices of Black Americans and
Native Americans, determined that the language of racially minoritized students had system-
atic, rule-bound differences not recognized by the school system. The ‘difference’ movement
of the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s formed the basis for the distinctive ethnoracial language perspec-
tive, which examines the linguistic patterns that distinguish ethnoracial groups (Reyes and Lo
2009; Chun and Lo 2015).
The difference paradigm has had a lasting impact on how language has been theorized in
relation to race and/or ethnicity. For one, it not only presumes a one-to-one mapping of lan-
guage onto social group (Irvine and Gal 2000), but it also presumes that ethnoracial language
varieties can be differentiated from and compared to a Standard English by noting the pattern-
ing of distinctive features that are considered to be non-standard. The distinctiveness paradigm
is endemic to second-wave variationist studies (Eckert 2012) that analyze the code-switching
and style-shifting practices of ethnoracial minorities and to linguistic anthropological studies
of ethnoracially defined speech communities. In the field of applied linguistics, the difference
movement has guided the majority of efforts to provide socially just education to bilingual and
racially minoritized students. Here, the goal is to validate stigmatized language varieties while
providing access to standard or academic English. This is seen in additive approaches in ESL
(Bartlett and García 2011) or in programmatic approaches to help Black students read and write
so-called Standard English (Labov and Baker 2010).
Critics note how the distinctiveness model constructs language differences along the lines
of racial and ethnic difference which reifies these differences as essentialized cultural or bio-
logical realities. As raciolinguistics scholars note, the distinctiveness paradigm’s theorizing of
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Language and race
difference reproduces essentializing notions about race and language that ultimately work to
construct whiteness as normative or ideal (Urciuoli 1996; Flores and Rosa 2015). As discussed
separately in this chapter, raciolinguistics has helped initiate a shift from analyzing the linguis-
tic practices of particular groups to how ideas about race and language construe some linguistic
forms or practices as non-normative and in relation to which types of speakers.
Building upon Alim’s (2004a) previous research, raciolinguistics scholars have recognized
that white teachers’ beliefs about their Black students, and their language, to take just one
example, depended largely upon their hearing of Black speech through the ideological lens of
linguistic supremacy, which served to uphold white supremacist logics of both language and
race. White teachers were hearing ‘errors’ in their Black students’ speech where there were
none, even going so far as to invent syntactic structures that are not found in any variety of
English, as well as missing various complex aspects of Black linguistic production. As Flores
and Rosa (2015) argued, this example demonstrates the powerful ways that raciolinguistic ide-
ologies of the white listening subject can stigmatize language use regardless of one’s empirical
linguistic practices.
Raciolinguistics complements the educational theory of culturally sustaining pedagogies
(Paris and Alim 2017; Alim et al. 2020a). CSP settings demand explicitly pluralist outcomes
that are not centred on dominant white, middle-class, monolingual/monocultural norms of
educational achievement. Whereas previous approaches sought to build upon the cultural and
linguistic practices of students to support academic learning, CSPs, as Lee (2017: 274) noted,
‘have expanded these ideas to argue that diverse funds of knowledge and culturally inherited
ways of navigating the world need to be sustained as goods unto themselves’. This fundamental
shift argues that the cultural and linguistic practices and knowledges of communities of colour
have always been vital in their own right and should be creatively foregrounded rather than
merely viewed as resources to take learners (almost always unidirectionally) from ‘where they
are at’ to some presumably ‘better’ place, or ignored altogether. These scholars are not inter-
ested in relegating learners’ cultural and linguistic strengths as tools for advancing the learning
of an acceptable curricular canon, a standard variety of language, or some other academic skill.
Rather, extending Alim’s approach to critical language awareness, they are interested in pro-
ducing learners that can interrogate what counts as ‘acceptable’ or ‘canonical’, what language
varieties are heard as ‘standard’, what ways of knowing are viewed as ‘academic’, and how
these perspectives came to be the dominant ones.
These pedagogies do much more than simply take students’ language into account; they
also ‘account for the interconnectedness of language with the larger sociopolitical and
sociohistorical systems that help to maintain unequal power relations in a still-segregated
society’ (Alim 2005: 24). Students are encouraged to ask questions like the following:
How did these particular perspectives come to be the dominant ones? Whose purposes do
they serve? And how do they uphold white supremacist systems of racial capitalism and
its efforts to produce not critically thinking human beings, but cheap sources of labour
(Ladson-Billings et al. 2023)?
The linguistic construction of ethnoracial identities

The linguistic construction of racial and ethnic identities is a central theme in the study of
language and race. Researchers start with the premise that identities are socially constructed
through situated linguistic or discursive interactions. These acts of identity (LePage and
165
Tabouret-Keller 1985) recruit social identity models circulated by larger-level practices and
institutions and scale up to reproduce or transform racialization and ethnicization processes.
Many language and identity studies are focused on teens and youth in school-based settings,
as schools are key sites of racialization and racial learning. Rampton’s (1995) research, which
uses interactional sociolinguistics to examine crossing, or how multi-ethnic youth at a London
high school use language to redraw lines of race and ethnicity, is an early exemplar of this
approach. Much of the work that was produced at the same time or which followed, particularly
by US-based linguistic anthropologists, used theories of indexicality (Ochs 1992; Silverstein
2003) to explain how racial and ethnic identities are recruited and transformed using lan-
guage (Cutler 2003; Mendoza-Denton 2008; Bucholtz 2011). Indexicality, a concept rooted in
Peircean semiotics, illustrates how participants position themselves in relation to wider mean-
ings, practices, and structures related to race and, not in the least, language. Linguistic forms,
practices, and varieties are thus analyzed as signs that may ‘point to’ socially circulating mod-
els of racialized personhood in any given interaction rather than as the objective property of a
given racialized or ethnicized group (Reyes 2009; Rosa 2019). This approach helped shift the
frame of analysis from describing the distinctive language and identity practices of particular
groups to interrogating the ideological foundations of racial and linguistic difference.
Linguistic anthropologists have produced much research on identity and identification, but
sociolinguists and others that take language as the primary object of analysis and theory have
also contributed to a theory of language and identity as co-constructed. In the quantitative para-
digm of variationist sociolinguistics, racial/ethnic identity was long treated as a self-evident
variable by which one could track linguistic variation and change (Labov 1972). Second-wave
variationists (Eckert 2012) in the US focused on the linguistic practices of African Ameri-
cans and other racialized minorities using the distinctive ethnoracial language paradigm. This
paradigm sees ethnolects as cohesive, intact language systems with systematically patterned
features and structures; identity is not treated as a social construct in this work but instead as
an identity characteristic of language speakers (Chun and Lo 2015).
This body of work was followed by a third wave of quantitative variationist studies, which
examined identity as mutually shaping language and as shaped by it via an approach referred to
as ‘communities of practice’ (Bucholtz 1999). Communities of practice helped unsettle broad,
essentializing claims about ‘racial/ethnic groups and their language’ by grounding language
and identity practices in interactions that show overlaps between or variations within language/
speech communities. Importantly, such studies show that individual language users can and do
orient themselves differently to shared identity models of race, ethnicity, and other categories
such as gender and class. Studies on the code-switching and style-shifting practices of racially
minoritized groups highlight how they negotiate multiple identities across interactions, blend-
ing or crossing styles to challenge oppressive ideologies and to claim identities outside of
received models (Zentella 1997; Bailey 2002; Blackburn 2005).
Linguistic racialization and ethnicization

A central theme in the study of language and race is linguistic racialization and ethnicization,
or the ways in which race and ethnicity, as institutionalized categories of social difference,
come to be ‘imagined, produced, and reified through language practices’ (Chun and Lo 2015).
Race and ethnicity are different social constructs, and they change over time as ideologies of
difference that are designed to support white supremacy. Social theorists often discuss racial-
ization or ethnicization, but not one in relation to the other, and they are often conflated or
interchanged. However, one of the most useful discussions on the differences between them
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Language and race
comes from scholars who note that language ideologies have played a significant role in racial-
ization and ethnicization processes in the US. Whereas racialized groups are considered to
be unassimilably different via essentialized representations of biology, language, and culture,
ethnicized groups are considered to be at least partially assimilated (Urciuoli 1996; Leeman
2004). Ethnic groups are perceived to be able to more easily maintain linguistic practices
such as bilingualism, whereas the bi- or multilingualism or non-standard English of racialized
groups are seen as a threat to the nation, in the US to include Blacks, Native Americans, Latinx,
and Asian Americans (Urciuoli 2001; Alim and Smitherman 2012; Rosa 2019; Delfino 2020b).
Language, taken together with racial ideologies about physical and cultural difference, may
thus be used to racialize particular bodies as Others and ethnicize other bodies as acceptable
or non-threatening.
Language ideologies
Language ideologies, or cultural systems of beliefs about language(s), their value, and the
people who speak them (Irvine and Gal 2000) are a central component of language, race, and
ethnicity studies and raciolinguistics especially. Raciolinguistics research is deeply indebted
to research that theorizes the workings of racialization by foregrounding the critical role of
language ideologies, viewing them as inextricable from ideologies of race and vice versa
(Alim 2016a).
The concept of raciolinguistic ideologies takes previous research on English-only and Stan-
dard English language ideologies and extends this work to examine the co-construction of
linguistic and racial ideologies, notably in the work of Flores and Rosa (2015) and Rosa (2019).
Oppressive racial ideologies are often expressed, and indeed masked, via language ideologies
that view only some Black speakers as ‘articulate’ (Alim and Smitherman 2012, 2020), ideolo-
gies of ‘appropriateness’ (Fairclough 1992; Flores and Rosa 2015; Love-Nichols 2018), and
the widespread belief that racialized minorities do not have a command of ‘academic language’
(Flores 2020) or code-switching skills (Zentella 1997; Alim 2004b). Alim and Smitherman
(2020) note that raciolinguistic exceptionalism – ‘whereby exceptionalism occurs through
white racist evaluations of, and ideologies about, both language and race’ (p. 473) – works to
produce a normative Black speaking subject who is only inarticulate when perceived through
white eyes/ears. Similarly, Flores and Rosa (2015) and Flores (2020) note how ideologies of
appropriateness and the insistence on academic language as an objectively identifiable set of
linguistic forms and structures rearticulate the major presuppositions of standard language
ideology. But standard or academic language is essentially a moving target: it is always what
a Black or Latinx speaking subject does not produce, and it is never identifiable as a language
variety with consistent forms, features, or grammatical structures.
Coloniality, post-racialism, and racial reproduction

Current research on language and race focuses on the white settler colonialist foundations
of linguistics and other fields. There is particular emphasis on how liberal and progres-
sive ideologies share the same ideological foundations of racial and linguistic difference
as those considered explicitly racist or conservative (Kroskrity 2020; Delfino 2021). In
the social sciences, race is often replaced with culture or ethnicity as an avoidance strat-
egy aimed at achieving distance from the colonialist and racist foundations of theory and
167
practice (Chun and Lo 2020). Similarly, the perceived reconservatization of liberal demo-
cratic states has been discursively constructed as a return to a regressive racism among
liberals and progressives; this framing erases the continued settler colonialist practices of
nations such as the US (Rosa and Bonilla 2017). But current research shows that race and
racism have not been eliminated from the social, political, or intellectual fabric; rather, they
continue to be essential to them (Alim and Reyes 2011). Lastly, since the focus should not
exclusively be on how people of colour are dominated, more research is needed on language
and social justice (Avineri et al. 2018) and the ‘macromovement’ of antiracist discourse writ
large (van Dijk 2021).
White supremacy and the perceiving subject

A related strand of research focuses on how language is used to maintain white suprema-
cist structures and practices and vice versa: how white supremacy shapes perceptions about
language and linguistic differences. This is a recent but important shift considering that the
majority of research on language, race, and ethnicity has focused on what non-whites do, lin-
guistically speaking, with little to no critical reflection on how language practices are heard and
perceived by listening subjects who sponsor white supremacist ideologies. White supremacy
is not a specific set of ideas or practices intentionally taken up by whites who intend to further
racist beliefs or projects. Rather, white supremacy is the institutional (re)centring of white-
ness as normative, ideal, or desirable (Shankar 2019). It is reproduced in liberal democratic
strategies of inclusion, for example, diversity and multiculturalism efforts by the nation-state
(Povinelli 2002; Ahmed 2012), and in linguistic or discursive practices that continue to mark
racial difference in relation to whiteness as the established or ideal norm (Hill 2008; Shankar
2015; Delfino 2021).
With regard to the linguistic construction of white supremacy, Hill’s (2008) work on the
everyday language of white racism shows that whites do not consider themselves to be racist
even as they take up racist language practices. ‘Covert’ linguistic racism, evident in practices
such as linguistic mocking, construe racialized minorities as Other. Language appropriation
also works as a covertly racist linguistic practice that works to recentre whiteness rather than
as inclusion or diversification. For example, corporations tweet their products using Black
language but at a ‘safe distance’ from actual contexts of Blackness (Roth-Gordon et al. 2020).
At the same time, minoritized groups may take up mock white to challenge practices and
structures of white supremacy (Basso 1978; Mason Carris 2011; Rahman 2004; Clark 2014;
Delfino 2020a).
A growing body of work examines the linguistic practices of white nationalist groups, who
use everyday talk and social media to promote explicitly white supremacist beliefs and ideolo-
gies. Kosse (2018) analyzes how white nationalists in the US combine Disney videos with mock
AAL and mock ‘Jewish’ voice-overs to frame these groups as an existential threat to whites.
Perrino and Jereza’s (2020) research examines how Italian joke-tellers code-switch from stan-
dardized Italian to their local varieties while telling jokes about migrants and how this switch-
ing creates exclusionary intimacies by producing both xenophobic stances towards migrants
and inclusionary stances towards ‘real’ Italians who laugh, applaud, and otherwise share in
these racist representations. Another study examines how right-wing French nationalists have
framed debates about the loss of the circonflexe, a suprasegmental vowel accent marker, as a
threat to the nation, which is fundamentally thought of as white (Tebaldi 2020). These studies
highlight how everyday discursive practices are linked to the increasingly aggressive, exclu-
sionary, anti-immigrant politics that characterize the rise of racist, right-wing politics across
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Europe and the United States, where non-white immigrants suffer increasing rates of violence,
discrimination, and even use of military force and concentration camps.
White supremacist ideologies of difference also shape listening and perceiving practices
that construe the speech of ethnoracial minorities as disorderly, deviant, abject, or threatening
(Urciuoli 2020). Thus, recent scholarship has been theorizing how race becomes an intelligible
category as listening/perceiving subjects report about what they hear/perceive. Drawing from
Inoue’s (2006) work on the listening subject, a central theme has developed around the idea
of white or institutionalized perceiving subjects (Rosa and Flores 2017; Flores et al. 2018).
The perceiving subject does not refer to particular individuals or type of person (i.e. white).
Rather, it is an ideological frame that is recruited in the hearing or perceiving of a linguistic
feature or form, in other words a positionality that is taken up in relation to the intersubjec-
tive production of language. Perceptive subjecthood is fundamentally shaped by the perceived
superiority of white speech and determines how particular voices or bodies are racialized as
Other; this racialization can even shift across contexts of interaction if they are heard or seen
differently against readings of their body and other signifying practices (Alim and Smither-
man 2012; Rosa 2019). Indeed, the contingent nature of listening subjecthood is what gives
white supremacy its power: a speaker who is ‘seen’ as Black, Latinx, or Asian may be judged
as an imperfect English speaker – for example, perceived as lacking grammatical correctness
or having an accent – even when they are producing target forms (Rosa 2016; Delfino 2020b).
And yet white students enrolled in bilingual language programs benefit from the determination
that they are skilled bilinguals, despite the fact that their proficiency levels do not match what
is required of those learning English as a second language (Chaparro 2019; Rosa and Flores
2017). Listening subjecthood thus has a direct impact on social stratification, as white English
speakers more easily get higher-paying jobs requiring dual language fluency, while bilingual
Spanish speakers do not.
Data collection methods

Ethnographic approaches that combine discourse analysis with long-term participant observa-
tion and in-depth conversations with community members are central to the study of language,
race, and ethnicity and to raciolinguistics especially, as researchers are generally seeking to
examine qualitative questions and claims (see Sections ‘Historical perspectives’ and ‘Critical
issues and topics’). Participant observation is particularly important for comparing what is
observed versus what participants report and to gain information on the intersubjective con-
struction of sociocultural and linguistic phenomena (Bucholtz and Hall 2005). But consistent
with third-wave variationism, quantitative studies have also been applied to investigate not
only how linguistic variables correlate with social categories but also the social meaning of
those variables (Gafter 2016, citing Eckert 2008; Podesva 2016; Sharma 2016). Thus, combin-
ing quantitative methods with qualitative approaches often helps to capture broader patterns in
the social construction of race and ethnicity.
Data analysis methods

The study of language, race, and ethnicity is at its most interdisciplinary with respect to data
analysis, as many researchers rely on multiple frameworks spanning discourse and conversa-
tion analysis (Bucholtz 2011), semiotic discourse analysis (Rosa 2019; Delfino 2020a, 2020b;
169
Smalls 2020), interactional sociolinguistics (Rampton 1995; Williams 2017), quantitative vari-
ationism (Mendoza-Denton 2008), and the integration of all of these approaches (Alim 2004b).
US scholars, in particular, have built on Peircean semiotics (Silverstein 2003; Agha 2005) to
examine how linguistic and racial meanings are recruited and bundled together through pro-
cesses of indexicality (Chun and Lo 2015). The focus on such work is the linguistic construc-
tion of racialized models of personhood in interaction and how they scale up to reproduce or
transform racialization and ethnicization processes.
Future directions
As the study of language, race, and ethnicity moves forward, the concepts of translanguag-
ing (García and Li 2009) and transracialization (Alim 2016a, 2016b; Tetreault 2016) are in
further development as processes that intersect. For example, a number of studies illustrate
how linguistic constructions of race disrupt received notions of the relationship between race
and language (Delfino 2020b; Severo and Makoni 2020; Wirtz 2020) and/or the idea of race
as a stable construct (Alim 2016b; Thu and Motha 2021). Others use a translanguaging lens to
examine the heterogeneity inherent to ethnolinguistic practices and to disrupt the idea of mono-
logic language communities (Seltzer 2017; Morales 2020). Such studies are especially key for
advancing the study of bilingualism, which sees the code-switching and code-mixing practices
of racialized bilinguals, including Latinx, through the lens of deficit (Vogel and García 2017).
Most recently, building upon Ibrahim’s (2003) work on African immigrants to Canada, Smith
and Warrican (2021) examine how Black Caribbean immigrants come to the process of engag-
ing in metalinguistic, metacultural, and metaracial understanding.
Further, raciolinguistics has insisted upon intersectional approaches ‘that understand race
as always produced in conjunction with class, gender, sexuality, religion, (trans)national, and
other axes of social differentiation’ used in complex vectors of oppression. This has necessi-
tated a return to the body as a site of analysis. Smalls (2020: 233), for example, draws from her
ethnographic research with Black-identified youth in the United States and Liberia to explore
‘how antiblackness disproportionately allocates a great deal of semiotic weight to their racial-
ized (and gendered, classed, etc.) bodies’. Her raciosemiotic research continues the focus on
the semiosis of blackness in young people’s lives ‘as they discursively reproduce, reconfigure,
and refuse different models of racialized personhood’ (Smalls 2020: 243).
Delfino’s (2020a) study examines how gender ideologies influence Black students’ voicing
of Black language as powerful/articulate and white speech as effeminate and weak. Her work
illustrates how patriarchal constructions of gender may be recruited as counterhegemonic work
aimed at disrupting oppressive raciolinguistic ideologies, such as what counts as articulate or
appropriate speech in public-institutional spaces such as the school. Morgan (2020) argues that
Black women’s counterlanguage ideology is a foundational element of African American lan-
guage ideology and has expanded into the public sphere as a response to racism, class oppres-
sion, and gender inequality in contemporary US society. China (2020) looks at the multimodal,
online construction of Beyoncé as an embodiment of ‘the Black gaze’, where discussions about
her Black womanhood/feminism are central to how Tumblr users interrupt white supremacist
understandings of her as a disruptive figure. Alim et al. (2020b) study freestyle rap sites to
show how young men of colour in different political economic contexts (US and South Africa)
often challenge the dominance of whiteness, while simultaneously celebrating and reifying
particular kinds of ‘Blackness/colouredness’ at the expense of already marginalized gendered
and sexualized bodies. These hegemonic practices reconstitute social divisions that benefit
cisheteropatriarchy, an ideological system that naturalizes normative views of what it means
170
Language and race
to look and act like a straight man and marginalizes women, femininity, and all gender-non-
conforming bodies that challenge the gender binary; a ‘system based on the exploitation and
oppression of women and sexual minorities’ (p. 292).
Finally, queer perspectives are an emerging focus in language and race research. Earlier
work in language and sexuality has addressed the racializing of bodies and spaces among gay
men in Cape Town, South Africa (Leap 2005), and queer Black linguistic practices among
Black gay youth in Philadelphia, US (Blackburn 2005). More recently, Cornelius and Barrett
(2020) argue that any study of language and the body must include a focus on race and racial-
ization or risk being ‘mired in a swamp of racial bias’ (p. 333). They show how Black gay men
use language to creatively navigate the double-bind of the racism ‘prevalent in predominantly
white gay male communities and homophobia in some Black communities’ (p. 316). In their in-
depth analysis of the speech of one Black gay man (Bakari), they examine how he monitors his
language and comportment as he constructs a ‘Black gay identity’. Bakari creates an ‘ambas-
sador’, a persona that might, at least temporarily, evade racist, heteropatriarchal expectations,
even within gay communities. More research is needed to show how the multiply marginalized
creatively negotiate dangerous, discriminatory discourses through the use of complex linguis-
tic repertoires.
Related topics
bilingual and multilingual education; multilingualism; language and culture; critical discourse
analysis; identity; minority/Indigenous language revitalization; languaging and translanguaging
Further reading
Alim, H. S., Reyes, A. and Kroskrity, P. (eds.) (2020) Oxford Handbook of Language and Race, Oxford,
UK: Oxford University Press. (This edited volume centres themes of coloniality and migration,
embodiment and intersectionality, and racisms and representations.)
Ibrahim, A. (2014) The Rhizome of Blackness: A Critical Ethnography of Hip-Hop Culture, Language,
Identity, and the Politics of Becoming, New York: Peter Lang. (This book is a theoretically sophis-
ticated, critical ethnography of language, race, and youth culture that examines the dialectic space
between language learning and multilayered identity investments.)
Smalls, K., Spears, A. and Rosa, J. (2021) ‘Language and white supremacy’, Special issue of Journal of
Linguistic Anthropology, 31(2). (This collection of articles specifically engages white supremacy in
an effort to advance theoretical discussions of the study of language and systemic racism, from insti-
tutional permeations to everyday interactions.)
Von Esch, K. S., Motha, S. and Kubota, R. (2020) ‘Race and language teaching’, Language Teaching 53:
391–421. (This article offers intersectional, globally themed critiques on theorizing race and language
and discusses how language teaching and the hegemony of English have always been part of racist
settler colonialism and imperialism.)
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14
Politics and applied linguistics
Philip Seargeant
Introduction
There is a long-running debate in linguistics about the role that political concerns should play
as part of the focus of the discipline. On one side of the divide are internalists, characterized by
Chomsky’s belief that questions of power simply are not an issue linguists should be addressing;
on the other are those who feel that attempting to separate language as a cognitive or biological
function from the way it is used as a means of communication in society – and by extension, the
way it is intimately tied up with issues of power – is misguided, if not impossible. The debate
tends to spin into stereotype, turning differences of approach around what constitutes linguistics
into value judgements about the validity of the opposing side’s interests. As a counter to some
of this stereotyping, Chomsky himself, for instance, has explicitly stated that sociolinguistics is
‘a perfectly legitimate enquiry’, but one which is ‘externalist by definition’, and thus committed
to different research aims from those he himself is pursuing (2000: 156). Despite this, the divide
remains a point of contention within the broader field of study (e.g. Lukin 2011; Davis 2020) to
the extent that the way a particular theoretical approach (or subdiscipline) views the role played
by politics in its conceptualization of ‘language’ (and thus as part of the subject of study for the
approach) has become a key indicator of disciplinary identity.
In the case of applied linguistics, political issues have always been a central concern of the
discipline, whether they are addressed implicitly or explicitly. If we take Brumfit’s succinct
definition of applied linguistics as the ‘investigation of real-world problems in which language
is a central issue’ (1995: 27), it becomes inevitable that, assuming we believe that the ‘real
world’ is intrinsically political in some way, the discipline itself needs to address issues of
power. Those areas of investigation which overlap with sociolinguistics and discourse analysis
often have an explicitly political focus; while forms of critical linguistics (e.g. critical discourse
analysis), and critical applied linguistics (Pennycook 2001), include not only a political focus
but also something of a political agenda. For this reason, the issue of politics can be seen as
essential to applied linguistics.
In this chapter I will focus on three main issues concerning the relationship between politics
and language. The first of these will focus on politics about language – the way that (ideas
about) language, particular languages, and language use become the site for political debate
176 DOI: 10.4324/9781003082637-16

and struggle. This includes, for example, debates over the status of the so-called Standard
English, especially as these influence educational policy and practice. The second category is
‘politics enacted through language’ – the ways that language use itself achieves or is subject
to political effects. The prevailing maxim here is that language use is never neutral and that
discourse is one of the prime resources used for the organization of social life (Searle 2010).
The influence of theories of discourse that were developed in the 1970s and ’80s, particularly
within French post-structuralist circles (e.g. the works of Foucault and Derrida), has been
especially notable within this category, and in the last few decades, this influence has been felt
across the social sciences via various forms of ‘critical’ studies (critical race studies, critical
gender studies, etc. [see, for example, Delgado and Stefancic 2017]).
The third category I will focus on is a subset of the second and looks at the ways that applied
linguistics is relevant specifically to electoral politics – that is, how insights from linguistics
can be applied to the analysis, or even the practice, of political engagement, especially in the
context of electoral or party politics. The boundaries between these three categories are some-
what artificial, and in many cases, there is overlap or slippage between the different categories.
Nonetheless, they provide an organizational structure for the chapter and thus for analysis of
the relationship between language and politics more generally. Before we move to the first of
them, however, it will be useful to define what politics itself means in this context.
Defining politics
In the most general of terms, politics refers to the regulation of people’s lives which influ-
ences the way they interact with each other, along with the way that societies more broadly
are organized. This regulation can be explicit (e.g. by means of policy) or implicit (e.g. via
ideology). In this sense, politics is a product of the distribution of power, and the ways in which
that power is used to create the structures which (attempt to) guide social relations. Within this
general framework, Boswell (2020) suggests that politics has conventionally been understood
as the theory and practice of how limited goods and resources come to be distributed in society
by means of mechanisms, such as taxation and welfare. In other words, there is a particular
materialist aspect to it, relating to the basics of human sustenance, well-being, and liberty. But
practical concerns such as how we organize society exist alongside a battle of ideas about how
we shape and represent our identity as communities and the values and beliefs that underpin
this. Or rather, materialist issues exist in a symbiotic relationship with symbolic ones so that the
power which can be used to regulate society is generated, in part, by trends in the beliefs and
values of the members of that society so that the ways in which an issue is framed (and thus
understood) will have an effect on how one approaches the distribution of material resources.
The term ‘politics’ in everyday usage is often synonymous with electoral or party politics –
that is, the world of professional politicians and the institutional structures that exist for the
governance of society. But in a wider sense it is applied to the private and the public spheres,
and in the last few decades, this has become increasingly part of public discourse with the
rise in (discussions about) identity politics. It is a commonplace now to consider our personal
lives and relationships as involving issues of power and to view them within the framework of
power differentials. The roles people are assigned and enact in the family and the workplace;
the expectations placed on them over norms of behaviour, dress, or speech – all of these con-
stitute larger patterns of interpersonal organization which we refer to as society and which are
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sustained by relations of power between individuals and the groups in which they participate.
In modern Western liberal democracies, many of these issues no longer fall directly under state
control, and thus, they are not explicitly political in terms of institutional governance. This was
not always the case, however, nor indeed is it the case in many other modern societies, where
the state would and can regulate everything from what you were/are allowed to wear or con-
sume (via sumptuary laws), what you were/are expected to believe (in terms of religious faith),
and what you could/can say (in terms of restrictions on freedom of expression). Modern-day
societies based on liberal ideals of individual human rights do not expect the state to explicitly
interfere in these aspects of a person’s life, other than in certain exceptional circumstances (e.g.
freedom-of-speech protections are balanced, in many societies, against legislation against hate
speech). All the same, society as a whole, through the promotion and contestations of norms,
still exerts forms of control over all these issues. The recognition of this has led to the devel-
opment of a whole strand of critical scholarship (e.g. Foucault 1977, 1998; Bourdieu 1991)
analyzing the ways in which relations of power can be seen to shape all social interaction and,
therefore, suggesting that the flow of power is responsible for the very existence of society. Or
to put it another way, without relations of power, we would not be able to collaborate, make
mutual decisions, and get things achieved, and in this respect, politics is a fundamental part of
everyday life.
How politics relates to applied linguistics

The early-20th-century anarchist Voltairine De Cleyre wrote,
Mankind invents a written sign to aid its intercommunication; and forthwith all manner
of miracles are wrought with the sign. Even such a miracle as that of a part of the solid
earth passes under the mastery of an impotent sheet of paper; and a distant bit of animated
flesh which never even saw the ground, acquires the power to expel hundreds, thousands
of like bits of flesh, though they grew upon that ground as the trees grow, labored it with
their hands, and fertilized it with their bones for a thousand years.
(2020: 199)
This is a stark image of the political role played by language in imposing a set of regulations
on a community. The physical presence of a written sign (a contract), which will complement
a written declaration which has been signed and ratified by a governing body (a law), imposes
sanctions on a variety of behaviours, including access to the land itself. Ownership of the land,
within the social structure that governs the peoples of a community, is allocated to a particular
person simply by dint of an assertion written on a piece of paper. The example given by De
Cleyre here is a rather extreme (although by no means uncommon) instance of the process
that the philosopher John Seale argues is the basis for social ontology. As he says, ‘all of insti-
tutional reality, and therefore, in a sense, all of human civilization, is created by speech acts
that have the same logical form as Declarations . . . Institutional facts are without exception
constituted by language’ (2010: 10–11).
By ‘institutional facts’ Seale means precisely these communally agreed-upon (or forced)
principles such as laws which govern our interaction within society – in De Cleyre’s example,
the ownership of the piece of land. These institutional facts are articulated through language
(by means of declarative speech acts) and then made real through our collective belief in them
and our collective behaviour in respect of them. As with all speech acts, for a declaration to
take on the status of an ‘institutional’ fact, it must be pronounced and recorded within a very
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specific set of contextual circumstances which relate, primarily, to structures of authority. In

other words, while ‘institutional facts are . . . constituted by language’, they are backed up by
other forms of institutional power, such as the police and prison systems. But language is nearly
always the operating mechanism for this authority.
The relationship between language and social ontology underpins the relationship between
applied linguistics and politics, with applied linguistics tending to examine such language use
at a fine-grained level, focusing, per the above definition, on real-world problems as these
are experienced by people within their immediate environs. That’s to say, applied linguistics
examines the way that social ontology functions in specific, context-based instances, paying
particular attention to the various roles that language plays in such cases. There is something
of an inevitable overlap with both sociolinguistics and discourse studies in this formulation. If
we see sociolinguistics as focusing on the linguistic resources that people draw upon to make
meaning, and we see discourse as the product of that meaning-making, we have a simple but
integrated model for analyzing language in use. Conceptualized in this way, both sociolinguis-
tics and discourse studies are broadly defined categories capable of incorporating the diverse
language practices people use and encounter in social interaction and thus are of a part with the
scope of study for applied linguistics and politics. In order to delimit this field for the purposes
of this chapter, in the following section I will outline some of the traditional areas of investiga-
tion for applied linguistics which pertain particularly to issues of politics.
Historical and current perspectives
Politics about language
‘Native speaker’ ideologies

The rough divisions I have made in structuring this chapter are, as noted, politics about lan-
guage, politics enacted through language, and the role played by language in electoral or insti-
tutional politics (what we might call Politics with a capital P). These are not hard and fast
categories, but an initial definition of the first is ways in which beliefs about language or lan-
guage use result in consequences for social practices and social structures which in turn depend
upon and have consequences for relations of power between people and groups.
The dividing line between historical and current perspectives can, at times, be difficult to
pinpoint because many of the political issues that applied linguistics deals with today are ones
which were first identified in the relatively early days of its emergence as a discipline and
have then been the focus for extensive theorizing and research through subsequent decades.
For instance, one of the major domains for applied linguistics research both historically and
today is education. A focus on the ways that languages are taught, how language learning takes
place, and how language education policies are formulated, debated, enacted, and received,
along with other related topics, has led to a broad body of work in this area. To the extent that
approaches to these subjects involve an examination of the contexts in which the education
occurs and the implications learning has for both the individual and society, there is an impor-
tant political element to all of this. Many of the major issues related to the politics of language
education concern the linguistic ideologies – that’s to say, the embedded social beliefs about
language and language use (Silverstein 1979; Woolard 1998) – which influence the practise of
teaching and learning and the way these practises have an impact on social structures.
One long-standing issue in this respect, which provides a good example of the many fac-
ets of the relationship between politics and applied linguistics, is the part that an ideology
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of the ‘native speaker’ has in foreign or second language education contexts. Within applied
linguistics scholarship, this has been analyzed and critiqued from the 1990s onwards (e.g.
Rampton 1990; Widdowson 1994), yet the ideology remains stubbornly prevalent in the poli-
cies and practice of many language-teaching institutions around the world and thus continues
to have an impact on issues of social inequality. Controversies over this concept begin from
the widely held belief, commonplace amongst the general public and many educational policy
practitioners, that authentic use of and indeed knowledge of a language is to be found in those
who acquired that language as a mother tongue. Given that such people’s use of the language
has this perceived authentic status, a ‘native speaker’ variety is then considered the preferred
model for those learning the language in any context other than as a mother tongue. (I am plac-
ing quotation marks around ‘native speaker’ to indicate the fact that it remains such a contested
term, despite being widely used in non-academic and, occasionally, academic contexts.) This
ideology then becomes reflected in curricula, teaching materials and in the aspirations of many
learners, whose desire is to be able to speak like a ‘native speaker’ in terms of both lexico-
grammatical competence and style (e.g. the imitation of a ‘native speaker’ accent). Further-
more, the fact that this preferred model for teaching is associated so completely with ‘native
speakers’ can often privilege those who have the language as their mother tongue in the job
market. Indeed, in some contexts, the criterion for being employed as a language teacher can
rest entirely on one’s status as a ‘native speaker’, with little weight given to whether one has
teaching qualifications or not (see, for example, the collected essays in Houghton and Rivers
[2013] for how these various issues manifest in terms of the teaching and learning of English in
Japan). The picture is further complicated in the case of a language such as English, which has
multiple global varieties reflecting the history of its spread around the world and particularly
the role played by colonialism and imperialism in this history. In English’s case, the concept
of the ‘native speaker’, and all the decisions around policy and practice that flow from this, is
often understood to refer to a particular type of ‘native speaker’ – namely, one from an ‘Inner
Circle’ country (e.g. the US, the UK, Australia) who speaks an educated, standard version of
that ‘Inner Circle’ variety.
The overall picture, then, is of linguistic ideologies which are the product of historical,
economic, and political events, creating a concept of the ‘native speaker’, which is then influ-
ential in the way the language is viewed within society, the way it is taught, and the various
economic and political structures which comprise the language education system in different
contexts. The linguistic ideologies which underpin the basic concept of the ‘native speaker’
are thus political from the very beginning in the way they conceptualize language use via the
prism of hegemonic cultures. The practices which flow from this initial conceptualization
then maintain and reinforce this hegemony through the promotion of the language practices
of powerful groups and nations. Building on these basic premises, research, and theorizing in
applied linguistics has done a great deal to analyze the motivation and influence of the ‘native
speaker’ ideology, to critique the belief systems and practices which sustain it, and to attempt
to reframe discussion around this with the use of an alternative descriptive vocabulary (e.g.
phrases such as ‘expert user’; Rampton 1990).
The hegemony of global languages

As noted, debates about the ‘native speaker’ in language education are often approached in
terms of linguistic hegemony, particularly when applied to contexts such as the teaching of
powerful global languages such as English. The historical spread of English and its contempo-
rary dominance in the linguistic ecology of the world raises a great number of political issues
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and has led to a range of different theoretical approaches for addressing these. Simply to label
the issue in terms of hegemony is, in fact, to take a political perspective on it and to view the
role that the language plays in society as contributing to the power differential between one
group and another. This sort of approach differs from that taken by governments and govern-
ment-affiliated bodies for whom the promotion of the national language is seen as a desirable
action that constitutes a form of soft political power. Organizations such as the British Council,
L’Institut Français, and the Confucius Institutes thus have networks of international outposts,
pursuing various initiatives to promote the language and culture of their homeland and, by
doing so, extend their cultural influence on the global stage.
An examination of such practices led to what has become one of the most influential cri-
tiques of the political motivations and implications behind government-backed language pro-
grammes: Robert Philipson’s concept of ‘linguistic imperialism’ (1992). This refers to the role
that language and the organizations which promote a particular language play as part of broader
processes of cultural imperialism, whereby a dominant power or powers (most noticeably the
US and the UK in the current world system) use the cultural advantages afforded by the sta-
tus that ‘their’ language plays in the world, to further political and economic aims. Although
several decades old now, and not without its critics (e.g. Widdowson 1998), Phillipson’s work
has prompted a great deal of subsequent research and theorizing into the way that language as
both idea and cultural resource is used explicitly as a tool for international influence and how,
as a consequence, ever greater divides develop between powerful ‘global’ languages and their
speakers and ‘local’ languages and the speech communities which use them.
Politics enacted through language

The second category, ‘politics enacted through language’, relates to the ways that choices
over language use frame representations of social reality and thus have an effect on norma-
tive understandings of this reality. There are a number of different layered components to this.
Firstly, there is the idea that choices pertaining to vocabulary and syntax can, within particular
social or cultural contexts, frame perceptions of phenomena. This contention underpins dis-
course studies (and most notably critical discourse analysis [CDA]), and in turn is based around
Foucauldian and neo-Marxist ideas concerning the ways that unequal distribution of power
within society is sustained via discursive means. The use of a term such as the ‘national living
wage’ by the UK government, for example, frames a minimum wage policy as a baseline for
adequate subsistence, regardless of whether or not this is actually the case.
There is also the metalinguistic contestation of framing: the way that these linguistic choices
become the focus for debates about broader social issues, particularly those pertaining to social
justice, so that contestation becomes a way of challenging and reframing norms. Debate about
the validity of the term ‘national living wage’, for example, can act as a touchstone for a
broader critical debate about the political and ethical responsibilities of the welfare state (liv-
ingwage.org 2021). What is noticeable in the era of social media is how this sort of critical
analysis had moved beyond academic and policy research to become (albeit it in a far less
rigorously analytical way) part of the everyday practice of online discussion and debate. On a
platform such as Twitter, for instance, a form of grassroots or amateur CDA daily dissects and
critiques the linguistic framing of political issues by public figures and news organizations,
usually driven by the partisan beliefs of those carrying out the analysis.
This brings us to a further level in the ways in which discursive and linguistic framing has
political consequences, and this concerns the issue of who has access to and authority over the
communicative resources which can be used to effect this politically consequential linguistic
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framing. The fundamental point here is that while it may indeed be the case that shaping the
framing or narrative by which phenomena are represented – and, through this, by which the
social world is ‘constructed’ – allows one to set the agenda on a particular topic, people do
not have equal access to the communicative means by which this discursive framing can be
achieved. Access to different linguistic varieties, registers, and genres, to different technolo-
gies and audiences, and to different platforms in terms of status and authority all feed into the
real-world effects that acts of linguistic and discursive framing have on the shape of society.
Language can also be the focus of political debate and action in other ways. The regula-
tion of language – the regulation of what one can say and of how and when one can say it – is
something that happens constantly in social life. For example, in many countries or states the
notion of free speech is a central tenet of the nation’s political identity. In such communities, a
citizen’s right to speak freely and without undue censorship is inscribed in the constitution or
otherwise protected by law (e.g. ECHR 2013). This is a form of political sanction for a particu-
lar aspect of language use. Yet even in communities which see this idea as an essential aspect
of their cultural identity, there are always proscriptions about what it is and is not acceptable
to say. These proscriptions can either be explicit laws or they can be social and cultural norms
(e.g. beliefs about what normally counts as bad or abusive language), but either way they act
so that the individual’s language use continues to be regulated at some level at all times.
Debates about this are mostly conducted in political philosophy (e.g. Garton Ash 2016), yet
the fact that free speech legislation relates to actual language use rather than merely abstract
principles means that it is a prime topic for applied linguistics. For example, a key tenet for
freedom of expression protections is that limits should only be set on utterances which are
likely to cause harm to an individual or group. How this harm is defined varies from country to
country, but in the United States (which has the most liberal free speech laws in the world) it is
understood as situations where the particular speech is likely to lead to immediate and specific
harm to someone. In other words, you can only judge what the harm is likely to be based on
the context in which the utterance is spoken. The same phrase uttered in different contexts
is likely to have very different effects. Because of this, free speech protections tend towards
being content-neutral but context-specific: it is not the words themselves which cause the harm
but the way in which they are used. Given that close analysis of the way meaning-making is
achieved in communicative interactions is at the centre of much applied sociolinguistic inves-
tigation, the discipline is thus well positioned to contribute to debates around and management
of the politics of free speech.
Applied linguistics and electoral politics

The final category, which is to some extent a subcategory of the above, is the applied linguis-
tics of Politics with a capital P. The persuasive power of language is a fundamental part of the
procedures by which liberal democracies work in that decision-making relies (albeit in highly
complex ways) on consensus which is arrived at by open discussion. With this as a key prin-
ciple underpinning the ideals of the liberal democratic system, there is a strong metadiscursive
focus upon how the actual practices of political discourse conform to these ideals, with regular
critiques in media and public conversations of instances which may threaten to undermine
them. Once again, the dynamics of political persuasion is a fertile subject for applied linguistic
analysis, particularly in terms of the way that the manipulation of language and discourse is
used in attempting to achieve specific purposes within the context of electoral politics.
Given how broad the range of such acts of political persuasion is, I will only offer one exam-
ple here. The concept of fake news, as this involves the generating and circulating of purposely
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fabricated stories made to resemble real news and shared for propagandistic purposes, became
a salient feature of political discourse from the mid-2010s onwards to the extent that it was
one of the defining notions for the era of global politics which emerged a few years after the
global financial crash of 2008. Although the general phenomenon to which the term refers has
been a part of the media ecosystem almost since the first development of the newspaper (and
in different guises, much earlier than that), a combination of digital media affordances and a
rise in a specific style of political communication that was particularly associated with populist
movements produced a distinct form of this age-old phenomenon in the second decade of the
21st century. Alongside the emergence of this concept of ‘fake news’, however, came a related
but distinct discourse of ‘fake news’, centred around the term itself, operating in its own right
as a form of propaganda.
A starting point for an analysis of this issue is Nietzsche’s contention, expressed in the
Genealogy of Morals (2013 [1887]), that concepts that have histories cannot have definitions.
To understand the meaning of the term ‘fake news’ as it occurs in political and media discourse,
it is necessary to examine who has used it, when, and for what purposes and how an intertex-
tual pattern based on such usage, particularly as this has been represented within the media,
has then emerged. In other words, to investigate the role played by use of the term one needs
to examine it as part of a broader discourse – one which communicates extreme scepticism
towards institutional news media outlets – and to provide close, context-based analysis of the
rhetorical aims and effects for which it is being used in any given scenario. There are a variety
of methodologies one can use for such analysis, from corpus linguistics to narrative-focused
discourse analysis to forms of linguistic ethnography. But the important point here is that,
while a topic such as ‘fake news’ has most readily been addressed by disciplines such as media
and journalism studies (e.g. Zimdars and McLeod 2020), the pivotal role that language plays,
particularly in the propagandistic mobilization of the term itself, means that applied linguistics
is well positioned to contribute to an understanding of this aspect of the politics of disinfor-
mation. As the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter (1942: 283) wrote in the midst of the
Second World War, ‘The psychotechnics of party management and party advertising, slogans
and marching tunes, are not accessories. They are of the essence of politics.’ This is even more
true now than it was when Schumpeter was writing, and thus, the analysis of the relationship
between the manipulation of linguistic and semiotic resources and the governing of society is
at the very heart of understanding modern Politics.
Future directions
The most significant way in which issues of communication – and thus, by extension, applied
linguistics – are evolving is due to the influence of rapidly changing technology. Developments
in technology, and particularly digital technologies, are influencing both how language is used
and how it is studied. With respect to the former, the influence of social media and artificial
intelligence (AI) are altering the scope, speed, and nature of communicative possibilities, as
well as the forms of interface and mediation we use when interacting (Seargeant and Tagg
2014; Gunkel 2020). With respect to the latter, the various applications of computer-facilitated
processing and analyzing of data – as, for example, in corpus linguistic approaches – are pro-
viding multiple new ways of studying language structure and language use.
How, then, does this apply specifically to the study of politics and language within the con-
text of applied linguistics? There are various political issues associated with the relationship
between language and new technologies. These include the ownership, and thus influence, of
the tech companies which monopolize much of the online world, including the platforms and
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spaces in which people interact, the resources they use to communicate, and the way these
resources are designed and regulated. For example, one of the implications of the integration
of AI into the platforms which dominate modern communication is that interactions between
human agents are increasingly co-created with the algorithms which power the platforms
(Jones 2021). The workings of these algorithms inevitably reflect the values and ideologies
of their designers to some extent (Noble 2018), meaning that they mostly promote the politi-
cal values, not to mention the biases, of those working in the tech industry on the west coast
of the USA. One example of this is the way that in 2021 Google introduced technology for
its Google Docs app, which suggests edits for language which is considered non-inclusive
according to current liberal democratic social norms. For instance, should one type ‘mailman’,
it will suggest instead ‘mail carrier’, or for ‘chairman’, it will suggest ‘chairperson’ (Condon
2021). At the other end of the interventionist scale, social media apps in mainland China are
subject to a variety of speech-related restrictions implemented via keyword filtering (Stock-
mann 2014), which thus complicate the ability for people to discuss a number of proscribed
topics. An analysis of individuals’ language use on platforms which use this type of filtering
or nudge technology thus becomes an investigation into how discourse is shaped by a mixture
of human agency, AI, and the political context in which the tech industry operates. This alters
many conventional understandings about the nature of expression and interaction and creates
new challenges for applied linguistics research.
In conclusion, it is worth, perhaps, adding a note about one further category – namely,
the politics of the institutions in which applied linguistics as a discipline or subject area is
researched and taught. This is part of the issue of the politics of higher education more gener-
ally and, as such, concerns all disciplines and subject areas. But given the importance that ide-
ology and discourse play in shaping political culture, it is an issue which applied linguists may
feel they have a particular sensitivity towards. The work of researching, teaching, and learning
about applied linguistics issues takes place in institutional contexts which themselves are run
according to a set of political and economic beliefs and which also act as sites of struggle
over the validity, consequence, and meaning of these belief systems. As such, even when the
knowledge produced and disseminated does not directly concern these politics, it is likely
nonetheless to be partly shaped in relation to them. The types of issues this entails includes
the following: the distribution of resources and opportunities available to researchers, teach-
ers, and students for gaining access to and participating in the production of and dialogue over
knowledge; the way knowledge production is shaped by the priorities and/or biases of those
who have control over this distribution of resources; and the way the same is shaped by cultural
and historical processes (not least among these being the dominance of the English language
in the contemporary global context) and by political agendas and the subsequent political deci-
sions taken at a state level which then affect the ethos behind the running of higher education
institutions. The knowledge which becomes the applied linguistics canon or curriculum is
thus the product of individuals and groups working in contexts which have been facilitated or
constrained by this system.
In recent years, one of the most salient ways in which reflection about this aspect of the rela-
tionship between academia and politics has been taking place is with campaigns centred around
the concept of decolonizing the curriculum. To an extent, certain parts of applied linguistics
have, since their inception, emerged specifically to pursue goals akin to those of the decoloniz-
ing the curriculum movement. The various strands of study focusing on English around the
world, for instance, have, since the 1980s at least, aimed to challenge Western-centric histories
of the English language, and both provide conceptual models which legitimize diversity and
variety and to be inclusive of local perspectives from around the world. In addition, from the
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late 1990s onwards, branches of applied linguistics have engaged extensively with theorization
around the processes of globalization (e.g. Blommaert 2012), leading to research areas such as
those on language and superdiversity (Blommaert and Rampton 2011) and translanguaging (Li
Wei 2018), all of which look to deconstruct static, nation-based notions of language.
This is not to say that there is not more productive work to be done in this area. Given the
role that language plays in shaping the life opportunities of people, as well as its role in repre-
senting the cultural values of a society, reflection about how we generate disciplinary knowl-
edge should be part and parcel of that disciplinary knowledge. Because applied linguistics
work often feeds directly into language-related social practices – into teaching, for example, or
assessment design – it is important that the critical approach that scholarship takes to the politi-
cal effects of such practices is matched by a critical approach to the way the research itself is
carried out – and this is likely to continue to be an increasingly important issue in the ongoing
development of the discipline.
Related topics
language and migration; language policy and planning; critical discourse analysis; language,
race, and ethnicity; world Englishes and English as a lingua franca; digital language and com-
munication
Further reading
Hewings, A. and Tagg, C. (eds.) (2012) The Politics of English: Conflict, Competition, Co-Existence,
Abingdon: Routledge. (This textbook examines the relationships between English and politics, with a
focus on the status of English as a global language and its relationship to issues such as migration, the
media, and the global ELT industry.)
Kramsch, C. (2021) Language as Symbolic Power, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (An over-
view of the relationship between language and power as this is manifest in contexts such as education,
politics, and culture.)
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15
World Englishes and English as a
lingua franca
Introduction
This chapter begins by reviewing the development of World Englishes as a field of study. First,
in showing that there are many Englishes, not just one, the work of Braj Kachru is described
and the importance of his contributions is summarized. Next, debates concerning the moti-
vations for language change in World Englishes are reviewed and examples of innovative
linguistic features are provided. Then we consider the developmental stages in the emergence
of World Englishes. Finally, we discuss recent developments, including the rapidly increasing
role throughout the world of English as a lingua franca (ELF), and we summarize how World
Englishes and ELF differ.
Models of World Englishes

There have been many models that represent the nature of Englishes around the world. These
are summarized in McArthur (1998), where McArthur’s own ‘Circle of World Englishes’ is
also described (1998: 97). Perhaps the most influential model is Kachru’s three circles of Eng-
lish. It also uses a circle analogy, placing each country in one of three circles as follows (with
country examples added in italicized brackets):
The current sociolinguistic profile of English may be viewed in terms of three concentric
circles . . . The Inner Circle refers to the traditional cultural and linguistic bases of English
(e.g. Britain, USA, Australia). The Outer Circle represents the institutionalized non-native
varieties (ESL) in the regions that have passed through extended periods of colonization
(e.g. Singapore, India, Nigeria). The Expanding Circle includes the regions where the
performance varieties of the language are used essentially in EFL contexts (e.g. China,
Japan, Egypt).
(Kachru 1992b: 356–357)
The terms ESL (English as a second language) and EFL (English as a foreign language) in this
extract refer to the traditional classification which Kachru challenged. His great contribution
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082637-17 187

to the field lay in recognizing the development of many different varieties of English, so the
language should not be seen in terms of a single monolithic standard, as variation is the norm.
And just as there are many varieties of British English, there are also many World Englishes,
which in turn have sub-varieties, so, for example, Indian English consists of a network of
varieties (Wiltshire 2020).
Some scholars have criticized aspects of the ‘three circles’ model on the following grounds:
it is historically and geographically based, it deals with countries rather than societies or indi-
viduals, and it fails to accommodate some places (such as Denmark and Argentina) that seem
to be moving from Expanding Circle to Outer Circle status even though they were never colo-
nies of England or the United States (Jenkins 2009: 20). Furthermore, Kachru’s model does
not allow for the possibility of the increasing number of speakers with English as their first
language in places such as Singapore and India.
However, as Bolton (2005) has noted, Kachru’s ‘three circles’ model was formulated in
response to the single-standard orthodoxy of the time, and ‘the strength of the World Englishes
paradigm has lain and continues to lie in its consistent pluralism and inclusivity’ (2005: 78).
Here, we survey linguistic studies of World Englishes and provide examples of features
from a range of Englishes. Then we consider the stages through which New Englishes progress
as they develop into mature varieties.
Linguistic motivations
A fundamental principle in the study of World Englishes is that variation and change are natu-
ral and inevitable (Kirkpatrick 2007). As a consequence, linguistic features which differ from
Standard English are not errors but may instead represent features of a World English.
Linguistic variation is, of course, nothing new, and Inner Circle Englishes, as well as World
Englishes, are characterized by variation not just in pronunciation and vocabulary but gram-
mar as well. For example, historically, all Englishes had a rich set of present tense inflections
on verbs, but the dialects of England now generally have substantially reduced inflections,
and furthermore, they are not the same in all varieties. In modern Standard English, for pres-
ent tense verbs, there is only the -s ending for the third person singular, but the dialect of East
Anglia generally has no present tense inflections at all, so ‘he make them’ is grammatical in this
variety, though Britain (2020) suggests it may be moving towards the standard in this respect.
In contrast, Yorkshire English has an additional present tense inflection, with ‘thou hast’ for
second person singular.
Variation in present tense marking is also seen in American dialects. ‘Folks sings’ is gram-
matical in the English of the American South (Bailey 1997: 259–260), and the following extract
of African American Vernacular English shows variation in the use of -s on verbs:
What’s her, what’s her name that cooks them? She a real young girl. She bring ’em in every
morning. An’ they, an’ they sells ’em, an’ they sells them for that girl there in that store.
(Cukor-Avila 2003: 98)
Given such variation in Inner Circle Englishes, it is not surprising to find similar variation in
World Englishes. In Kortmann et al. (2004), half of the 46 varieties of English surveyed fre-
quently do not mark the third person singular -s.
Mesthrie and Bhatt (2008) compared a selection of World Englishes and identified gram-
matical features which occur in many varieties but not in Standard English. They propose that
World Englishes can be classified as either ‘deleters’ or ‘preservers’ (2008: 90–92). Deleters
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World Englishes and English as a lingua franca
are varieties whose speakers commonly leave out grammatical elements, while preservers are
those in which deletion is less common, with Singapore English an example of a deleting vari-
ety and Black South African English a preserver. Their explanation for this distinction between
deleters and preservers involves influence from other languages, as it is ‘usually dependent on
the characteristic syntax of the substrate languages’ (2008: 90).
Although language contact has always been a key stimulus for linguistic change, a number
of shared grammatical features have been identified. In fact, the large number of non-standard
forms which are shared by many new varieties of English has led some scholars to propose
that a number of vernacular universals (VUs) exist, as these cannot be solely due to influence
from the speakers’ first languages.
Assuming that language contacts are a factor to be reckoned with when dealing with VUs,
the question is: what exactly is the relationship between language contact phenomena and
vernacular universals, and to what extent can we distinguish them from each other?
(Filpulla et al. 2009: 8)
The debate over the relative importance of a speaker’s first language (the substrate) upon a par-
ticular variety of English continues, but it is evident that the substrate is not the only motivation
for change, and grammatical simplification and regularization are also motivations for change.
In the next section, we provide a sample of linguistic features from a range of World Englishes.
Linguistic features: some examples

Kortmann and Lunkenheimer (2013) provide a substantial catalogue of grammatical variation
across 46 different varieties of English. Here, we discuss a small selection of features, focusing
particularly on a few that are shared widely among World Englishes. In addition, we consider
which of these features also occur in Inner Circle varieties, and the extent to which they might
be reflecting the evolution of English.
We start with some phonological features that seem to occur in a range of World Englishes:
avoidance of dental fricatives, reduction of final consonant clusters, use of syllable-based
rhythm, and spelling pronunciation. Next, we consider how World Englishes borrow words
from local languages so that these Englishes reflect the lived experiences of their speakers. We
then give some examples of morphosyntactic features, involving the inflections that occur on
verbs and nouns. Finally, we discuss the discourse feature of topic fronting.
Phonological features
Dental fricatives
One of the most widespread features of World Englishes is the tendency to avoid the use of [θ]
and [ð] for the TH sounds. However, the sounds that occur instead of these dental fricatives
vary. For example, for the voiceless TH sound at the start of a word such as three, [t] tends to
occur in places such as Singapore (Deterding 2007: 13–16), Malaysia (Baskaran 2004), the
Philippines (Tayao 2004), Brunei (Mossop 1996), Ghana (Huber 2004), the Bahamas (Childs
and Wolfram 2004), and India (Kachru 2005: 44–46), while [f] occurs in Hong Kong English
(Deterding et al. 2008), and Gut (2004) reports that, in Nigerian English, Hausa speakers tend
to use [s] but Yoruba and Igbo speakers use [t]. The avoidance of dental fricatives also occurs
in some Inner Circle Englishes, as at the start of a word such as three, many speakers in London
189
use [f], while those in Ireland and also New York may use [t] or [t̪ ] (Wells 1982: 328, 428, 515),
but this phenomenon is almost certainly more widespread in New Englishes.
Jenkins (2000: 159) excludes dental fricatives from her lingua franca core (LFC), the fea-
tures that she suggests are vital for the intelligibility of English as an international language. In
fact, they are the only sounds from the inventory of consonants found in Inner Circle Englishes
that are excluded from the LFC. One might hypothesize that, in the future, the absence of dental
fricatives may become increasingly accepted in standard Englishes.
Final consonant clusters

Word-final consonant clusters are commonly simplified in World Englishes, often involving
the omission of the final consonant, especially if it is a plosive. For example, in Singapore
English, first, world, ask, and think may all be pronounced with the final consonant omitted
(Deterding 2007: 18). Final consonant cluster reduction is similarly reported for many other
New Englishes, including those of Hong Kong (Deterding et al. 2008), Nigeria (Gut 2004),
Ghana (Huber 2004), and East Africa (Schmied 2004).
The omission of plosives from the end of word-final consonant clusters is also frequent in
Inner Circle varieties. Cruttenden (2014: 314) offers a long list of phrases in RP (the variety
of British English that is usually adopted as the standard) from which [t] or [d] at the end of
the first word is omitted, including next day, raced back, last chance, first light, old man, and
loved flowers, and Guy (1980) reports that the phenomenon is particularly common among
speakers of vernacular Black English in the USA. Perhaps the biggest difference is that in New
Englishes the omission of the final consonant tends to persist even when the next word begins
with a vowel, an environment in which the consonant is more likely to be used for linking in
Inner Circle varieties.
Schreier (2005: 27) suggests that consonant cluster reduction may be a universal property of
all varieties of spoken English and, furthermore, that this natural tendency towards simplifica-
tion characterizes the historical development of English. It seems, then, that New Englishes
may be leading the way in reducing the complexity of syllables by omitting the final consonant
in word-final clusters.
Rhythm
While stress-based rhythm is often claimed to be the basis of English speech timing in
most Inner Circle varieties, the use of syllable-based rhythm is widely reported for New
Englishes. Although nowadays few people adhere to the view of Abercrombie (1967: 97)
that all languages can be neatly classified as either stress-timed or syllable-timed, and
indeed, some scholars have questioned the entire existence of this fundamental rhythmic
dichotomy (e.g. Cauldwell 2002), it is often still asserted that languages may be placed
along a continuum of stress-/syllable-timing (Dauer 1983). Indeed, measurements that
compare the duration of the vowels in neighbouring syllables confirm that a clear acous-
tic difference can be shown between the rhythm of Singapore and British English (Low
et al. 2000), though the best way of measuring rhythm remains uncertain (Deterding 2012;
Fuchs 2016).
In addition to Singapore English, other new varieties that have been observed to have a syl-
lable-based rhythm include those of the Philippines (Tayao 2004), India (Fuchs 2016), Nigeria
(Gut 2006), East Africa (Schmied 2004), and Jamaica (Trudgill and Hannah 2008: 117). In fact,
British English can also sometimes have variable rhythm, and Crystal (1995) observes that
190
syllable-based rhythm can be found in a range of speech styles, including baby talk, sarcastic
utterances, many types of popular music, and some television commercials.
Given the widespread occurrence of syllable-based rhythm throughout the world, it seems
that this is another candidate for a feature where New Englishes may be leading the way for
the evolution of English.
Spelling pronunciation
As more and more people become literate, there is a tendency for the pronunciation of words
to be influenced by their spelling (Deterding and Nur Raihan 2016). This affects all Englishes,
so in Britain forehead was once [fɒrɪd] (it rhymed with horrid), but it is now usually [fɔːhed].
However, this process seems to be particularly common in World Englishes, so salmon is gen-
erally [sælmɒn] in Brunei English (Deterding and Salbrina 2013: 41) and throughout Southeast
Asia, and about half of university undergraduates in Brunei have [ɒ] rather than [ʌ] in the first
syllable of company (Deterding and Salbrina 2013: 40).
The influence of spelling on pronunciation may be yet one more area where World Eng-
lishes are leading the changes that are affecting English worldwide.
Lexical features
World Englishes are spoken by people who share cultural and linguistic backgrounds, and
by definition, their speakers are multilingual, so they typically use words borrowed from
their other languages (Kirkpatrick 2020a). Borrowing can, of course, also be seen with Inner
Circle varieties, as kangaroo, koala, and boomerang are all borrowed into Australian English
from Australian Aboriginal languages, while in an Outer Circle variety, Malay words such
as kampong (village) and sarong (a wrap-around garment) are found in Malaysian English.
Names of foods are common sources of borrowed vocabulary, so nasi goreng (fried rice) and
ambuyat (a dessert made from sago) are common words in Brunei English (Deterding and
Salbrina 2013: 95).
Indeed, new words constantly enter all varieties of English. The Oxford English Dictionary
(2018 edition) has a number of entries originating from Filipino English, including bagoong
(a condiment made from fermented fish), holdupper (someone who commits a robbery or
holdup), and trapo (a corrupt politician). The etymology of trapo provides an excellent exam-
ple of how new words are created. It is formed from the first letters of traditional politician,
but is also an allusion to trapo, the Spanish word for rag, a reminder that the Philippines was
a Spanish colony until 1898.
World Englishes also create hybrid words, combinations of a local language and English.
Examples from Indian English include lathi-charge (Indian police carry lathis or batons) and
tiffin carrier (a lunch container) (Kachru 1983: 38).
Speakers of World Englishes often display humour and creativity in the development of new
words. For example, ‘New Chinglish’ sometimes splices two English words together to create
portmanteaus: democrazy mocks the democratic system of the West and became prominent
after Trump’s presidential election, shitizen describes how ordinary people feel about their sta-
tus in Chinese society, smilence refers to a typical Chinese reaction of smiling without saying
anything, propoorty alludes to the mounting costs of owning property in China, and profartssor
indicates the lack of integrity of some Chinese professors (Lee and Li 2020). Chinese speakers
also use direct translations of Chinese utterances. For example, the direct English translation
of 你问我我问谁? (Ni wen wo, wo wen shei?)’ is ‘You ask me, I ask who?’ and means, in this
191
variety of English, ‘I have no idea.’ As Lee and Li point out, this multilingual creativity ‘can
be said to be immanent in the concept of translanguaging, the creative and critical deployment
of semiotic resources in communication that transcends normative boundaries between named
languages’ (2020: 558).
Morphosyntactic features
As discussed, the absence of the present tense -s inflection is reported in many Englishes. In
addition, many speakers of World Englishes see no need to mark the past tense of verbs once
the time frame of an event has been established. For Singapore English, Deterding (2007)
suggests that use of the present tense in narrating an event is particularly common when deal-
ing with something that may still be true. For example, in the following extract, the speaker
switches to the present tense, even though the story is located in the past, possibly because she
believes that the funfair is still running at the time she is speaking:
[T]hen later on in the evening . . . er went to the UK funfair . . . at Jurong East . . . mmm . . .
it was, it was interesting, but very expensive . . . erm the fun, the entrance fee is cheap, it’s
only two dollars . . . I guess that’s cheap enough, but then the . . . the games and the rides
are all very expensive.
(Deterding 2007: 46)
Another factor that may influence the use of tenses in Singapore English is the nature of the
verb, as Ho and Platt (1993: 86) show that past tense marking is most common for punctual
verbs (i.e. verbs such as hit or give that describe an action, in contrast with stative verbs such
as like or want).
Could absence of past tense marking for narrating an event become widely accepted as
part of Standard English? In fact, the historic present is already sometimes used for narrating
past events in order to create a sense of immediacy. Carter and McCarthy (2006: 625) give the
following example from their corpus of spoken British English, where the speaker is talking
about a laser show:
In the beginning there was darkness, and we hear this scraping sound, and you see this
little coloured pattern, the coloured pattern gets bigger and bigger.
The non-use of the present tense -s is also attested in many varieties of World English. How-
ever, it may not be as frequent as people have previously assumed. The existence of corpora,
including corpora of ELF, has allowed scholars to investigate the actual frequency of non-
standard forms. And while the non-use of the present tense -s is attested in the Vienna Oxford
International Corpus of English (VOICE) (Breiteneder 2005), it is relatively uncommon in the
Asian Corpus of English (ACE). For example, Kirkpatrick and Subhan (2014) found that the
non-marking of the present tense -s was rare in the formal speech of first language speakers of
Malay and Bahasa Indonesia (languages that do not mark tense), and even in informal speech,
it was less frequent than the use of the marked form.
Similar results have been found for nouns which are uncountable in Inner Circle Englishes
(e.g. furniture) but may be countable in World Englishes (Hall et al. 2013; Kirkpatrick 2020b).
Researchers must therefore be careful not to treat what might only be occasional uses of non-
standard forms in World Englishes as characteristic features (Van Rooy 2013). These findings
also question the influence of the substrate on a speaker’s variety of English.
192
Discourse features
Many scholars have noted that in certain World Englishes, the topic tends to be placed clearly at
the front of the sentence. For example, in Singapore English, the recording in Deterding (2007:
63) includes the following utterances:
So the whole process I need to break down for the different operators.
Australia, I’ve been to Sydney and Perth.
For Indian English, Bhatt (2004: 1023) offers:
Those people, I telephoned yesterday only.
Sometimes, topic fronting is followed by a resumptive pronoun, as in the following example

from Singapore English (Deterding 2007: 65):
Then, er, two of my sisters, they’re already married.
What about Inner Circle varieties? Carter and McCarthy (2006: 193) suggest that fronting is
common in spoken language, and they give the following examples:
That leather coat, it looks really nice on you.

The white house on the corner, is that where she lives?
So perhaps the use of fronted topics, often with a resumptive pronoun, is actually a universal fea-
ture of all Englishes. Topic fronting seems to be a natural process in human language, and perhaps
its widespread occurrence in World Englishes may have a substantial influence on the discourse
structures that become increasingly favoured and accepted as mainstream in World Englishes.
General trends in linguistic features

One characteristic of many shared features is that they are the result of simplification or regu-
larization. For example, many speakers find dental fricatives hard to pronounce, so their avoid-
ance makes things easier; and use of plurals for logically plural nouns makes the grammar
more regular. Simplifying and regularizing innovations are ones that have a good chance of
becoming adopted as standard when a language evolves, and we suggest that World Englishes
may be leading the way in this respect.
Figure 15.1 shows a sign written in Singapore in which close is used rather than the stan-
dard closed. At first glance, one is tempted to classify this as an error, as a suffix has not been
added to the verb close to convert it into an adjective. But we might note that open can function
perfectly well as both a verb and an adjective, and ‘we are open’ would be fine. So why not
‘we are close’?
In fact, we can regard this use of close rather than closed as illustrating both simplification
(it is easier to say, as the word-final consonant cluster is avoided) and also regularization (it
is consistent with the use of open). And this is just the kind of change that we might expect
to find adopted in Standard English one day. Perhaps this Singaporean signwriter is ahead of
their time. And maybe many of the trends that have been noted for World Englishes indicate
the future direction of global English.
193
Figure 15.1 Sign on the door of a shop in Singapore (picture by Ludwig Tan)
Stages in the development of World Englishes

So far, we have summarized some linguistic features in World Englishes. We now consider the
stages that a variety of English goes through on its way to becoming accepted as the standard
variety in a society. Kachru (1992a: 56) suggested that World Englishes pass through three
stages. The first is marked by non-acceptance of the emerging variety, with locals preferring
the colonial or relevant Inner Circle variety. The second stage sees local and imported varieties
existing side-by-side. Finally, the local variety becomes accepted as the standard.
Schneider (2007, 2020) has refined and extended this in his model of the evolution of Eng-
lishes, showing that post-colonial varieties of English often follow the same basic developmen-
tal path. He identifies five stages in the developmental cycle (2020: 417):
1 Foundation: English first arrives in the area.

2 Exonormative stabilization: Standards are provided by the colonial variety. British Eng-
lish originally provided the norms in many colonies.
3 Nativization: Bilingual and multilingual speakers create a new local variety of English
which is influenced by the linguistic systems and cultural norms of the speakers’ first
languages. During this stage, the new variety is usually considered deficient, so norms are
still provided by the colonial variety, especially in the classroom.
4 Endonormative stabilization: The new variety becomes socially accepted and provides the
classroom model. In Kachru’s terms, this is when Outer Circle varieties become norm-
providing rather than norm-dependent.
5 Differentiation: The new variety itself develops sub-varieties.
While more research is needed on the development of individual varieties, Schneider’s model
appears fundamentally sound. However, the extent to which the local educated variety is
194
accepted as the classroom model remains the topic of debate, with many Asian countries still
insisting on an Inner Circle variety as the preferred model (Kirkpatrick forthcoming). It would
appear, therefore, that varieties of English can reach Schneider’s final stage of differentiation
linguistically, but sociolinguistically they remain at an earlier stage as language planners are
not prepared to accept local varieties as classroom models.
World Englishes have also given rise to literature written in the variety. There are many
Asian and African writers who now use local varieties of English to represent their cultures.
The Pakistani novelist Sidhwa writes,
We have to stretch the language to adapt it to alien thoughts and values which have no
precedent of expression in English, subject the language to a pressure that distorts, or if
you like, enlarges its scope and changes its shape.
(Sidhwa 1996: 240)
An excellent example of this is Ken Saro-Wiwa’s (1985) novel Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten
English. The author’s note explains that Sozaboy (soldier boy) was the result of his fascination
with how English could be adapted to reflect the language of Nigerians.
The way a World English is transplanted and adapted by its new users is nicely captured
in Indian English, which is characterized by its bookishness and use of extended metaphor:
Years ago, a slender sapling from a foreign field was grafted by ‘pale hands’ on the mighty
and many-branched Indian banyan tree. It has kept growing vigorously and is now an
organic part of its parent tree, it has spread its own probing roots into the brown soil below.
Its young leaves rustle energetically in the strong winds that blow from the western hori-
zon, but the sunshine that warms it and the rain that cools it are from Indian skies; and it
continues to draw its vital sap from ‘this earth, this realm’, this India.
(Naik and Narayan 2004: 253)
English as a lingua franca (ELF)

Nowadays, there are more users of English as an additional language than native speakers
(Crystal 2003), and English as a lingua franca (ELF) is the most common worldwide use of
the language (Jenkins 2009). Some have defined ELF to exclude native speakers (e.g. Firth
1990), but we follow Seidlhofer (2011: 7) that ELF is ‘any use of English among speakers of
different first languages for whom English is the communicative medium of choice’, which
may include some native speakers.
A key distinction between ELF and World Englishes is that the latter are spoken by people
who share linguistic and cultural backgrounds and reflect the lived experiences of their speak-
ers, including words borrowed from local languages in order to express cultural phenomena
(Baker 2016), while ELF occurs with speakers from different backgrounds. As a result, World
Englishes are generally code-mixed varieties as their speakers make free use of their shared
languages (McLellan 2020), as in this example of Singapore English, in which non-English
words are underlined.
Pulau Ubin zuo mo? makan seafood or phatoh? Emails he takes like 2 days later. Then
when I reply to ask further, lagi 2 days gone. Merng so much of bun tuay, but neh cor-mit
if can make it for sebben Low-vember also.
(Cavallero et al. 2020: 422)
195
Why Pulau Ubin? Is he there for seafood or a date? He takes two days to answer his emails
and when I replied with more questions, another two days go by. He asked so many ques-
tions but still is unable to commit to the 7th November date.
(Translation by Cavallero et al.)
In contrast, ELF users tend to avoid words from other languages that might hinder communica-
tion, though they do sometimes code-mix (e.g. Cogo 2016). In ELF data, however, code-mixing
is less frequent in ACE (ACE n.d.) than in VOICE (VOICE n.d.), partly because the contributors
to ACE are speakers of Asian languages which often come from different language families.
Furthermore, Asians tend not to learn other Asian languages at school (Kirkpatrick and Lid-
dicoat 2019), while many contributors to VOICE are Europeans who will also have learned
another European language, so there are more opportunities to use each other’s languages.
While ELF may have a monolingual surface form, it is still inherently multilingual (Schaller-
Schwaner and Kirkpatrick 2020). Indeed, ELF users sometimes ‘translate’ an idiom from their
own language into English. Pitzl (2016) quotes a German speaker saying, ‘I think in that case,
we should not wake up any dogs’, adopting a German idiom translated into English.
A second key distinction between World Englishes and ELF is that the former can be codi-
fied, such as Kachru (1983) for Indian English and the individual chapters in Kirkpatrick
(2020b). In contrast, ELF cannot easily be codified. The fact that ELF interactions involve
people from a range of cultural and linguistic backgrounds means that ELF is ‘inherently
hybrid in nature’ (Firth 2009: 163). One might say it is a way of ‘doing English with other
languages in (the back of) one’s mind and in a specific setting’ (Schaller-Schwaner and Kirk-
patrick 2020: 234).
Recent research into ELF has focused on strategies that users adopt to facilitate commu-
nication (Deterding and Kirkpatrick 2006; Bjorkman 2011; Vettorel 2019; Kirkpatrick and
Schaller-Schwaner forthcoming) and to repair misunderstandings (Deterding 2013). Many
scholars have noted ‘the supportive and cooperative nature of interactions in ELF where mean-
ing negotiation takes place at different levels’ (Archibald et al. 2011: 3), though ELF interac-
tions are not always cooperative, especially in high-stakes encounters (Kirkpatrick et al. 2016).
Key questions and issues

We have outlined how recent work has created fields of study under World Englishes, and we
have summarized some of the findings. However, much needs to be done – to codify the key
features of varieties of World English, to analyze the extent to which they are used by differ-
ent speakers, to determine trends in the evolution of English around the world, to consider the
occurrence of and constraints on code-mixing, to identify shared features that may be classified
as vernacular universals, and to examine how usage differs from that of ELF. In reality, research
on World Englishes is still in its infancy, and there are exciting prospects for further work.
Related topics
multilingualism; language and migration; language policy and planning
Further reading
Jenkins, J., Baker, W. and Dewey, M. (eds.) (2020) The Routledge Handbook of English as a Lingua Franca,
London and New York: Routledge. (This edited volume includes recent contributions by the key scholars
196
into research on ELF, with between six and eight papers in each of seven sections: conceptualizing and
positioning ELF, the regional spread of ELF, ELF characteristics and processes, contemporary domains
and functions, ELF in academia, ELF policy and pedagogy, and ELF into the future.)
Kirkpatrick, A. (ed.) (2020) The Routledge Handbook of World Englishes, 2nd ed., London and New
York: Routledge. (This edited volume includes 40 contributions from various scholars describing the
background to World Englishes, a range of varieties of World Englishes, emerging trends, contempo-
rary contexts, and pedagogical implications.)
Onysko, A. (ed.). (2021) Research Developments in World Englishes, London: Bloomsbury. (This edited
volume summarizes the wide range of recent research in World Englishes, highlighting the plethora of
approaches now being adopted by scholars from a variety of disciplines.)
Seidlhofer, B. (2011) Understanding English as a Lingua Franca, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
(This book provides an authoritative overview of approaches towards ELF, written by one of the key
scholars in this field.)
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Part II
Broadening horizons
16
Sign languages
Introduction
This chapter explores applied linguistics in relation to sign languages, which have arisen spon-
taneously within deaf communities, operate in the visual modality, and are unrelated to the
spoken languages which surround them. Despite surface differences from spoken languages,
they share at a deeper level the linguistic structure of all human language and are used in paral-
lel social and communicative contexts.
The linguistic structure of signed languages
Structure and modality

In the last 70 years, there has been substantial research on over a hundred different sign lan-
guages, determining that the sign languages of deaf communities throughout the world are
complex natural human languages, distinct from gesture and also from spoken languages.
Early modern research on sign languages emphasized the underlying structural similarities
of spoken and sign languages, but more recent research has moved towards recognition that
there are systematic typological differences (see Goldin-Meadow and Brentari 2017 for a
review of changing emphasis in research). These differences arise mainly from the interaction
of language form with modality. Phonological and morphological structures differ because
sign languages have greater correspondence between form and meaning (iconicity or visual
motivation) than spoken languages do. Sign languages also exploit the properties of sign lan-
guage articulators (two primary articulators – the hands – as well as non-manual articulators,
including the torso, head and face, eyes, and mouth) and the differing properties of the visual
and auditory perceptual systems, using space for grammatical and discourse purposes and
creating syntactic structures exhibiting extensive simultaneity, while spoken languages prefer
linearity and affixation processes. In the light of sign language research, linguistic theory needs
to take greater account of modality (Meier et al. 2003). A further step in our understanding of
sign languages has been to recognize the interrelationship of language and gesture. Cognitive
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082637-19 203

models are increasingly used to account for the visual motivation behind the structure and form
of sign languages, irrespective of the level of language analysis (Taub 2001; Leeson and Saeed
2012; Roush 2018).
Although the social histories of sign languages differ from each other in many respects,
there is greater typological similarity among sign languages than among spoken languages.
Their relative youth (Kegl et al. 1999) and their possible creole status (Singleton and New-
port 2004; Fischer 1978) may account for some of this similarity, but visual motivation as an
organizing factor in the phonology, lexicon, and syntax may also be significant. The linear
syntax of spoken languages and their independence from visual motivation may allow greater
differences than spatial, visually motivated syntax (Woll 1984; Taub 2001; Napoli and Sutton-
Spence 2014).
Similarities in the structures of sign languages are sufficient for us to treat them together in
a brief review here.
Phonology, morphology, and syntax

Since Stokoe’s pioneering work on American Sign Language (ASL) (1960), linguists have
seen signs as consisting of simultaneous combinations of handshape configuration, a loca-
tion where the sign is articulated, and a movement – either a path through signing space or an
internal movement of the joints in the hand. Each is understood to be a part of the phonology
because changing one of these parameters can create a minimal pair. Thus, in British Sign
Language (BSL), AFTERNOON1 and ORDER differ only in handshape, AFTERNOON and
NAME2 differ only in location, and AFTERNOON and TWO-HUNDRED differ only in
movement1. There have been considerable modifications to Stokoe’s framework since 1960,
not least in relation to greater recognition of sequences of movement and hold within a sign’s
structure (Liddell and Johnson 1989) and the suggestion that these sublexical parameters are
more akin to features than phonemes, but this model has remained the basic description of
sign language phonology.
Sign language morphology tends to manifest itself in simultaneous combinations of
meaningful handshapes, locations, and movements. In derivational morphology, for exam-
ple, handshape can change to reflect numbers – for example, in BSL, N weeks, N o’clock,
and N years old are articulated with conventionalized location and movement, while the
handshape indicates the number. Signs referring to objects, and signs referring to actions
related to those objects may also differ only in movement, so the verbs LOCK, SIT, and
EAT are made with a single, large movement, compared to the nouns KEY, CHAIR, and
FOOD, which have short, repeated movements. Inflectional morphology is also shown by
changes in movement and location. Thus, degree is shown through size, speed, onset speed,
and length of hold in a movement, with, for example, LUCKY having a smaller, smoother
movement than VERY-LUCKY. The movement changes conveying temporal aspect are
frequently visually motivated, so that repeated actions or events are shown through repeti-
tion of the sign; duration of an event is paralleled by duration of the sign (signs for shorter
events being articulated for less time than signs for longer events); and when an event is
interrupted suddenly, the movement of the sign is interrupted. Some verbs show number
and person by movement through signing space. The direction of movement of a verb such
as HAND-OVER indicates who gave what to whom. Signs can also change handshape to
indicate how an object is handled. So I-HAND-OVER-A-SINGLE-FLOWER-TO-YOU
204
Sign languages
has the same movement as I-HAND-OVER-AN-ICE-CREAM-TO-YOU but a different

handshape.
With their rich morphology, sign languages have relatively free word order, influenced
by factors such as the pragmatics of the signers’ communicative aims and what they believe
their audience to know, as well as what has already been said. Sign order is often influenced
by visual motivation, with the ground signed before the figure, and the patient or goal signed
before the agent, to allow the agent to have something to act upon in a visual sense. For exam-
ple, WALL PAINT (put paint on a wall) and PAINT PICTURE (create a picture by painting)
may be preferred orders (Napoli et al. 2017).
Different types of visually motivated signs

While signed and spoken languages share many grammatical features, the visual-spatial modal-
ity provides structural possibilities less available to spoken languages.
Although not all signs are visually motivated (for example, WANT and SISTER in BSL),
most are derived from representations of the visual form of a referent, how it moves, or where
it is located; or from a representation of the visual form of something associated with the refer-
ent. Visual motivation in the lexicon is often lost through change over time. However, signers
also have the option to use non-conventionalized highly iconic structures with a deliberately
illustrative intent (Cuxac and Sallandre 2007).
The presence of visual motivation does not imply universality since the specific image
of the referent selected for linguistic encoding is arbitrary. For example, the BSL sign TEA2
reflects the action of ‘drinking from a teacup’ while the ASL sign reflects the act of ‘dipping
a teabag in a cup’.
The visual properties of sign languages also allow them to convey spatial relations
directly. The linguistic conventions used in such spatial mapping specify the position of
objects in a highly geometric and non-arbitrary fashion by situating certain sign forms (e.g.
classifiers) in space such that they maintain the topographic relations of the world-space
being described (Emmorey et al. 1995). Within these structures, the handshapes in verbs of
motion and location represent object features or classes (how objects are handled, their size
and shape, or their function). These have been termed ‘classifiers’ (Supalla 1986; Engberg-
Pedersen 1993), and although this term has been questioned (see Schembri 2003), it remains
widespread.
Both spoken and signed languages articulate lexical items sequentially. Spoken languages
can give some linguistic information simultaneously (as in, for example, tone languages), and
prosody adds further grammatical and affective information to the lexemes uttered. Essen-
tially, though, humans have only one vocal apparatus so spoken languages must use sequential
structures. The availability of two hands (and head and face) enables sign languages to use
simultaneously articulated structures (see Vermeerbergen et al. 2007). Two hands can be used
to represent the relative locations of two referents in space and their spatial and temporal
relationships. In representing, for example, a person reaching for a book while holding a pen,
English conjoins clauses using ‘while’ or ‘as’ to indicate two events happening simultaneously.
In sign languages ‘holding a pen’ can be signed with one hand, while ‘reaching for the book’
can be signed with the other. English uses prepositions such as ‘next to’ or ‘behind’ to represent
relative locations, whereas sign languages can simply place the two signs in the relative loca-
tions of the two referents.
205
Sign languages within a bilingual context
Case studies of non-Western deaf communities

Deafness is statistically uncommon, with about 1 in 1,000 children born deaf in the Global
North. The bulk of research on sign languages has been in countries where small numbers of
relatively well-educated deaf people socialize within local and national deaf communities and
share a common national sign language. However, there are also small isolated, often rural,
communities around the world where higher rates of genetic deafness create ‘deaf villages’
which develop their own sign languages. These include the people of Desa Kolok on the island
of Bali (De Vos 2016), villagers of Adamarobe in Ghana (Kusters 2015), and the Al-Sayyid
Bedouin in Israel (Kisch 2007, 2008). Quadros and Silva (2017) document 12 different local
sign languages used by isolated communities in Brazil. In these communities, most hearing
people have some knowledge of their local sign language, but only hearing people in families
with a high percentage of deaf members are fully fluent.
Deaf members of these communities may have higher status at a local level than is more
generally the case. These sign languages frequently come under threat because the introduc-
tion of specialist deaf education using the national sign language alters the linguistic and social
dynamics of these small communities.
Translanguaging
Encounters between signers and non-signers or between people who know different sign
languages result in a language outcome that has been termed translanguaging (Kusters 2020).
The concept of translanguaging and the ways in which deaf people communicate visually
with people from outside their own language community enable linguists to appreciate more
the range of linguistic and communicative options available within visually based interaction.
Translanguaging also occurs in international contexts, such as conferences and congresses
where deaf people who use many different sign languages communicate via International
Sign. This is not an identifiable language with its own vocabulary but a way of negotiating
understanding and expressing meaning through classifiers, constructed action, periphrasis,
or combining several signs to express a concept. Additionally, as ASL becomes increasingly
accepted as a lingua franca, some of its vocabulary has begun to be included in International
Sign. However, a characteristic of translanguaging is that it varies according to its users and
their needs, so the relative use of these different strategies varies, and for example, the Inter-
national Sign of European signers differs substantially from the International Sign of Asian
signers (Mesch 2010).
Bimodal bilingualism
With the development of research on sign languages, it has become clear that bilingualism can
be bimodal and unimodal. Unimodal bilingualism occurs when either two spoken or two sign
languages (e.g. Irish Sign Language and BSL) are used (Adam 2017); bimodal bilingualism
occurs when the two languages exist in different modalities: one signed and one spoken/writ-
ten. Recognition of bimodal bilingualism has led to a re-evaluation of models of bilingualism
generally (Emmorey et al. 2016).
Bimodal bilingualism differs from unimodal bilingualism with respect to the tempo-
ral sequencing of languages. Hearing people with deaf parents (in some countries, they are
206
Sign languages
referred to as CODAs – children of deaf adults) can acquire a sign language as a first lan-
guage. As adults, they have full access to at least two languages: a visual-manual one (signed
language) and an auditory-vocal one (spoken language). Emmorey et al. (2016) have explored
bimodal bilingualism in CODAs, showing code-blending in the production of words and signs
where these reflect a common conceptual source. Code-blending reflects the simultaneous use
of sign and word in a single utterance, which is not possible for unimodal bilinguals, who must
sequence linguistic elements in production.
Deaf bimodal bilinguals may not use voice but still produce code-blends and code-
mixes (some researchers prefer the term ‘cross-modal’ to indicate that bilingualism in, for
example, BSL and English can be represented in types of code-blends other than speech
accompanied by signing). Cross-modal bilingualism is the norm in those countries where
deaf children have access to education and are exposed to sign language. Mastery of both
the sign language of the deaf community and the written language of the hearing com-
munity is the goal of deaf bilingual education since the bedrock of formal education is
literacy.
Recording signs
Sign languages are essentially unwritten. Written forms of some sign languages are being
actively promoted using SignWriting (see www.signwriting.org), although other writing sys-
tems exist, and in Libras (Brazilian Sign Language) it is taught in some schools and universi-
ties. Increasingly, children’s literature in Libras is written directly in SignWriting, and there
are also examples of Libras poetry composed in SignWriting, where the visual representation
of signs is creatively combined with effective layout on the page. However, it will be many
years, if at all, before these written forms of sign language attain the status and function of
written forms of spoken language. Since written language is central to so much of applied
linguistics, it is worth considering the implications for teaching and learning, for change and
standardization, and for dictionary-making and issues of electronic storage of examples of
language use.
Sign languages are increasingly recorded, edited, and transmitted using digital video tech-
nology. The impact of this on sign language literature has been profound. Whereas previously,
performances of creative and artistic sign language were limited to live events, digital record-
ing has created a new space for sign language artists and their audiences to create literature.
Some videos of literary sign language posted on social network sites receive thousands of
views. These videos often make use of visual effects, either at the time of filming or in editing,
including changes in camera perspective and use of illustrations edited into the works. The
increased availability of online recorded material has made the creation of literary antholo-
gies in sign languages an option, supporting the development of literature in sign languages,
creating new genres, and providing resources for teaching sign languages as a first or second
language. There is also a Deaf Studies digital journal with articles published in ASL (www.
deafstudiesdigitaljournal.org).
Although both video and writing allow a permanent record of a text, freed from constraints
of time and space, recorded sign language has a different impact than writing. Wilcox (2003)
has observed that seeing the signer (whom many will recognize and whose personality will
be known) is not the same as an anonymous written record. This has great implications for
the creation of linguistic corpora and language surveys and for marking in examinations – there
can be no anonymous candidates in a sign language examination.
207
Dictionaries and standardization

Sign language dictionaries are usually created to collect and preserve the lexicon of the lan-
guage (such dictionaries have existed for several centuries; for example, Bulwer 1644; Pelissier
1856) or to allow others to learn the language. However, these ‘dictionaries’ are more accu-
rately ‘bilingual word lists’ using a written language and illustrations of signs. With improved
video technology online, there are many examples of open-access bilingual glossaries for gen-
eral and technical terminology, in which the term may be given in the written language and a
video of the equivalent term in the sign language (showing directly how it is pronounced) and
definitions and examples given in sign language, sometimes with illustrations (for example,
see www.ssc.education.ed.ac.uk/bsl/ and https://glossario.libras.ufsc.br/).
Recent advances in technology have allowed construction of sign language dictionaries based
on signed corpora. Even the largest sign dictionary databases are only of several hundred thou-
sand signs – minimal compared to most spoken language databases for corpus work – but they
are proving effective, and corpus-based sign language dictionaries (signbanks) are now avail-
able in many countries, such as Germany (Dictionary – DGS Korpus, uni-hamburg.de), Brazil
(https://signbank.libras.ufsc.br/pt/), and Britain (https://bslsignbank.ucl.ac.uk/). Corpora also
allow researchers to identify sign frequencies so that teaching materials can be better designed.
Concerns have been raised about the variable quality of many of the video sign lists. Dic-
tionaries of minority languages often provide ‘a clear and powerful symbolic function of rec-
ognition and empowerment of the language’ (Lucas 2002: 323), but they can also threaten the
language if the making of the dictionary is not carefully controlled (Armstrong 2003).
As an example, Van Herreweghe and Vermeerbergen (2004) describe some of the impact of
codification on Flemish Sign Language (VGT). Increased official recognition of VGT led to
increased demand for educational materials, dictionaries, and grammar books. Between 1980
and 1995 a committee of deaf people worked to standardize VGT across Flanders, creating
signs where there were apparent lexical gaps and choosing the most widely used variant to be
the standard form. Deaf adults rarely used the new codified form, but its lexicon influenced
interpreters. When deaf schools were replaced by the integration of deaf children in main-
stream schools, reducing their access to each other and especially to deaf children or teachers
from deaf families, non-native signer interpreters became language role models.
Dialect variation in many sign languages is common, and signers from different regions
often use different lexical items to refer to the same concept. BSL research in the late 1980s
showed that although there were regionally specific signs for many concepts, there was fre-
quently one lexical item that was recognized and used across all regions (Woll 1991), and the
process of levelling of variation has continued (Stamp et al. 2014). At the time of that study,
most deaf adults had been educated at schools for deaf children (either residential or day
schools), but most children are now educated in mainstream schools. The implications of this
change for BSL have been considerable, as children no longer have the same ready-made circle
of signing friends and their sign language role models are now often non-native signers. One
outcome of the various corpus projects conducted on sign languages around the world has been
the documentation of many of these earlier regional variants.
Learning sign language as L1

Since the vast majority of deaf children are born to hearing parents, their exposure to lan-
guage is very different from that of hearing children learning a spoken language. The typical
experience for deaf children is late and impoverished exposure to a first language: language
208
Sign languages
deprivation (Harris 2001; Hall 2017). If parents communicate only through spoken language,
the child may have greatly reduced access to the linguistic signal; where parents begin to learn
a sign language when deafness is diagnosed, they often have only limited sign language skills.
The 95% of deaf children born to hearing parents are therefore often contrasted with the minor-
ity of deaf and hearing children who grow up with deaf parents and usually have good sign
language models from birth.
There is general agreement that sign language acquisition parallels that of spoken language
(Newport and Meier 1985; Schick 2003; Mayberry and Squires 2006) when young children
(deaf or hearing) are exposed to sign language by their deaf parents.
There is some controversy about whether there is any positive effect of iconicity on early
sign language acquisition. On the one hand, children’s first signs are likely to be associated
with the same sets of semantic categories evident in children’s early speech, such as signs for
people, animals, and food (Anderson and Reilly 2002), irrespective of iconicity. On the other
hand, Novogrodsky and Meir (2020) have reported effects of iconicity on acquisition. There
is evidence for a changing role of iconicity during first language acquisition. Children who
acquire a sign language as their first language are unlikely to be aware of the visual motivation
behind a sign such as MILK (which in BSL represents the action of milking a cow by hand).
The recognition of iconicity depends on world knowledge, and there is evidence that children
may return to the language forms they have learned previously, reanalyze them, and identify
iconicity (Morgan 2005).
Sign language and education

The use of sign languages in education varies greatly around the world and even within coun-
tries. The enduring controversy in deaf education from the early 19th century onwards which
has polarized educators has been between monolingual (spoken/written language only) and
bilingual (sign language and spoken/written language). The dominant approach to communi-
cation for deaf children from the late 19th to late 20th century saw no role for sign language
in the education of deaf children, and the use of sign language in the classroom was actively
suppressed. Nevertheless, until the 1980s, deaf children were usually educated in deaf schools
and sign language was informally transmitted from child to child.
Since the 1980s, while a role for sign language has been more accepted in schools, at the
same time there have been strong moves towards mainstreaming deaf children. Placement in
mainstream education has produced some improvements in educational achievement but has
had serious social and linguistic consequences because of the loss of a natural signing commu-
nity providing opportunities for full acquisition of an L1. Some deaf children informally learn
sign language once they arrive at primary schools but are neither formally taught the language
nor exposed to it as a language of instruction. Their access to sign language may be via school
staff (teachers, classroom aides, and communication support workers) and other pupils, who
may vary greatly in their signing competence. Teachers who are themselves deaf provide the
best sign language role models to children in education, but their numbers vary greatly around
the world. In the United States, a survey of 3,227 professionals in deaf education programmes
reported that 22.0% of teachers and 14.5% of administrators were deaf; only 2.5% were deaf
persons of colour (Simms et al. 2008). In Brazil, schools are legally required to provide bilin-
gual education for deaf children if it is requested. However, this provision is rarely made in the
context of a bilingual school, and the child may be on her own in a mainstream setting with
interpreters in the classroom. Nevertheless, the legislation has led to training many more deaf
people to become teachers, both of Libras as an L1 and as an L2 (Quadros and Stumpf 2018).
209
Studies consistently show superior sign language skills in deaf children from deaf families
compared with deaf children from hearing families (Paul and Quigley 2000), as well as persis-
tent inadequacies in the language environment provided by education systems that report using
sign language (Ramsey 1997; Greenberg and Kusché 1987). Herman and Roy (2006) found
that many deaf children do not achieve age-appropriate levels of BSL, and the majority of deaf
children also do not achieve age-appropriate levels of spoken/written language.
Education in many countries has also had a profound effect on national sign languages his-
torically because educators of deaf children have taken on methods of teaching and approaches
to communication used in other countries. LSF (French Sign Language) has had the greatest
impact; its influence can be seen clearly in Irish Sign Language (ISL; Burns 1998), American
Sign Language (Lane 1984), Russian Sign Language (Mathur and Rathmann 1998), and Libras
(Diniz 2010), among many others. Other sign languages have also had influential roles. Brit-
ish Sign Language was exported to Australia and New Zealand; Portuguese signers use the
Swedish Sign Language manual alphabet because a Swedish educator helped to found a deaf
school in Portugal. ISL, originally heavily influenced by LSF, has also had its own consider-
able impact on sign languages around the world. Irish nuns and Christian brothers have taught
in Catholic schools for deaf children in countries including India, South Africa, and Australia,
and the influence of ISL is noticeable in the sign languages in these countries (Adam 2017).
ASL, itself, closely related to LSF, has an increasing impact on sign languages around the
world. Gallaudet University attracts foreign deaf students who take ASL back to their own
countries. The USA has been especially generous in providing teacher training in many third
world countries. Andrew Foster, a deaf African-American, led a movement for the establish-
ment of schools in African countries where ASL was introduced as the language of tuition
(Lane et al. 1996). In Nigeria, ASL, taught in schools, is mixing with the Indigenous sign
languages (Asonye et al. 2018; Schmaling 2003).
Learning sign languages as L2

There have been substantial changes in attitudes of the general public to sign language since
the 1980s, particularly in the representation of sign languages in the media, and there has been
an enormous increase in the number of hearing people learning sign language. There are now
significantly more hearing people with some knowledge of their national sign language than
members of the deaf community. Several European countries offer sign languages as L2 within
the general school population (France teaches LSF within the baccalaureate system; England is
introducing a GCSE in BSL). In many American universities, ASL is included as part of the mod-
ern language requirement for undergraduates (Quinto-Pozos 2011), and in Brazil, all students
of licentiate degrees (required for students who wish to teach in schools) are required to study
Libras for a minimum of 60 hours (Quadros and Stumpf 2018). The increased interest in learn-
ing a sign language has implications for teacher training and language resources. It also impacts
on the employment of deaf signers within universities and the level of their qualifications. Since
the introduction of the Brazilian law requiring bilingual education for deaf children, courses
have been introduced to train teachers and interpreters, and by 2018, there were 242 deaf people
employed as lecturers in Brazilian federal universities, with over 25 having PhDs (Reis 2015).
Interpreters
Until the 1970s, in many countries the ‘go-between’ of hearing and deaf people was usually
a hearing member of a deaf person’s family or a missioner – a church or voluntary worker
210
Sign languages
with the deaf. Deaf people used the missioner as an interpreter and also frequently as an ally,
adviser, and advocate. As connections between deaf communities and the church weakened, in
the UK, for example, this task was taken on by social workers for the deaf (Brennan and Brown
1997). (The BSL sign SOCIAL-WORKER is derived from the old sign CHURCH-MINISTER
because of their similar role in deaf life.) Social workers for the deaf and missioners for the deaf
often came from deaf families and lived and socialized with members of the deaf community.
Professional BSL/English interpreting began in the early 1980s, as a step towards empow-
erment of deaf people. These interpreters have undergone formal linguistic and interpreting
training and do not advise but only relay information between the two languages, comparable
to spoken language interpreters.
Restricted access to interpreters in many countries is also a serious problem since inter-
preters enable access to communication with the hearing world. Napier et al. (2019) address
the implications for deaf people of the experience of mediated communication through inter-
preting. Laws requiring sign language provision in public settings (such as on television or
for health and legal settings) do not take into account the shortage of qualified, experienced
interpreters.
Problems have also arisen from the way that interpreters are trained. With interpreter train-
ing moving from the community into university settings, many members of the deaf commu-
nity feel that interpreters (now often from hearing families) no longer have in-depth knowledge
of the deaf communities with whom they work. Subtle language nuances, contextual informa-
tion, complex social relationships, and specific language skills of a deaf client are only learned
through long-term, committed relationships with a community, such as missioners and social
workers had. Interpreters are now beginning to recognize the need to adapt other models of
interpreting to the specific needs of the deaf community today, with calls for a more flexible
approach, incorporating ideas from both the ‘traditional’ and the ‘professional’ approaches, and
including recognition of the need for ethnic diversity.
Deaf interpreters and translators are increasingly recognized as professionals, although deaf
people have long acted as language brokers for other deaf people (Adam et al. 2011). Today,
deaf translators and interpreters act as ‘relay’ interpreters as an interface between the inter-
preter and the deaf client in situations where a deaf person (for example, in court) may not
understand the signing of a hearing interpreter, who in turn may not understand the deaf person.
(Brennan and Brown 1997). Increasingly, deaf interpreters also work in the media, providing
sign language translations of pre-recorded programmes or pre-prepared live programmes. They
also work between sign languages in international settings – for example, between ASL and
another national sign language (because ASL is increasingly considered a lingua franca) or
between a national sign language and International Sign.
Conclusions
The last 40 years have seen substantial social and technological change for the deaf com-
munity that has impacted on sign language. In Britain, for example, there was no BSL on
television until after 1980. Forty years later, there are several hours of sign language broadcast
daily (mostly in the form of sign language interpretation of mainstream programming) and an
ever-increasing amount of signed video available on the Internet, including on sites such as
YouTube. This greater national (and international) media exposure has impacted on dialect
variation and on access of signers to foreign sign languages.
Where next in the study of deaf people and signed languages? One pressing need is a review
and re-examination of the experiences and achievements of deaf children and adults. Changes
211
in technology and new research into language development and the learning of literacy and
numeracy skills need to feed into such a policy review.
The history of sign languages, like that of many minority languages, cannot be separated
from a study of their relationship with the majority language communities which surround
them. In the 21st century, there are two contrasting futures: on the one hand, there are pressures,
such as the decrease in opportunities for deaf children to use sign language with their peers as a
result of the shift to mainstream education, and the possible decrease in the deaf population as
a result of medical intervention and advances in genetics; on the other hand, increased interest
and demand from the hearing community for courses in sign language, increased use of sign
language in public contexts such as television, legislation in many countries recognizing the
national sign language, and increased pride of the deaf community in their distinctive language
and culture. It is to be hoped and expected that sign languages will continue to thrive.
Related topics
bilingual education; identity; language and culture; language emergence; L1 and L2 acqui-
sition; language policy and planning; lexicography; linguistic imperialism; multilingualism;
sociolinguistics
Note
1 Video clips are available for underlined examples of signs at https://bslsignbank.ucl.ac.uk. Subscripts
(e.g. NAME2) indicate which clip in Signbank is being referred to.
Further reading
Bauman, H.-D., Nelson, J. L. and Rose, H. M. (2006) Signing the Body Poetic: Essays on American Sign
Language Literature, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. (This provides a helpful introduc-
tion to linguistic, cultural and literary aspects of artistic sign language.)
Erting, C. J., Johnson, R. E., Smith, D. L. and Snider, B. D. (eds.) (1994) The Deaf Way: Perspectives from
the International Conference on Deaf Culture, 1989, Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press.
(This is a comprehensive collection of papers on sign languages and deaf culture, drawing on a wide
selection of sign languages around the world.)
Nicodemus, B. and Cagle, K. (eds.) (2015) Signed Language Interpretation and Translation Research,
Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. (This collection provides an overview of research on
sign language translation and interpreting, including its practice, training, and techniques.)
Pfau, R., Steinbach, M. and Woll, B. (eds.) (2012) Sign Language: An International Handbook (HSK –
Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science 37), Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. (This
handbook provides a comprehensive overview of sign linguistic research worldwide.)
Rosen, R. S. (ed.) (2020) Routledge Handbook of Sign Language Pedagogy, Abingdon: Routledge. (This
handbook documents research and practice in the teaching of sign languages as first and second lan-
guages.)
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Stamp, R., Schembri, A., Fenlon, J., Rentelis, R., Woll, B. and Cormier, K. (2014) ‘Lexical variation and
change in British Sign Language’, PLoS One, 9(4): e94053.
Stokoe, W. C. (1960) Sign Language Structure: The First Linguistic Analysis of American Sign Language,
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and Categorization (Typological Studies in Language 7), Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Taub, S. (2001) Language from the Body: Iconicity and Metaphor in American Sign Language, Cam-
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17
Lexicography
Thierry Fontenelle
Introduction
Lexicography is an area of applied linguistics that focuses on the compilation of dictionaries
(practical lexicography) and on the description of the various types of relations found in the
lexicon (theoretical lexicography). It is neither a new science nor a new craft. Historians gen-
erally agree that the first dictionaries can be traced back to the explanations of difficult words
inserted into Latin manuscripts in the Middle Ages. These glosses evolved into glossaries,
which were sorted alphabetically or thematically and came to fulfil a vital function in teaching
and the transmission of knowledge (Cowie 2009: 2). The use of Latin words to explain more
difficult Latin ones foreshadowed monolingual dictionaries, with their headwords and defini-
tions, while explanations of hard Latin words in Old English or Old French can be seen as a
precursor of modern bilingual dictionaries.
Dictionaries are primarily compiled to meet practical needs. They are also cultural arte-
facts which convey a vision of a community’s language. The tension between prescriptive and
descriptive approaches has often made lexicographers uncomfortable since many users per-
ceive dictionaries as ‘authoritative records of how people ought to use language’ (Atkins and
Rundell 2008: 2). Modern lexicography is more concerned with a descriptive approach where
the lexicographer compiles a description of the vocabulary of a given speech community.
Robert Cawdrey’s A Table Alphabetical (1604) is usually considered as the first printed
monolingual English dictionary. However, the history of lexicography remembers Samuel
Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755) as the first modern and innovative dic-
tionary of English. Johnson’s Dictionary reflected the need for a prescriptive and normative
authority which would serve to establish a standard of correctness. In his ‘Plan of a Dictionary
of the English Language’, addressed to Lord Chesterfield in 1747, Johnson discussed all the
crucial issues which lexicographers are faced with, even today, when starting a dictionary proj-
ect, ranging from inflectional and derivational morphology to pronunciation and etymology.
The representation of syntactic information (Johnson did not use the modern term ‘subcatego-
rization’) attracted his attention when he pointed out that one ‘dies of one’s wounds while one
may perish with hunger’. He stressed that ‘every man acquainted with our language would
be offended with a change of these particles’. Johnson’s preoccupations are still at the heart of
216 DOI: 10.4324/9781003082637-20

Lexicography
the creation of current dictionaries, especially learners’ dictionaries. He was a radical thinker
who was well ahead of his time and who managed to shed light on the nature of language and
meaning, long before philosophers like Wittgenstein started addressing the crucial issue of
word meaning. He asked many important questions which are still hotly debated in contem-
porary lexicography circles. He was aware of the need to establish clear criteria for selecting
words to be included in dictionaries, or for distinguishing between general language and spe-
cialized terminology. The term ‘corpus lexicographer’ did not exist in 1755, but because he
was the first to base his dictionary on authentic examples of usage, collected from the works
of English authors, he was definitely a precursor of corpus lexicography.
A monument of English lexicography is undoubtedly Murray’s Oxford English Dictionary
(OED), whose final section was published in 1928. The original aim of the project, which
started in 1879, was to produce a four-volume dictionary which would record the history of the
English language from Anglo-Saxon times, using nearly two million citation forms to track the
genesis and evolution of lexical items. Several supplements were published in the 20th century
(the first supplement appeared in 1933) and, today, the OED includes around 300,000 entries
defining over half a million lexical items (Murray et al. 1933). The electronic version, which
corresponds to the 20-volume integrated work, offers powerful search-and-browse function-
alities which provide scholars with exciting vistas to research the history and evolution of the
English language.
Historical dictionaries have been compiled for several other languages, such as for French,
the prime example being the Trésor de la Langue Française, whose 16 volumes are based on
a huge corpus of millions of authentic citations from literary texts. It took nearly 150 years to
compile the Dutch Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal (WNT), which, with its 40 volumes
and 400,000 headwords, aims to provide an objective linguistic description of the vocabulary
stock of that language. All these major historical dictionaries cover general-language words,
but also dialectal, jargon and slang terms, as well as offensive and swear words, which are more
likely to be left out from general-purpose dictionaries.
The advent of learners’ dictionaries
The vocabulary control movement

The most noticeable impact of lexicography on applied linguistics is probably related to the
advent of learners’ dictionaries, which has heavily influenced Anglo-Saxon lexicography. One
of the chief weaknesses of native-speaker dictionaries is that the words used in definitions
are often difficult to understand for non-native speakers, which means that these dictionar-
ies do not meet the specific needs of second language learners. The history of monolingual
learners’ dictionaries can be traced back to the contributions of a number of key figures such
as A. S. Hornby, Michael West, and H. E. Palmer, who created the so-called vocabulary con-
trol movement and can justifiably be seen as the founding fathers of applied linguistics (see
also Cowie 2009 for more information about this major development). The leading figure of
this movement, Harold Palmer, was interested in identifying the set of words which speakers
use most frequently to communicate. After realizing that a high level of natural communica-
tion could be achieved by using a vocabulary of around 1,000 words, he worked with A. S.
Hornby to produce Thousand-Word English (Palmer and Hornby 1937), a word list of initially
900 words which was intended to lighten the learning load of foreign students. Michael West
took the vocabulary control idea further by developing a limited vocabulary of about 1,500
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Thierry Fontenelle
words which he used to write the definitions of his New Method English Dictionary (West
and Endicott 1935). West’s subsequent General Service List (1953), which includes frequency
ratings for words in their particular senses as well as collocations and idioms, also definitely
influenced the next generation of learners’ dictionaries. The first edition of the Longman Dic-
tionary of Contemporary English, or LDOCE (Procter 1978), followed this tradition by using
a controlled vocabulary of about 2,000 words to write the definitions, while, more recently,
the Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners, or MEDAL (Rundell 2007), uses a
limited defining vocabulary of about 2,500 words. In LDOCE, the words which do not belong
to this set are printed in small capitals. Consider the definition of mink, where weasel and car-
nivorous are not part of the controlled vocabulary of this dictionary:
mink n 1 [Wn1;C] a type of small weasel-like animal – see picture at carnivorous 2 [U]
the valuable brown fur of this animal, often used for making ladies’ coats
The vocabulary control movement therefore influenced the macrostructure of the dictionary.
The list of words that are granted entry status is indeed significantly smaller than a native-
speaker dictionary’s macrostructure and rare and highly technical words are not likely to be
included in learners’ dictionaries.
The second edition of the MEDAL (Rundell 2007) highlights the top 7,500 words which
account for about 92% of most texts. This distinction between high-frequency core vocabu-
lary and less common lexical items reflects the distinction between receptive and produc-
tive vocabulary. In this dictionary, the core headwords are shown in red and are banded by
frequency into three equal sets of 2,500 words each. This system is based upon research into
vocabulary size, which has shown that learners need to be familiar with a fairly large number
of lexical items to perform successfully at advanced level (see also Barcroft and Sunderman,
on lexis, in this volume, for more details about vocabulary learning). Headwords that are
part of the core vocabulary will therefore receive more extensive treatment and will provide
users with more information in the form of additional examples, in-depth information about
collocational and subcategorization preferences, frequent mistakes typically made by learn-
ers, and so on.
The way definitions are written is also different from what can be found in dictionaries for
native speakers. The use of a strictly controlled vocabulary facilitates the decoding task (under-
standing what a word means) and forces the lexicographer to resort to specific defining patterns
or formulae (see Kamiński 2021). The following examples, excerpted from LDOCE, illustrate
patterns such as ‘a person who’ to define nouns denoting professions, or ‘(cause to)’ and ‘make
or become’, used to indicate that a verb participates in the so-called causative-inchoative alter-
nation, which is typical of change-of-state verbs like open, break, boil, or increase:
florist n a person who keeps a shop for selling flowers

herbalist n 1 a person who grows and/or sells herbs, esp. for making medicine
shorten v [T1; I0] to make or become short or shorter
develop [T1; I0] to (cause to) grow, increase or become larger or more complete
Combining dictionaries and grammars

The examples in the preceding section illustrate the use of a feature which distinguishes learn-
ers’ dictionaries from their unabridged counterparts for native speakers – namely, a system
of grammar codes designed to represent the types of syntactic environment in which a given
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Lexicography
lexical item can be inserted. The first learners’ dictionaries owed much to Harold Palmer’s
pioneering work in the field of verb syntax. Palmer had experimented with various systems
for accounting for verbal valency (i.e. the nature and number of complements a verb can take)
before publishing his Grammar of English Words (Palmer 1938), which was the first learners’
dictionary to contain a verb-pattern scheme. In this dictionary, each verb pattern was identi-
fied by means of a number code, and one or more codes were included in verb entries. Palmer
heavily influenced A. S. Hornby in the 1930s and the latter took over this idea of using verb-
pattern schemes in his Idiomatic and Syntactic English Dictionary (Hornby 1942), which, in
1952, would become known as the Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English. Hornby
improved on Palmer’s presentation of verb patterns and started to arrange the patterns and
illustrative examples in a series of tables where vertical divisions are made to correspond to the
major structural elements of a pattern, such as noun phrases corresponding to the object in verb
pattern 9 (VP9) corresponding to ‘verb + object + past participle’. In 1974, Hornby adopted the
verb-complementation scheme of Quirk et al.’s Grammar of Contemporary English, grouping
together verb patterns that had the same major function (e.g. the class of ditransitive verbs cor-
responded to verb patterns 11 to 21 [VP11 to VP21]).
In addition to information on pronunciation, syllable division, compounds, and irregular
inflections, the first edition of LDOCE in 1978 proposed a systematic organization of gram-
matical categories and codes. The double articulation of the LDOCE table of grammar codes
made it possible to represent the syntactic function of a given constituent class. The codes were
made up of a capital letter, corresponding to word classes or parts of speech, followed by a
number representing the type of environment in which a code-bearing item can be found. In
these examples, the letter T in the code T1 (in shorten) corresponds to a transitive verb and the
number 1 indicates that this verb can be followed by one or more noun phrases. The letter I in
I0 indicates that the verb can be used intransitively, 0 meaning that it need not be followed by
anything. Other letters are used for ditransitive verbs (D), linking verbs (L), uncountable nouns
(U), count nouns (C), and so on.
Combining the letter and number information gives a very sound and systematic indication
of the syntactic environment in which a word is used in a given sense. This double articulation
was at the time an innovative feature. The similarity between the realizations of syntactic pat-
terns described by codes like T5, D5 or U5 is reflected in the makeup of the codes themselves
(the code-bearing lexical item is italicized in the following examples):
[D5]: ditransitive verb with noun phrase followed by a that-clause: He warned her that
he would come.
[T5]: monotransitive verb with one that-clause object: I know that he’ll come.
[U5]: uncountable noun followed by a that-clause: Is there proof that he is here?
The three codes describe a pattern that includes a common element (a that-clause), a similarity
which they reflect in their internal organization, since the three codes have [5] as second ele-
ment. In 1978, this was a highly innovative approach since the only major rival at the time―
Hornby’s Oxford Advanced Learners’ Dictionary (1974)―relied upon unanalyzed codes such
as VP9 (S + V + that) or VP11 (S + V + NP + that), which did not enable the user to figure out
that the patterns included this common element.
As can be seen here, the system of grammar codes found in learner’s dictionaries is designed
to meet the encoding needs of users, especially non-native speakers of English, who need
explicit guidance to produce grammatically and stylistically correct documents. This points to
the dual function of dictionaries, which can be used for receptive use (to decode or understand
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Thierry Fontenelle
a text), or for productive use (to encode a text). The Longman system was found to be too
complex for users, however, and was subsequently abandoned.
Lumping versus splitting

One of the key questions in lexicography is the issue of word senses and polysemy. Diction-
aries are frequently called upon to resolve disputes about meaning (Kilgarriff 1997). They
must draw a clear line around a meaning so that a use can be classified as on one side of the
line or the other. Lexicographers are therefore under pressure to present sets of discrete, non-
overlapping meanings for a word. Yet when one examines corpus data and actual evidence
of usage based upon collections of millions of words of authentic texts, one quickly realizes
that these discrete, non-overlapping sets of senses are frequently a myth. Two key concepts to
understand the dilemmas lexicographers regularly face are lumping (considering two slightly
different patterns of usage as a single meaning) and splitting (which happens when the lexi-
cographer separates slightly different patterns of usage into distinct meanings). Consider the
following LDOCE definition for the verb shorten, which illustrates the lumping strategy: one
single definition captures two distinct types of subcategorization possibilities, an intransitive
use and a transitive one:
shorten v to make or become short or shorter
The same lexical-semantic property is accounted for via the splitting strategy in the same dic-
tionary for other verbs, like addle:
addle v 1 [T1; I0] a: to cause (an egg) to go bad

b: (of an egg) to go bad
The advantage of splitting the different syntactic patterns is clear: addle indeed has a spe-
cific collocational preference for the noun egg used as a patient argument (the entity that
changes state). The verb shorten does not exhibit specific collocational preferences, which
makes it possible to lump all the relevant information into one single definition, the con-
junction or in make or become indicating that the verb participates in two distinct syntactic
constructions.
The question whether word senses exist at all is an important one. Dictionaries are based
on a huge oversimplification which posits that words have enumerable, listable meanings,
which are divisible into discrete units. Yet corpus linguistics and the systematic analysis
of authentic evidence have shown that the concepts of polysemy and word senses are a lot
more mysterious than we think. Some linguists prefer to talk about meaning potentials,
which are ‘potential contributions to the meanings of texts and conversations in which the
word is used and activated by the speaker who uses them’ (Hanks 2000). In this sense, dic-
tionaries only contain lists of meaning potentials, while electronic corpora contain traces of
meaning events. Word sense disambiguation therefore boils down to trying to map the one
onto the other, and it is crucial for lexicographers to devise systems to discover the con-
textual triggers that activate the components making up a word’s meaning potential. Work
on corpus pattern analysis, or CPA (Hanks and Pustejovsky 2005), to build up an inventory
of syntagmatic behaviour that is useful for automatic sense disambiguation, seems to be a
promising attempt to contribute to the development of such systems (see also Hanks 2013
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Lexicography
about his theory of norms and exploitations, which led to the creation of a pattern diction-
ary of English verbs).
For practical purposes, lexicographers do divide polysemous words into numbered senses.
Samuel Johnson was aware of this problem when he wrote that ‘the shades of meaning . . .
pass imperceptibly into each other; so that it is impossible to mark the point of contact’ (1755).
However, frequently meanings blur into each other, the lexicographer needs to sort them out
and present them to the dictionary user in such a way that the information can be used to decode
a text and to produce grammatically correct and natural sentences. The next section discusses
the techniques used by today’s lexicographers to address this issue (see also Lin and Adolphs,
on corpus linguistics, in Volume 1).
Lexicography and corpus linguistics

The recent generation of learners’ dictionaries owes a lot to the late John Sinclair’s work on
corpora at the University of Birmingham in the 1970s and 1980s. His research led to the pub-
lication of the COBUILD (Collins Birmingham University International Language Database)
series of monolingual dictionaries. The first edition of COBUILD (Sinclair 1987) truly revolu-
tionized the field of dictionary-making. Today, all dictionaries claim to be ‘corpus-based’ and to
provide a description of the English vocabulary based upon ‘natural’ or ‘real’ data. Yet it might
be objected that even the previous generation of dictionaries resorted to ‘real’ data. The main dif-
ference is that lexicographers of the pre-corpus era used to record their findings on slips of paper
that they conscientiously kept in shoeboxes. They were primarily concerned with rare phenom-
ena and weird contexts and combinations which had attracted their attention. Such shoeboxes
were excellent repositories of idiosyncratic descriptions which would be better found in histori-
cal dictionaries than in monolingual learners’ dictionaries, whose task is primarily to capture the
most frequent patterns of usage. Unfortunately, they frequently failed to record the prototypical
uses of a word, and usually included citations from well-respected literary texts only.
Another difference is that pre-corpus lexicographers had to rely on their own reading pro-
gram and their encyclopaedic skills. The advent of computers has now made dozens of millions
of words available to them. The sorting functionalities provided by modern concordancers
enable lexicographers to examine the right and left contexts of a given word with thousands of
KWIC (keyword in context) lines, which have become the primary material they use. KWIC
lines are exploited to identify the typical preposition used with a given adjective or verb; they
reveal collocational preferences (preferred contexts) or show that a given word is used only,
say, in non-assertive contexts (consider budge, which is used exclusively in negative contexts
like The door wouldn’t budge). Some linguists talk about colligational preferences, colligations
being seen as a midway relation between grammar and collocation (Hoey 2005: 43). Colliga-
tion will, for example, include, in a verb, a marked preference for one particular form or use
(e.g. passive or progressive form), or, in a noun, a marked preference for either the singular or
plural form. Similarly, the marked preference for attributive position after a noun in the adjec-
tive galore (there will be food galore at the party) will be described as a colligational prefer-
ence that should be mentioned in a dictionary entry.
The following example illustrates the concept of KWIC line, in which a given word (the
node) is centred in the middle of the table. A number of words to the right and left of the node
are displayed. Most concordancers or corpus tools make it possible to sort such data on, say, the
first word to the right or the first word to the left, which is a very effective means of discovering
regular patterns in which the word can be found.
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Thierry Fontenelle
ordainements. 4. cysticercosis in <bovines,> swine, sheep and goats when no

nged to grey in the case of <bovine> meat or to ash grey in the case o
evel of concern surrounding <bovine> spongiform encephalopathy (bse) a
disease was transmitted to <bovines> through animal protein rations (
a prohibition on the use in <bovine> rations of meat meal and bonemeal
ransmitted via ingestion in <bovine> rations of meat meal and bonemeal
is aspect. 2) the brains of <bovines> which when alive have presented
inutes of the conference on <bovine> spongiform encephalopathy held at
om in view of the spread of <bovine> spongiform encephalopathy in that
ncrease in the incidence of <bovine> spongiform encephalopathy in the
ou our information pamphlet <‘bovine> spongiform encephalopathy (bse)’
rmality which affects adult <bovines> and culminates in death. it is c
As can be seen in the table, a word like bovine can readily be described as a noun (which can
be pluralized – bovines) or as an adjective. Sorting the data on the first item to the right reveals
that bovine is frequently found in multi-word entries like bovine spongiform encephalopathy
(BSE) or in collocations like bovine rations.
Today, with the entire web at the lexicographers’ fingertips, one of the major problems
which they face is no longer the scarcity of the data. Rather, the analysts are confronted
with a wealth of data which, after a given threshold, can no longer be analyzed manually. A
hundred KWIC lines are manageable. Five thousand lines cannot be read and ‘digested’ by
any human being working under the time constraints imposed by publication deadlines. Yet
with corpora of hundreds of millions of words, most queries are likely to generate several
thousand lines. Computational linguists have therefore collaborated with lexicographers to
propose a number of statistical methods to help the latter separate the wheat from the chaff
and identify central and typical usages. One such method relies on the concept of mutual
information (MI), which is used to identify relations between words which occur more often
than chance (Church and Hanks 1990; Church et al. 1994). MI values may be used in decid-
ing whether a sequence of two words, such as ‘requested and’, is more or less interesting
than the sequence ‘requested anonymity’. Lexicographers intuitively feel that the former
sequence is linguistically (and lexicographically) uninteresting, while the latter combination
probably deserves more attention and is a suitable candidate for inclusion in a dictionary
(whether as an example of what one can typically request or as an example of which verb
typically combines with anonymity). Intuition is not reliable, however, and cannot be read-
ily tapped to discover that one typically requests anonymity, permission (to do something),
political asylum, copies (of a document), or documents themselves. The very first applica-
tions in printed dictionaries can be found in the COBUILD dictionary (Sinclair 1987). Varia-
tions of MI scores were then adapted and refined, for instance, by taking into account the
relative frequencies of the words, because the original MI statistics unfortunately gave too
much weight to low-frequency words. More recently, lexicographers have partnered with
computational linguists who have developed techniques to ‘summarize’ the data extracted
from corpora. The MEDAL team (Rundell 2007) used the Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al.
2004), which produces word sketches, which can be seen as distinct collocate lists for sub-
jects, direct objects, adjectives, noun of noun phrases, and so on, extracted from a lemma-
tized and parsed corpus.
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Lexicography
Word sketches provide an interesting synthesis of the grammatical and collocational envi-
ronment in which lexical items can be inserted (Kilgarriff 2006). The most salient and relevant
collocations are displayed, exploiting MI and frequency statistics. The subject-of or object-of
relations allow lexicographers to quickly identify typical predicates (bank is frequently found
as the object of the verbs burst, rob, or privatize). Words are automatically grouped as a func-
tion of the relation which links them to the node item, which facilitates the lexicographer’s
task of selecting examples and summarizing this into a dictionary entry. Of course, the ultimate
analysis still requires lexicographical and linguistic interpretive skills since nothing in the lists
of collocates of bank generated by the Sketch Engine indicates that the verbs burst or overflow
are linked to the ‘river bank’ sense while the object of the verbs rob or privatize is the ‘financial
institution’ sense of bank.
The main advantages of such a tool are that it is nearly impossible to miss common and
typical patterns and that the lexicographer has access to a treasure trove of pre-digested mate-
rial to choose from. In MEDAL, such collaboration between lexicographers and computational
linguists has resulted in the creation of ‘collocation boxes’ which list common collocates of
frequent words, as in the following entry:
campaign 1 n
Collocations
Verbs frequently used with campaign as the object:
conduct, fght, launch, lead, mount, spearhead, wage
Now that the Macmillan Dictionary is only available online, space constraints are no longer an
issue and more comprehensive lists of collocations can be provided than in print dictionaries.
The Sketch Engine developers also created tools that help lexicographers identify good
examples and relevant lexical items whose collocates are worth including in a dictionary. The
GDEX tool (Kilgarriff et al. 2008) was one of the first tools used in lexicography, as well as
in language learning and teaching, to identify and extract good dictionary examples. It was
adapted to a variety of languages (see Kosem et al. 2019).
The systematic inclusion of information about collocational preferences in dictionary
entries testifies to the revival undergone by the study of multi-word units over the last 30
years. Much of this contemporary research into the distribution of phraseological units is based
upon Sinclair’s idiom principle, which states that language users have available to them a large
number of semi-preconstructed phrases that constitute single choices, even though they might
appear to be analyzable into segments (Sinclair 1991: 110). The idiom principle is generally
opposed to the open-choice principle, which states that a large number of choices opens up and
the only restraint is grammaticalness (see also Corpas Pastor and Colson 2020 for a compila-
tion of papers in the field of computational phraseology).
Learners’ dictionaries now also increasingly benefit from the analysis of learner language
and learner corpora. Most of these dictionaries now include specific sections that address
writing issues, using typologies of frequent mistakes compiled on the basis of large learner
corpora such as the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE; Granger et al. 2002) or
the Cambridge Learner Corpus. The second edition of MEDAL (Rundell 2007) is a case in
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Thierry Fontenelle
point, with its dozens of ‘Get it Right’ boxes, which, at the level of individual entries, identify
common errors, give examples from learner corpora, and suggest the correct forms, as in the
following:
Contribute
Get it Right!
Don’t use a verb in the infnitive after contribute. Use the pattern contribute to doing
something:
 Technology has contributed to improve our lives.

 Technology has contributed to improving our lives.
 A positive aspect of education is that it contributes to confrm one’s identity.
 A positive aspect of education is that it contributes to confrming one’s identity.
You can also use the pattern contribute to something:
Technology has contributed to improvements in our lives.
The role of examples

One of the key questions in lexicography is what constitutes a good example to illustrate the
meaning of a word and its lexical properties. Earlier dictionaries such as the OED or Johnson’s
Dictionary, as we saw earlier, mainly tapped literary texts and the best authors as sources of
citations. The advent of computerized corpora like the HarperCollins Bank of English in the
1980s and 1990s and, more recently, the use of the web as a corpus (Kilgarriff and Grefenstette
2003) have put hundreds of billions of words of texts at the linguist’s disposal for language
research, for the compilation of dictionaries, as well as for the development of natural language
processing systems. The availability of examples does not mean that the lexicographer’s task
is made a lot easier, however. Thirty years ago, the controversy about the relative merits of
authentic and invented examples was raging. The effectiveness of examples was discussed at
length by applied linguists, who were trying to figure out whether the examples to be included
in dictionaries should be excerpted from a corpus or invented by the lexicographer. Laufer
(1992) showed that examples made up by lexicographers are sometimes pedagogically more
beneficial for language learners than authentic ones. There is clearly a difference between
interesting examples and authentic examples, and it is essential that the user of the diction-
ary not be distracted with unintelligible examples. The key to the effectiveness of diction-
ary examples is for the compiler to select real, natural, typical, informative, and intelligible
sentences illustrating common usage and to resist the temptation to focus on abnormal and
idiosyncratic usages. A lexicographer who would record untypical and abnormal usages in a
dictionary would not do learners any favours. Atkins and Rundell (2008: 458–461) provide a
series of clearly bad, uninformative, and abnormal examples published in some contemporary
dictionaries, a case in point being the idiom ‘bring up the rear’, illustrated by a totally uninfor-
mative although authentic example (John brought up the rear). The most efficient examples are
probably those that are based upon corpus data and that have been carefully edited to remove
the irrelevant portions that distract the user. Kosem et al. (2019) illustrate the use that is made
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Lexicography
of the GDEX tool to automatically identify good example candidates in corpora. As they point
out, however, experience shows that it is easier to recognize bad examples than to define the
characteristics of very good examples.
Definitions
Lexicographers are often judged by their ability to write definitions for dictionaries. Definitions
are an essential component of monolingual dictionaries since users tend to turn to dictionaries
mainly to look up words in order to find out about their meanings. In most cases, dictionaries
adopt the classical Aristotelian model of definitions based upon the distinction between genus
(a superordinate word which locates the item being defined in the right semantic category) and
differentiae (additional information which indicates what makes this item unique and how it
differs from its cohyponyms, i.e. the other members of the same category). The difficulty is
to choose a genus term that is neither too general nor too specific. In many cases, dictionaries
tend to define by synonym and antonym. So, if, to quote Atkins and Rundell (2008: 414), the
noun convertible is defined as ‘car with a folding or detachable roof’, ‘car’ is the genus term
and the differentia is the expression ‘with a folding or detachable roof’, which distinguishes a
convertible from its cohyponyms saloon, estate car, or people carrier.
Another strategy, introduced by the COBUILD lexicographers (Sinclair 1987), is to write
longer definitions in which the definiendum (the word that is defined) is incorporated into the
definition, which then takes the form of a full sentence. Consider the definition for the verb
capsize in COBUILD:
capsize
When you capsize a boat or when it capsizes, it turns upside down in the water.
Criticizing the overuse of parentheses to indicate likely objects and subjects, Hanks (1987)
argues that the traditional conventions used in most modern dictionaries make definitions dif-
ficult reading for ordinary readers. COBUILD’s full-sentence definitions (FSDs) were con-
sidered a real revolution at the time, with a first part placing the word being explained in a
typical structure (‘A brick is . . .’; ‘Calligraphy is . . .’; – Hanks 1987: 117) and the second part
identifying the meaning. In his discussion of the pros and cons of the traditional definitions,
which are supposed to be substitutable in any context for the definiendum, Hanks stresses the
importance of collocational and syntactic information and argues that full-sentence definitions
make it possible to suggest much more easily whether collocates are obligatory, common but
variable, or simply open. Selection preferences are easier to integrate into such definitions,
Hanks claims, giving the example of an ‘ergative’ (causative-inchoative) verb like fuse, as in
the following COBUILD definition:
2 When a light or some other piece of electrical apparatus fuses or when you fuse it, it stops
working because of a fault, especially because too much electricity is being used.
The revolution created by the introduction of full-sentence definitions attracted a lot of atten-
tion and certainly influenced other learners’ dictionaries. However, COBUILD’s relatively
dogmatic approach also attracted some criticism and has not been adopted universally. Rundell
(2006) acknowledges that the FSD model works better than alternative models in a number
of cases (for instance, if a verb is nearly always used in the passive form, like lay up, a full
225
Thierry Fontenelle
sentence definition is clearly better – ‘If someone is laid up with an illness, the illness makes
it necessary for them to stay in bed’). The disadvantages of the FSD model cannot be ignored,
however: the coverage of an FSD-based dictionary is reduced because these definitions are
on average much longer than traditional definitions. The complexity of these longer defini-
tions is also the source of a number of problems and can be challenging for learners. Pronoun
references in if-definitions can be unclear, for instance, and the redundancy found in some
long-winded structures is not always informative (‘You use X to describe something that . . .’).
Rundell recommends using hybrid approaches and recognizes that FSDs work in some cases
but that, in many other cases, simplicity and economy are more adequate.
Bilingual dictionaries
A chapter on lexicography would not be complete without a section on bilingual dictionar-
ies, given their importance in foreign language learning. Bilingual lexicography has also
undergone significant changes over the last 30 years, thanks to the availability of multilin-
gual corpora and to advances in the field of natural language processing, which allow lexi-
cographers to identify the collocational patterns that help users match equivalents across
languages.
Four major functions are generally assigned to bilingual dictionaries, depending on whether
the user is using the dictionary to understand or translate a text written in the foreign language
(L2) or in the first language (L1):
Reception in L2
Reception in L2 + production in L1
Production in L2
Reception in L1 + production in L2
Most of the burning questions discussed in the context of monolingual lexicography also
apply to bilingual dictionaries. Should the lexicographer favour lumping or splitting strate-
gies, for instance? Other questions are more specific: should sense divisions be based upon
the source language or the target language? Many bilingual dictionaries indeed divide the
semantic space of source items as a function of the target language. A word which is consid-
ered as monosemic in a monolingual dictionary may therefore be regarded as polysemic in
a bilingual dictionary because the target language makes distinctions which are non-existent
in the source language. Consider the definition for croak in CIDE (Procter 1995), which
covers the general SOUND meaning (grammar codes appear between square brackets; e.g.
[I] = intransitive use):
croak [SOUND] v (of animals) to make deep rough sounds such as a FROG or CROW
makes, or (of people) to speak with a rough voice because of a sore or dry throat. I
could hear frogs croaking by the lake. [I] “Water, water”, he croaked. [+ clause]
In comparison, a bilingual dictionary such as the Collins-Robert Dictionary (Atkins and

Duval 1978) makes distinctions which are based solely on the existence of different potential
translations:
croak 1 vi (a) [frog] coasser; [raven] croasser; [person] parler d’une voix rauque; (*grum-
ble) maugréer, ronchonner.
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Lexicography
These examples point to the all-important nature of the metalinguistic indicators (frog,
raven, person, grumble) in a good bilingual dictionary (see also Duval 1991; Béjoint and
Thoiron 1996). Such dictionaries make use of collocates, subject labels, and various types
of indicators to capture typical subjects or objects to provide foreign language users with as
much information as possible about the semantic, syntactic, and combinatory properties of
lexical items.
Conclusion
It is not possible to discuss all aspects of lexicography as a branch of linguistics. In this
article, we have focused on the applied linguistics features of dictionaries, which manifest
themselves more clearly in pedagogical dictionaries for foreign language learners and in
bilingual dictionaries. We deliberately excluded the very vibrant and active field of compu-
tational lexicography dealing with the construction of lexicons for natural language process-
ing, which would be better suited for a handbook of computational linguistics and would
deserve a chapter on its own.
We have discussed several of the hot topics that are debated in lexicography circles,
including the impact of the ‘corpus revolution’, which now allows lexicographers to compile
dictionary entries on the basis of linguistic evidence extracted from corpora of hundreds
of millions of words. Computers are good at counting and extracting patterns of usage,
but condensing linguistic facts in an intelligible way and making sense of these masses
of data to create reference works that are useful to language learners is still something for
which lexicographers will always be needed for years to come. The tendency is to move to
‘post-editing’ in lexicography, however, where computers and sophisticated software tools
automatically identify an increasingly wide range of elements (candidate collocations, defi-
nitions, examples, etc.) from corpora and present them to the lexicographer, who is invited
to edit or validate the suggestions.
Related topics
corpus linguistics; lexis
Further reading
Atkins, B. T. S. and Rundell, M. (2008) Oxford Guide to Practical Lexicography, Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press. (A down-to-earth, step-by-step textbook on the making of dictionaries; an essential course
for the training of lexicographers)
Cowie, A. P. (ed.) (2009) Oxford History of English Lexicography, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
(Two volumes that present the fullest account of the lexicography of English; covers general-pur-
pose and specialized dictionaries, including the evolution of dictionaries aimed at foreign learners
of English)
Durkin, P. (ed.) (2016) The Oxford Handbook of Lexicography, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
(A book that provides a series of chapters on the major issues confronting lexicographers and the users
of dictionaries today)
Fontenelle, T. (2008) Practical Lexicography: A Reader, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (A collec-
tion of articles that have become classics in the field of lexicography; covers topics hotly debated in
lexicography circles: collocations and idioms, tools and methods, dictionary use, grammar and usage,
word senses and polysemy, Johnson’s Plan of a Dictionary, etc.)
Fuertes-Oliveira, P. (ed.) (2018) The Routledge Handbook of Lexicography, London and New York: Rout-
ledge. (A handbook with 47 chapters covering all aspects of lexicography, focusing on the functional
approach, but also going beyond)
227
Thierry Fontenelle
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18
Translation and interpreting
Introduction
As language-based activities that have practical implications, translation and interpreting are
often seen as falling within the remit of applied linguistics. This chapter focuses on key issues
that have interested both translation scholars and applied linguists in recent years. The use of
translation in language teaching falls outside the remit of this chapter; see Cook (2009) and
Laviosa (2020) for an authoritative view of this issue.
Increased globalization, growing mobility of people and commodities, and the spread
of armed conflicts since the turn of the 21st century have established translation and inter-
preting more firmly in the public consciousness. For one thing, translators and interpreters
have become important economic players in the services sector worldwide in their capacity
as facilitators and beneficiaries of increased interconnectedness. Between 2009 and 2019,
global translation industry surveys reported a healthy compound annual growth rate of 7.76%
(CSA 2019), and language services providers bounced back from the downturn caused by the
2020 COVID-19 pandemic faster than other economic sectors (CSA 2021). But translators
and interpreters are now also widely recognized as important political players, with their
involvement in Iraq, Afghanistan, Darfur and more recently in Ukraine receiving widespread
media attention.
This chapter explores the growing pervasiveness of translation and interpreting in all
domains of private and public life, with particular emphasis on their social and political rel-
evance. It examines their contribution to the delivery of institutional agendas – from supra-
national organizations to judicial and healthcare services at community level, their role in the
negotiation of power differentials in social life, and their growing visibility in various spheres
of conflict, including protest movements and war zones. The chapter also examines the key
role that translation and interpreting play in promoting cultural and linguistic diversity in the
information society and in developing multilingual content in global media networks and the
audiovisual marketplace against the backdrop of the growing dominance of English as a lingua
franca. Finally, it surveys the technological developments underpinning the proliferation of
multimodal texts that require more complex forms of translation, including new modalities of
intersemiotic assistive mediation to empower sensory impaired members of the community.
230 DOI: 10.4324/9781003082637-21

Historical overview
Although the intellectual interest in translation goes back several centuries, the academic study
of translation and interpreting dates back only to the middle of the 20th century (Baker 2005).
Initially focusing on short, often decontextualized stretches of text, much theorizing between
the 1950s and the 1980s involved elaborating taxonomies of equivalence between source texts
and their translations (Baker and Pérez-González 2011). During this period, translation equiva-
lence was discussed in terms of semantic correspondence between original and translated texts
(Rabin 1958); the extent to which the target version reproduced the effect that the source text
had on its original readership (Nida 1964; Nida and Taber 1969; Larson 1984); the degree of
alignment between the most prominent textual functions or communicative purposes in the
original text and its translated version (Reiss 1971; House 1981); and finally in terms of trans-
lators’ compliance with the commissioner’s specifications (Vermeer 2000 [1989]; Nord 1991).
By the late 1980s, cultural studies and literary theory in particular had come to exercise
considerable influence on the study of translated texts as instances of interaction embodying
the values a given culture attaches to certain practices and concepts (Venuti 1995; Hermans
1996; Tymoczko 1999). By then, too, translation scholars had begun to draw on an expanding
array of theoretical strands and fields within linguistics – including but not limited to critical
discourse analysis, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, conversation analysis, psycholinguistics, and
semiotics (Saldanha 2009). The work of Hatim and Mason (1990, 1997) proved extremely
influential in widening the remit of linguistically informed studies of translation and interpret-
ing, in particular by engaging with issues of ideology and positioning.
Since the mid-1990s, corpus linguistics has provided a robust methodology for studying
translation (Laviosa 2002; Olohan 2004; Zanettin 2014). Initially, corpus-based translation
studies sought to facilitate comparison between a computer-held corpus consisting exclusively
of translated text and one holding only non-translated texts produced in the same language.
Such comparison aims to demonstrate the distinctive nature of translation as a genre in its
own right by identifying recurrent patterns in the language produced by translators (Baker
1996; Laviosa 1998) and interpreters (Pérez-González 2006a). Baker (1993) first proposed that
translation is constrained by a fully articulated text in another language that inevitably leaves
traces in the language translators produce. But corpus-based studies of translation go further,
providing evidence that translators tend to make explicit what is either implicit in the source
text or would be implicit in a non-translated text in the same language – for example, they
have a tendency to spell out the optional that in reporting structures in translated English text
compared to non-translated English in the same genres (Olohan and Baker 2000). De Sutter
and Lefer offer a critical analysis of the current state-of-the-art and outline a revised research
agenda based on ‘multi-methodological designs and advanced statistical modelling’ (2020: 18)
that nevertheless focuses on the nature of translation as a form of ‘constrained communication’
(ibid.: 19). Adopting a broader definition of translation, studies based on the AHRC-funded
Genealogies of Knowledge project (2016–2020) have drawn on corpora to examine the cross-
cultural mediation of key concepts in political and scientific discourse, such as common people
(Jones 2019) or sign versus symptom in medicine (Karimullah 2020). A more recent extension
of this methodology focuses on explaining controversies surrounding concepts which underpin
the practice and ethos of modern medicine, such as evidence in evidence-based medicine (Buts
et al. 2021).
Since the 1990s, many studies have focused on the influence of ideology and power on
translators’ decision-making. The extent to which translational behaviour facilitates the use
of language as an instrument of ideological control is a recurrent object of enquiry in studies
231
informed by critical discourse analysis (CDA), including corpus-based CDA (Kim 2020).
Other research strands informed by the social sciences explore how different types of narra-
tive, understood not as a genre but as our primary means of making sense of the world, impact
the way in which translators mediate texts as well as how readers/listeners interpret translations
(Baker 2006; Bassi 2015; Boukhaffa 2018). On the whole, this critical body of research inter-
rogates how the professional conduct of translators and interpreters is negotiated against the
backdrop of existing norms of translation as a social institution and have challenged the widely
held perception of translation and interpreting as routinized, uncritical activities.
Current research issues in translation and interpreting
Translation and interpreting as institutionalized and institution-

building practices
The role of translation in effecting institutional change has long been documented by transla-
tion and interpreting historians (e.g. Lung 2016). Drawing on Koskinen’s (2008: 17) defini-
tion of institutions as forms of ‘uniform action governed by role expectations, norms, values
and belief systems’, this section examines the impact of translation on two types of contem-
porary institutional settings: local/national organizational systems and supranational bureau-
cratic cultures.
With increased globalization, migration, and other forms of mobility, interpreters and trans-
lators have come to play a prominent role in encounters between institutional representatives
and lay citizens. In bilingual common law courtroom proceedings, for instance, barristers use
sophisticated questioning strategies whose effectiveness is heavily dependent on the interpret-
ers’ mediation (Berk-Seligson 1999; Hale 2001; Pérez-González 2006a). The legal profession
has attempted to regulate the impact of such mediation by means of codes of practice that
require interpreters to refrain from explicating or clarifying verbal elements deliberately left
ambiguous, implicit, or unclear in the counsel’s questions. In doctor-patient interactions and
interviews of asylum seekers and political refugees, interpreters are expected to exercise their
discretion in organizationally sanctioned ways and have been found to enforce rigid question-
answer exchanges aligned with institutional agendas. Medical interpreters, for example, focus
on eliciting and interrogating diagnostically relevant information while excising patients’ own
personal concerns (Bolden 2000). Interpreters similarly prevent political refugees from launch-
ing into a narrative of their personal tragedies while their asylum claims are being assessed
(Jacquemet 2005).
However, even interpreters bound by the strictest codes of ethics often fail to provide the
sort of straightforward, unedited renditions which their organizational co-interactants expect
(Angelelli 2004). Lack of syntactic and semantic equivalence between languages, together
with the stress under which they operate, often lead interpreters to inadvertently alter the tenor
of the original utterance, such as by downgrading the suggestive and intimidating nature of
key questions and statements. Conference interpreters working in highly formal contexts have
also been shown to depart from their canonical roles as conduits and speak in their own voice
to defend themselves against charges of misinterpreting by other interactants wishing to use
them as scapegoats (Diriker 2004). It has therefore been argued that interpreting studies should
refrain from ‘comparing the propositional meaning of utterances and their interpretation’ and
seek instead to challenge the conceptualization of interpreters as neutral conduits by describing
‘the behaviour of all parties in terms of the set of factors governing the exchange’ (Mason and
Stewart 2001: 54). Such arguments have paved the way for the emergence and consolidation of
232
dialogue interpreting studies, a distinct subfield within interpreting studies which approaches
face-to-face encounters as triadic exchanges between the institutional representative, the client,
and the interpreter (Mason 2001).
The power imbalance inherent in interpreter-mediated institutional encounters makes polite-
ness theory an attractive framework to draw on. In these settings, interactants realign them-
selves as required by the turn-by-turn unfolding of the conversation and exploit the politeness
and face-saving strategies available at each stage to maximize the effectiveness of the ongoing
interview or interrogation, occasionally mitigating face-threatening acts – for example, when a
lay interactant refuses or fails to comply with the requirements of the institutional representa-
tive. Goffman’s (1981) ‘participation framework’ has proved helpful for researchers working
on interpreter-mediated interaction (Wadensjö 1998; Roy 2000; Marks 2012). Studying shifts
in footing may reveal the interpreters’ alignments with lay people and institutional representa-
tives, highlight their role as institutional ‘gatekeepers’ (Wadensjö 1998), and yield insights into
the repair and bridging work they carry out using an array of hedging, downtoning, amplify-
ing, and turn-taking managing devices. For example, to ensure that doctor-patient interviews
unfold successfully, medical interpreters may offer their own answers to patients’ questions,
acting as covert co-diagnosticians (Davidson 2000). This body of scholarship has shown that
interpreters may claim a participatory role for themselves ‘as speaking agents who are critically
engaged in the process of making meaningful utterances that elicit the intended response from,
or have the intended effect upon, the hearer’ (Davidson 2002: 1275).
While acknowledging interpreters’ active involvement in the management of institutional
interaction, scholars investigating institutions that regulate the flow of asylum seekers and
political refugees (Barsky 1996; Inghilleri 2007), journalists reporting on the involvement of
interpreters and translators in armed conflicts (Levinson 2006; Packer 2007), and professionals
concerned about the welfare of interpreters operating in war zones (Kahane 2007) have also
addressed the interpreters’ vulnerability to exercises of power by institutional representatives.
Interpreters working in the asylum system are often co-opted into the relevant institutional
cultures and made to assume responsibilities that lie outside their canonical role, such as by
participating in the evaluation of the asylum applicant’s credibility, thus exacerbating their
shifting perceptions of their own position as mediators within these structures of power. Simi-
larly, interpreters working for the American troops in Iraq in the first decade of the 21st century
were often assigned intelligence-gathering tasks that further alienated them from their local
community and put their lives at greater risk (Packer 2007).
Beyond nationally based systems, international and pan-national organizations also rely
heavily on translators and interpreters. Multilateral institutions address their respective con-
stituencies through translated and interpreted texts, such that ‘in a constructivist sense, the
institution itself gets translated’ (Koskinen 2008: 22). These organizations often attempt to
hide their translational character and subsequently to efface the role played by translators and
interpreters at different levels. On the one hand, translators’ and interpreters’ individual identi-
ties and contributions are diluted through the enforcement of collective workflow processes
which serve to strengthen the public perception of the organizational voice. On the other hand,
translators’ and interpreters’ ability to exercise their professional discretion is significantly
restricted by means of institutional guidelines which seek to effect a gradual routinization and
mechanization of translational behaviour and ensure that the language they produce ‘functions
seamlessly as part of the discourse’ of the institution in question (Kang 2009: 144). Despite the
efforts of international organizations to develop translational cultures of their own, scholars
have identified a slippage between what translators and interpreters are officially expected
or asked to do and what they actually do. This has been attributed to mismatches between
233
institutional doctrine and ‘interpreting habituses’ (Marzocchi 2005) and to the growing impact
of the economics of translation (i.e. time/costs factors), rather than sociocultural policies, as
the driving force behind institutional agendas (Mossop 2006). Mason (2004 [2003]: 481) also
reports on the ‘little uniformity of practice or evidence of influence of institutional guidelines
on translator behaviour’ in his analysis of data from the European Parliament and UNESCO.
His study suggests that institutional translators are responsible for numerous ‘discoursal shifts’
(i.e. concatenations of small shifts in the use of transitivity patterns throughout the translated
text), which result in attenuating or intensifying the message conveyed in the original text.
Mason’s contention that such discoursal shifts display traces of the ideologies that circulate
in the translators’ environment reinforces their interactional status as agents who are actively
engaged in the production of institutional discourses, rather than simple mouthpieces whose
role consists of consolidating ‘habitualized’ discourses through mechanistic practices of medi-
ation. Duflou’s (2016) ethnographic research on the socialization of Dutch conference inter-
preters at the European Union institutions shows how the development of their competence in
applying the practical and setting-determined know-how required in the booth influences their
production of institutional discourses.
Power, inequality, minority

Much of the current literature in the field approaches cross-cultural encounters involving an
element of interlinguistic mediation as a space of radical inequality. Translators and interpret-
ers mediating these encounters are involved in asserting, questioning, and sometimes force-
fully resisting existing power structures, suggesting that translation does not resolve conflict
and inequality by enabling dialogue but rather constitutes a space of tension and power strug-
gle in its own right. Casanova (2010) examines translation as a factor in the struggle for
legitimacy in the literary and political fields – a factor that participates in consecrating authors
and works, both nationally and internationally, and in the distribution and transfer of cul-
tural capital. In her model, structural inequality evident in the imbalance between dominating
and dominated languages and literatures reflects the struggle within any field in Bourdieu’s
terms. Inghilleri similarly draws on Bourdieu’s notions of habitus, field, capital and illusio
to demonstrate that interpreters working in the asylum system ‘act within and are constituted
by . . . power-laden macro-structures . . . that impact directly and indirectly on the interpreting
activity’ (2003: 261).
Growing interest in issues of power and inequality has naturally drawn attention to the role
played by translation and interpreting in shaping the relationship between minority and major-
ity groups in any society. Translation has always been a powerful instrument of the nation-
state, not only in colonial and post-colonial contexts (Niranjana 1990; Dodson 2005) but also in
the context of more modern, multicultural, and multi-ethnic societies. Minority issues become
particularly acute, with translation and interpreting acquiring increased significance in diglos-
sic situations where the dominant, colonial, or majority language inhabits and has monopoly
on official, public life and where the native language is relegated to the realm of the home, the
casual, and the ephemeral. Cronin (1998) was among the first to stress the urgency of exploring
the effects of translation on various minority languages given their diminishing numbers across
the world. He distinguishes between translation efforts that seek to obliterate the minority lan-
guage by assimilating it to the dominant language and those which seek to retain and develop
the minority language and resist its incorporation into the dominant language. Examples of the
former abound in the Irish experience and are brought to life vividly in Brian Friel’s Transla-
tions (Friel 1981), a play that depicts the process of Anglicizing Ireland through the British
234
Ordnance Survey in 1833. Examples of the latter include translation both from and into Welsh
in many official contexts today, and translations undertaken from a wide range of prestigious
literatures and languages into Scots in order to ‘raise its status and establish its validity as a
literary medium’ (Corbett 1999: 3). Beyond the mere survival of the dominated language,
translation into a minority language like Corsican is sometimes also ‘a way of demonstrating
a new confidence in [that] language and identity by acting as if it were a language of power’
(Jaffe 2010 [1999]: 264; emphasis in original).
The deaf and hard-of-hearing are often treated as a minority group: their interaction with
the hearing community constitutes a site of power struggle in which translation and interpret-
ing can play either an oppressive or empowering role. Those who are born deaf generally do
not acquire the majority language or do not acquire it to native-speaker level, and because of
their inability to hear, they rely on interpreters throughout their life across a range of contexts.
Although access to interpreters allows this particular minority group to participate more fully
in various aspects of social life, the mere provision of interpreting services has been shown to
have a disempowering effect by creating an illusion of access or independence without neces-
sarily putting the deaf person on an equal footing with their hearing co-interactants (McKee
2003). Together with the issues arising from the low number of native sign language entrants
(Napier and Leeson 2016) and the under-representation of certain ethnic groups within the
interpreting profession (Leeson and Sheridan 2020), the need to increase deaf political partici-
pation has emerged as an important research theme (Turner et al. 2017).
Activism, protest, and social movements

Research on translation and political activism was given impetus at the turn of the century
by Tymoczko’s (2000) critical analysis of discourses on translation and engagement that are
aimed at a literary elite. Against the then dominant understanding of resistance in translation
as a question of adopting a disruptive, or foreignizing, translation strategy (Venuti 1995), she
argued that ‘[t]rying to prescribe a single translation strategy [to effect political change] is
like trying to prescribe a single strategy for effective guerrilla warfare’ (Tymoczko 2000: 42).
Instead, for translation to be politically effective, translators have to work together as a group
with a common agenda, select texts for translation with that agenda in mind, and vary their
strategies for tactical purposes. A number of studies have since analyzed the working practices
of groups of translators and interpreters with a declared activist agenda, such as Babels and
Tlaxcala (Boéri 2008; Baker 2013). Halley (2019) examined the practices of a group of vol-
unteer American Sign Language interpreters which formed around the 1988 Deaf President
Now protest movement at Gallaudet University, focusing on the way it developed a collective
identity with the deaf protestors. Recently published collections (e.g. Gould and Tahmasebian
2020) bring together further important contributions from settings as varied as Iran, Palestine,
Japan, and Mexico.
The global spread of protest movements in late 2010/early 2011 drew further attention to
the role of translation in political activism. Baker (2016) examined the subtitling practices
of collectives active during the Egyptian Revolution, focusing on the extent to which they
undercut the political project by failing to reflect its goals or enhanced it by providing addi-
tional space for actualizing these goals. By claiming visibility and exercising agency in pursuit
of prefigurative agendas, these activist communities aim to put into practice values such as
‘solidarity, diversity, non-hierarchy, horizontality and non-representational models of prac-
tice’ and to bring ‘the world they aspire to create into existence’ (Baker 2019: 460). The most
extended investigation into the role of translation in contemporary social movements to date is
235
Fernández (2020). The study highlights the centrality of translation in various types of political
activity during the Spanish 15M movement, concluding that it did not necessarily constitute a
‘beneficial contribution to political transformation’ in this context. Instead, as in many other
sites of interaction, translation is revealed to be ‘a complex and unpredictable process that is
subject to multiple “partisan” engagements’ (Fernández 2020: 132).
Translators and interpreters in the war zone

Scholars of translation have only recently begun to engage in a sustained manner with various
aspects of the role and positioning of translators and interpreters in the war zone. Their focus
has varied from an interest in the impact of interpreter and translator behaviour on other parties
in the conflict, and the way they align or do not align with the institutions that employ them
(Baker 2010; Salama-Carr 2007), to the impact of the war situation and proximity to violence
on the interpreters and translators themselves (Inghilleri 2008, 2009; Maier 2007), especially
‘non-professional and untrained mediators’ (Tryuk 2021: 399). Todorova and Ruiz Rosendo’s
(2021) Interpreting Conflict brings several of these themes together and examines a wide range
of contexts (military, humanitarian, activist) and cultural locations, such as in Korea, Japan,
Afghanistan, Iraq, the Sahel, Spain, and Argentina, among others. Focusing on mourning walls
in Aleppo, Bader Eddin (2020) is one of very few studies to offer an extended analysis of
specific strategies of translation and their impact on the reception of textual and visual mes-
sages from war zones in Western media. Haddadian-Moghaddam and Scott-Smith (2020) bring
together a number of important studies of translation and interpreting during the Cold War.
Baker (2006) demonstrates how the discursive negotiation of competing narratives of wars
and armed conflicts is realized in and through acts of translation and interpreting in the media,
literature, scholarly articles, documentary film, political reports, and websites. Rafael (2007)
argues that in the case of armed conflicts, interpreters can become particularly involved on the
ground and find themselves occupying precarious positions, often exposed to extreme discur-
sive violence and distrusted by the very parties that deployed them as instruments of surveil-
lance. Despite their essential function in fighting insurgents, he argues, locally hired interpreters
are also feared as potential insurgents themselves. Indeed, distrust of local interpreters and trans-
lators in the context of imperial expansion has been documented elsewhere, such as by Niran-
jana (1990) for colonial India and Takeda (2009) in relation to US concerns about employing
second-generation Japanese Americans in code-breaking work during the Second World War.
Research on the role of translators and interpreters in mediating armed conflict suggests that
they typically assume a wide range of tasks that extend well beyond any canonical definition
of their responsibilities and obligations. Takeda (2009: 52) explains how Japanese Americans
recruited and trained by the US military during the Second World War ‘translated captured
enemy documents, interrogated Japanese prisoners of war, persuaded Japanese soldiers and
civilians to surrender, and participated in propaganda activities’. Based on interviews with
British and French journalists who worked in Iraq following its invasion by US troops in 2003,
Palmer (2007) confirms that interpreters often selected the individuals to be interviewed by the
media representative and advised on whether it was safe or practical to travel to a particular
place to secure an interview.
Translation and interpreting in the globalized information society

Recent technological developments have brought about a ‘de-materialization of space’ (Cronin
2003) and sped up the circulation of information, facilitating the creation of supraterritorial
236
readerships and audiences. Translation scholars have explored the dynamics of language flows
in the global deterritorialized space, demonstrating how the dominant lingua franca influences
other languages via processes of translation and multilingual text production (House 2013)
and how translation can serve as a strategy of resistance against the linguistic and cultural
dominance of English (Chan 2016).
Bennett (2007) examines the role of translation in strengthening the position of English as
lingua franca in academic discourse and, hence, in configuring knowledge and controlling the
flow and format of information. The ‘predatory’ discourse routinely employed by academics
is hierarchically organized into sections with a clear introduction, development, and conclu-
sion. Impersonal structures, such as passive and nominalized forms, are preferred to create the
illusion of impartiality, while material and existential processes are used to enhance objectiv-
ity. Bennett draws on examples of Portuguese academic articles translated for publication in
English to demonstrate the extent to which the ideological framework that informs the original
articles is disrupted and replaced by a positivist structure inherent to English academic dis-
course. She concludes that translators’ complicity in enforcing ideologies embedded in English
academic discourse must be questioned since it can lead to the systematic destruction of rival
forms of knowledge.
House (2004, 2008) investigated the communicative norms that operate in a wide range of
texts translated from English and those operating in comparable texts written originally in the
target language. According to House (2008: 87), textual norms in languages other than English
are likely to be adapted to Anglophone ones, ‘particularly in the use of certain functional cat-
egories that express subjectivity and audience design’. Such adaptations include shifts from the
ideational (message-oriented) to the interpersonal (addressee-oriented) function of language,
from informational explicitness to inference-inducing implicitness, and from ‘densely packed
information to loosely linearized information’ (House 2004: 49).
Technological advances have stimulated interest in the variety of multimodal texts that
circulate in a growing range of professional and recreational settings. Boria et al.’s (2019)
Translation and Multimodality explores how the simultaneous occurrence of multiple semiotic
modes – including but not limited to the spoken and written word, gestures, visuals, music, and
colour – across textual genres calls for a retheorization of translation practices. While the study
of multimodal translational behaviour has traditionally focused on subtitling, dubbing, and
assistive forms of intersemiotic translation, such as audio description and subtitling for the hard
of hearing (Pérez-González 2019), scholarly attention is increasingly shifting towards new
research themes and settings, such as embodied multimodal meaning-making and museum
accessibility (Pérez-González 2020).
The emergence of new patterns in the distribution and consumption of audiovisual content
in digital space has drawn scholarly attention to networked communities of translators seeking
to effect aesthetic or political change. Unhappy with the paucity and cultural insensitivity of
commercial translations of their favourite audiovisual programmes and genres, networks of
fans, known as fansubbers, produce their own subtitled versions, which are then circulated
globally online (Dywer 2019). To allow their fellow fans to experience the cultural ‘otherness’
of the content they subtitle, these amateur translators exploit traditional meaning-making codes
creatively and criss-cross the traditional boundaries between linguistic and visual semiotics in
innovative ways. For example, they use headnotes and written glosses at the top of the screen to
expand or elaborate on the meaning of ‘untranslatable’ cultural references in the film dialogue;
the cultural references in question still feature untranslated within the ‘traditional subtitle’ dis-
played simultaneously at the bottom of the screen. Fansubbers also favour the ‘dilution’ of sub-
titles within the image: technological developments allow them to display subtitles in unusual
237
angles, perspectives and fonts which blend in with the aesthetics of the film, thus maximizing
the viewer’s enjoyment of the visuals (Pérez González 2006b).
Future directions
As it continues to develop in the 21st century, the next and most consequential challenge
for translation studies is to shed its Eurocentric origins and prepare to embrace the variety
of theoretical perspectives, experiences, and traditions that the West’s many ‘others’ have to
offer. This challenge is already being undertaken, with a growing number of voices of non-
Western scholars continuing to gain strength and calling into question much-received wisdom
in the field (Hung and Wakabayashi 2005; Cheung 2006; Bandia 2008; Selim 2009; Gould and
Tahmasebian 2020). Cronin’s notion of eco-translation, understood as ‘all forms of translation
thinking and practice that knowingly engage with the challenges of human-induced environ-
mental change’ (2017: 2), is also bound to play a central role in the development of disciplin-
ary discourses in translation studies, as the consequences of the climate emergency become
irreversibly lodged in public consciousness. Eco-translation is not only enabling a reconceptu-
alization of the past, present, and future of translation itself but also yielding new insights into
the tradosphere, a notion encompassing the study of various regimes of control and attention,
the sustainability of minoritized languages, and the circulation of information and knowledge
within global linguistic ecologies.
Related topics
institutional discourse; the media; medical communication; culture; identity; migration; lin-
guistic imperialism; corpus linguistics; critical discourse analysis; discourse analysis; multi-
modal communication
Further reading
Baker, M. (ed.) (2010) Critical Readings in Translation Studies, London: Routledge. (A thematically orga-
nized reader which prioritizes developments in the field rather than foundational texts and features detailed
summaries of each article, follow-up questions for discussion, and recommended further reading)
Baker, M. and Saldanha, G. (eds.) (2020) The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, 3rd ed.,
London: Routledge. (A standard reference in the field which features extended entries on core con-
cepts, types of translation and interpreting, and theoretical approaches)
Munday, J. (2016) Introducing Translation Studies: Theories and Applications, 4th ed., London: Rout-
ledge. (A balanced and accessible overview of the main theoretical strands in the discipline, supported
by illustrative case studies in different languages, suggestions for further reading, and a list of discus-
sion and research points)
Pöchhacker, F. (2016) Introducing Interpreting Studies, 2nd ed., London: Routledge. (An accessible intro-
duction to interpreting studies as an academic discipline, outlining its origins and development to the
present day)
Venuti, L. (2021) The Translation Studies Reader, 4th ed., London: Routledge. (A chronologically orga-
nized reader which focuses largely on foundational texts, with extended introductions to each section
that clearly outline the main trends during the relevant period)
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19
First language attrition
Bridging sociolinguistic narratives and
psycholinguistic models of attrition
Introduction
The field of language attrition has seen an interesting development; not many research fields’
inauguration can be traced back to a very specific date. For attrition, however, there is a general
consensus that the loss of language skills conference at UPenn in 1982 marks the start of the
field (cf. Schmid 2013), although the term attrition had been coined before then (see the next
section). For a long time, the field has tried to find its own space amidst the adjacent field of
second language acquisition; the first studies examined how languages could best be learned
and taught to avoid second or foreign language attrition (cf. Lambert and Freed 1982). In the
1990s, the focus shifted from second and foreign to first language attrition. A number of guid-
ing questions emerged, such as what the predictor variables that govern language attrition are
and how they impact an individual’s attrition trajectory across time. It was also at this time that
the earlier umbrella term ‘language loss’ was subdivided into distinct categories, marked by
specific terminology: ‘language loss’ came to be reserved for pathological loss experienced in
the case of a stroke or trauma; ‘language shift’ came to denote only communal language shift
patterns in migrant communities over time; ‘language attrition’, then, came to be exclusively
used for individual language mastery changes (cf. Schmid 2011). Within this newly created
framework, individual attrition came to be the focus and questions shifted to whether attrition
was irreversible and whether it was mainly the result of reduced L1 use or increased L2 use
(cf. Keijzer and de Bot 2018; Keijzer 2020).
Since the beginning of the field, clear categories of attrition types have thus been estab-
lished, and in addition, different perspectives have been taken in order to study attrition: (1)
linguistic, detailing specific features and often adopting a contrastive crosslinguistic perspec-
tive as an explanation of the attestation or absence of attrition (cf. Schmid and de Leeuw 2019);
(2) sociolinguistic, examining how socio-affective variables, such as motivation, modulate
attrition (Schmid and Dusseldorp 2010; Schmid and Cherciov 2019); and (3) psycholinguistic
and neurolinguistic (cf. Obler 1982; Köpke 2007; Köpke and Keijzer 2019), examining attri-
tion effects in the mind and brain. A holistic approach to attrition, integrating perspectives,
and looking across categories and even fields has the potential of advancing the research field.
Indeed, the self-carved niche may not be tenable against the backdrop of the context of attrition
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082637-22 243

that has dynamically expanded over the years. From migrants in the 1980s and 1990s, the set-
tings in more recent attrition studies have widened to expat communities who mostly continue
to use their L1 every day (cf. Keijzer 2020).
This development is corroborated by psycholinguistic investigations and neuroimaging
data, also labelled attrition, that show L2 learning effects on the L1 also in the absence of
an international move (cf. Bice and Kroll 2015). The development and the inherent interdis-
ciplinarity of attrition work is also clearly felt in recent studies that use attrition as a case or
exemplar to bridge fields that have traditionally been approached from an (applied) linguistics
perspective and those more rooted in neuroscience. A case in point is Mickan et al.’s (2019)
Bridging the gap between language acquisition research and memory science: The case of
foreign language attrition, but also the recent epistemological issue of Linguistic Approaches
to Bilingualism (2019), in which Schmid and Köpke explore the relevance of first language
attrition to theories of bilingual development.
With attrition work being intricately linked with multilingualism in a broader sense, it is
very revealing that within multilingualism work, there have been strong pleas in recent years
to use sociolinguistic backstories and individual narratives as modulating psycholinguistic and
neurolinguistic outcomes of multilingualism (cf. Bak 2016). We would here like to highlight
Köpke’s (2007) observation that studying the intricacies of attrition is ‘promising for the explo-
ration of links between the brain, mind and external factors that are also of interest in multilin-
gualism’ (10). This chapter attempts to make that promise more concrete. It focuses on attrition
as a function of typological differences between languages and takes a more holistic approach
to attrition by (1) framing attrition as clearly embedded in the broader realm of multilingual-
ism; (2) moving away from the categorization of individual versus community and, with that,
language shift versus attrition (individual multilingual narratives are greatly informed by the
community and environment in which they are nested); and (3) using linguistic features to
illustrate how sociolinguistic information can influence psycholinguistic outcomes. The ulti-
mate aim of the chapter is to show the complementarity of these perspectives in relation to
language attrition and offer theoretical tools for a more holistic attrition framework.
Theoretical and methodological perspectives on language attrition

Language attrition research has come a long way since Einar Haugen’s essay ‘Language and
Immigration’ (1938) where the term attrition was first coined. More recent research has chal-
lenged the understanding of language attrition as loss and as an extreme form of linguistic
development experienced only by a small number of multilinguals (see Waas 1996; de Bot
1998; Hulsen 2000; Appel and Muysken 2005; Schmid 2011; de Leeuw et al. 2013; Schmid
and Köpke 2017 for a discussion on language loss). In fact, attrition is increasingly viewed and
investigated as a non-linear, gradual, and dynamic process that cannot be studied out of context
of the broader multilingual context of an individual (de Bot 2007; Optiz 2012; de Leeuw et al.
2013). As Schmid and Köpke (2019: 4) claim, attrition is ‘only ever one side of the coin of
bilingual development’ (emphasis in original), and thus, language acquisition and language
attrition should not be examined in isolation. It follows that the sociolinguistic setting of the
individual in the community modulates how attrition operates in the mind. In other words, soci-
olinguistic and psycholinguistic perspectives on attrition may have been studied in isolation
in the past, but according to recent findings, such a clear-cut divide is not tenable or desirable.
Sections ‘Sociolinguistic approaches to attrition’ and ‘Psycholinguistic approaches to attrition’
discuss both approaches to attrition the way they have been operationalized in past work before
proposing a holistic attrition framework in Section ‘A holistic approach to attrition’.
244
Sociolinguistic approaches to attrition

Given that sociolinguistics is the empirical study of language use, variation, and change in
society, this approach has been widely employed in attrition studies, especially in contexts that
used to be labelled language shift (i.e. in communities) but extended to the sociolinguistic and
societal stories that moderate an individual’s attrition experience (cf. Optiz 2019; Schmid and
Cherciov 2019 for an overview of socio-affective variables in L1 attrition research). Previous
studies have established that the most relevant social predictors for attrition processes are the
following: ‘(1) personal background factors (age at immigration, length of residence, educa-
tion, occupation and socio-economic status, aptitude); (2) measures relating to the use of and
exposure to the L1 and the L2; (3) measures relating to the attitude, identity, integration and
affiliation’ (Schmid and Cherciov 2019: 270–271). It has also, crucially, investigated how these
different socio-affective variables cluster and interact (Schmid and Dusseldorp 2010). Hence,
sociolinguistic background variables have traditionally been used to control for individual dif-
ferences. In the following sections, we suggest a change of perspective in order to investigate
how individual narratives shape attrition and the sociolinguistic consequences that arise from
this process.
Psycholinguistic approaches to attrition

Psycholinguistic approaches to attrition have traditionally attempted to model language attri-
tion based on changes in language processes of multiple languages in one mind. The construct
of competition has played a key role; competition first appeared in Green’s (1986) model of
selected, active, and dormant languages. Köpke and Keijzer (2019: 65) explain that a selected
language controls ongoing verbal activity, whereas the active language has an impact on the
verbal activity although not selected. According to Green’s model, a dormant language does
not intervene in ongoing language processing. Though not specifically constructed for attri-
tion contexts, Green’s model does reflect the constant competition between a multilingual’s
languages (Köpke and Keijzer 2019: 65). It also paved the way for other competition-based
models, most notably Paradis’ (1993) activation threshold hypothesis (ATH). At the foundation
of this hypothesis lies the premise that the frequency with which a multilingual’s languages are
used as well as the time elapsed since they were last activated (recency) predicts how effortful
retrieval of language (features) will be (Köpke and Keijzer 2019: 65). Hence, the activation
threshold of a language is lowered each time the language is activated, facilitating subse-
quent activation and decreasing cognitive costs associated with activation. Recent studies have
challenged the ATH’s seemingly simplistic inhibition/activation relationship in the context of
language attrition (see Schmid 2019: 288–303 for a critical review of the topic), emphasizing
the intricate and complex connection between a multilinguals’ languages and receptive versus
productive language activation, which is not considered in the ATH. Gollan et al. (2005) and
Bramer et al. (2017) add to this that lexical attrition can already be observed in the early stages
of language acquisition and in L2 learners with no experience in L2 immersion whereas the
ATH presupposes a relative balanced language mastery.
With competition also governing early stages of multilingualism, psycholinguistic attrition
models started to further investigate memory retrieval processes more generally, introducing
cognitive psychological theories such as retrieval induced forgetting (RIF) to attrition (cf.
Linck and Kroll 2019: 92). The main assumption underlying this theory is that inhibition of
certain items leads to reduced accessibility of similar items (see Anderson et al. 1994; Levy
and Anderson 2002 for a detailed account). Levy et al. (2007) were the first to invoke RIF in
245
attrition contexts. They carried out two experiments with L1 English speakers learning L2
Spanish. Participants were asked to name line drawings in either English or Spanish based on a
colour cue (green for English and red for Spanish). This picture-naming task included different
number of repetitions (0, 1, 5, or 10) and the language of naming. A subsequent retrieval task
prompted participants to name all pictures in the L1. Results showed that repeatedly producing
the L2 in the first task (i.e. 10 times) led to a decrease in the accessibility of the corresponding
L1 item (cf. Linck et al. 2009 for a study using a similar paradigm). The RIF framework thus
reflects the dynamic nature of multilingual competition and extended the traditional notion of
attrition. To the best of our knowledge, the RIF model has been studied solely in relation to
bilinguals. Hence, future studies should apply RIF to the multilingual speaker to provide a bet-
ter account of retrieval processes when more than two languages are at play and thus to reflect
the ecological reality of many attriters.
Memory retrieval processing models reflect crosslinguistic influence (CLI) more broadly.
Traditionally, CLI has been understood to comprise interference, borrowing, transfer, and
avoidance (Allgäuer-Hackl and Jessner 2019: 327). In situations where all interlocutors share
the same languages, code-switching might additionally take place (cf. Grosjean 2015 for the
notion of bilingual mode of interaction). While, historically, the L1 was understood as a sepa-
rate autonomous system uninfluenced by L2 learning and use (see, for instance, de Bot et al.
1991), more recent studies – through the advent of more sophisticated online measures – have
demonstrated the bidirectionality of CLI (Cook 2016). According to Herdina and Jessner
(2002), it is not always straightforward to place attrition within CLI phenomena of interfer-
ence, transfer, borrowing, or avoidance (see Riehl 2019 for a description of these phenomena)
or code-switching. In combination with the temporary difficulty apparent in retrieval induced
forgetting paradigms, it may be more fitting to view language attrition as a manifestation of
CLI. Both can then be grouped under the umbrella of crosslinguistic interaction (CLIN), coined
by Herdina and Jessner (2002). Jessner (2008: 275) explains CLIN as
an umbrella term, including not only transfer and interference, but also code-switching
and borrowing. Furthermore, it is also meant to cover another set of phenomena, includ-
ing the cognitive effects of multilingual development. These are nonpredictable dynamic
effects that determine the development of the systems themselves.
From an integrative perspective that aims at combining socio- and psycholinguistic models
to the study of language development in multilinguals, CLIN can be seen as a spectrum that
encompasses both CLI and language attrition.
A holistic approach to attrition

A holistic model that captures the bidirectionality of CLI and the cognitive-affective integra-
tion of CLIN, which also governs attrition is complex dynamic systems theory (CDST). Optiz
(2019: 52) details CDST as a combination of chaos/complexity theory (CT) (see Larsen-Free-
man 1997; Cameron and Larsen-Freeman 2007) and dynamic systems theory (DST) (cf. van
Geert 1991; Herdina and Jessner 2002; de Bot 2007). The most important tenets of complex
dynamic systems in relation to language development are its non-linear interactions and inter-
connectedness of all the elements within the system (Optiz 2012). This means that a migrant
who comes to use an L2 (or L3, L4, etc.) more because of new linguistic setting requirements
might encounter retrieval problems in other languages due to inhibition and lowered activation
levels. Hence, change in one language subsystem impacts other (sub)systems. De Leeuw et al.
246
(2013: 671) further point out that ‘isolating single variables as explanatory may be unproduc-
tive because the impact of one element within the system or subsystems on other elements
and (sub-) systems runs the risk of being ignored’. Therefore, one’s linguistic background,
life experience and social interactions crucially interact and modulate the language develop-
ment process. Thus, to accurately predict and explain attrition processes, a multilingual’s full
background story needs to be holistically examined: their acquisition process, proficiency,
frequency of use, attitudes to the languages in question, etc.
In order to do this, attrition researchers (de Bot 2007; Köpke 2007; Optiz 2012) have sug-
gested studying covariation of clusters of attrition variables or ‘compound factors/composite
determinants’ (Schmid and Dusseldorp 2010) for two reasons: first, it helps to account for and
disentangle variables that are inextricably connected, such as socioeconomic status, educa-
tional level, and migration history. Second, clustering social variables as opposed to studying
them individually allows for the reduction of the number of participants required in a given
study. The intricacies of CDST, including its gradual, non-linear, context-dependent, con-
stantly changing traits, make empirical research very challenging, especially within traditional
frameworks that see variance both within and between attriters as noise (Optiz 2019: 55). In
more recent multilingual investigations, noise is treated as informative, rather than disruptive,
to a better understanding of multilingual outcomes of an individual nested in a given environ-
ment (cf. Pot et al. 2018).
The application of CDST in multilingual contexts was further developed by Herdina and
Jessner (2002). Their proposed dynamic model of multilingualism (DMM) theory builds on the
main tenets of CDST and sees attrition as a natural process of language development in non-
native and native speakers (Jessner and Megens 2019: 282). The DMM outlines two theories
of forgetting: (1) forgetting in relation to time – that is, ‘the longer the phase between learning
and forgetting, the more difficult or less likely the particular recall of an item of information
will be’; (2) forgetting with regards to cognitive interference theory, where there is competition
between the language systems and thus ‘access to information is reduced because old infor-
mation is covered up by new’ (Herdina and Jessner 2002: 94). The model therefore captures
relatively recent retrieval-induced forgetting accounts of attrition (see previous discussion).
In sum, CDST and DMM are holistic approaches to the study of language development that
allow individual narratives to be placed at the centre of the discussion and that have the poten-
tial to shed new light on aspects that have been neglected in past research, especially complex
crosslinguistic interference mechanisms, variance, and non-linearity. Undoubtedly, the under-
standing of language acquisition and language attrition as dynamic multidirectional processes
within an individual in interaction with their environment is promising in creating a meeting
link between sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic approaches to attrition. We exemplify these
links in the following section.
Languages in contact: the role of typology in language attrition

In the discussion so far, we have already highlighted the importance of crosslinguistic interfer-
ence as an integral part of attrition, recently recognized for the two-way process that it is (cf.
Schmid 2011), and the processing effect of frequency and recency of activation that itself is
dictated by an attriter’s setting. The role of linguistic typology – the classification of languages
according to their structural properties, forms, and similarities and differences – forms an
optimal case to better understand multilingual speakers’ attrition experiences against the back-
drop of all of this. After all, this factor has proven to be of great relevance in related fields like
contact linguistics and language acquisition and can thus cut traditionally separated fields to
247
result in a more holistic attrition framework. The aim of examining linguistic typology from a
language contact perspective has traditionally been ‘[t]o predict typical forms of interference
from the sociolinguistic description of a bilingual community and a structural description of its
languages’ (Weinreich 1963: 86, cited in Koptjevskaja-Tamm 2010: 453). It would be interest-
ing to extend this to attrition contexts.
Language typology has impacted language acquisition studies, creating awareness of ‘key
dimensions of language variation that might make a difference to the acquisition process’ and
typology considerations allow for a better understanding of factors that can influence language
acquisition (Bowerman 2010: 591). Inspired by Chomsky’s research (1959, 1965), the late
1960s and early 1970s saw an increase in language acquisition research across languages, with
the aim to compare acquisition processes and thereby shed light on universal features that tell
us more about the human capacity for language acquisition (Bowerman 2010: 593). Thereafter,
research into first language acquisition started to develop into different directions with a clear
formalist/functionalist divide. New angles were being considered including the premise that
children may have a richer set of cognitive capabilities than had been assumed. This cognitively
and functionally minded approach again led to an interaction with the field of linguistic typol-
ogy, as inspired by Greenberg (1966) and other scholars. Typology was useful in determining
differences between the influence of universal properties and the learning environment, the lat-
ter being linked to exposure to a language with a particular structure. Importantly, acquisition
success came to be predicted as an interaction between a child’s cognitive abilities to solve lin-
guistic problems and the intricacy of the acquisition problem as a function of the complexity of
given language’s subsystems (phonology, morphology, and syntax, among others; Bowerman
2010: 593–594), which allowed for typology to become an important explanatory factor. This
line of work became especially prominent in the field of second language acquisition (SLA),
where much focus has since then been on mental grammars, so-called interlanguage grammars,
that can be subject to constraints on learnability, one of which is linguistic typology (Eckman
2010: 1). Eckman (2010) provides an extensive overview of typological generalizations that
have had an impact on learnability explanations given by second language acquisition scholars
over time, such as typological markedness and interlanguage grammars. L3 acquisition stud-
ies have similarly considered the role of typology, L2 status, and frequency of use and level
of proficiency in the languages in interaction (Cenoz 2001, 2003; De Angelis 2007; Lindqvist
2018). In acquisition work, then, linguistic typology has created a bridge between linguistic
features on the one hand and their (cognitive learnability) on the other (see Chiswick and Miller
2004 for difficulties that North Americans have learning other languages). In line with this,
linguistic distance or similarity are sometimes considered as a ‘measure of language difficulty’
(Hutchinson 2005: 1), indicating ‘how difficult it is to learn the foreign language’ (2005: 2).
Extending this line of work, Lindqvist (2018) in her work has taken a so-called psycho-
typological approach that considers learners’ perceptions of the similarities and differences of
certain languages and the effect perceptions have on crosslinguistic transfer. More precisely,
her study of L3 written French, in combination with English and Swedish, revealed that the
learners’ perceptions of relatedness did play a role – that is, there was more reliance on English
as a more closely related language to French compared to Swedish when the learners wrote in
French L3. While the author acknowledges a range of limitations in the study, the important
role of perceptions as linked to typology should be further investigated, and language attrition
presents an ideal setting to do that.
Given the important relationship between language acquisition, language learning, and
language attrition in order to compare and determine explanatory forces for both processes,
the role of language typology still ought to get more attention as a factor to explain language
248
attrition processes. For this, both the fields of contact linguistics and language acquisition
have already attained significant results – typological generalizations – on the role of language
typology that should be tested on language attrition or, more precisely, the typological distance
as an attrition predictor (see also Gürel 2004; Riehl 2019).
Taking psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic perspectives, Riehl (2019) raises the question
where language contact has a role in attrition processes, thereby considering both the individ-
ual and the community perspective. More precisely, she focuses on contact-induced changes
and takes a closer look at borrowing and interference on different linguistic levels. Her study
combined with findings concerning typological generalizations from related fields provide
ideal test cases for evaluating linguistic typology as an attrition predictor. More specifically,
it will be interesting to determine whether greater levels of attrition are found in typologically
more closely related or more distant languages. In other words, will a Portuguese speaker in a
French-speaking environment attrite differently from an English speaker in the same environ-
ment, and how will the effects be observable on different linguistic levels? Will it be possible
to make typological generalizations regarding attrition, possibly mirroring findings related to
linguistic typology in acquisition studies (cf. Keijzer 2010), or will other factors have to be
considered in addition? In line with this, could the psycho-typological approach, as exempli-
fied in Lindqvist’s (2018) acquisition study, also be applied to attrition data, and if so, would
the perception of the attriter regarding language-relatedness have a different attrition effect
than the actual language relationship (if they differ)? In line with this, to better interpret attri-
tion data, the attitudes and motivations linked to different languages and situations by the mul-
tilingual speakers also need to be taken into consideration (see, for instance, Cherciov 2012).
In order to capture all of these different aspects, sociolinguistic narratives are essential. After
all, they do not only allow the researcher to retrieve some general biographical information
from the multilingual speaker/attriter, but they can also shed light on language use and choice
in different communities and networks, language proficiency levels and language dominance,
language acquisition/learning, language attitudes/preferences and motivations, and the social
status and values of languages (Codó 2008: 174).
Further considerations for a unified framework

This chapter has highlighted the bridge that attrition phenomena and attrition research inher-
ently are. Using second language acquisition research as a step, the chapter has detailed the
developmental trajectory of attrition as an independent research field with clear subdivisions.
For years, attrition work has tried to stay within these self-created niches, studying language
repertoire changes in either individuals or communities and targeting socio-affective variables
as determinants in this process or looking at how attrition is manifested in the mind or brain. In
this paper, we have suggested, using (psycho)typology as one exemplar, that such clearly dis-
tinct boundaries do not reflect the expansive range of attrition experiences. Indeed, individuals
cannot be studied in isolation from the environments to which they move. That is why typology
plays such a crucial role: different first language backgrounds may interact differently with the
language newly added to the multilingual mix, creating vastly different outcomes, especially
given that language backgrounds also interact with other socio-affective variables including
perceived language distance. In the chapter, we have stressed the importance of a holistic attri-
tion framework – a framework that is able to take the ‘noise’ that past attrition work has tried
to control by compartmentalizing the field into (sub)niches and let it be at the very heart of
attrition. In this process, we have tried to make a strong case that a truly holistic approach to
attrition requires a merging of sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic approaches to and accounts
249
of attrition. In this way, various attrition phenomena, from expat (community) language change
to the temporary forgetting of L1 items after repeatedly naming items in an L2 or even L3, do
not need separate explanatory frameworks. Sociolinguistic background variables have almost
invariably been used to control for individual differences in psycholinguistic models, but we do
not need to control them. Socio-affective individual differences do not have to be controlled but
multilingual narratives should form the basis of any psycholinguistic investigation, explaining
how language attrition can operate in the mind and how it interacts with acquisition. Already
in 1999, Hansen made the plea for language attrition not to be separated into first and second
language attrition and should, moreover, be studied alongside other language systems in flux:
first language acquisition, second language development (across the lifespan), bilingualism
and multilingualism, language contact, creole and pidgin varieties, and diachronic language
change (Hansen 1999). The bridges are already there, and along the way of attrition research,
signposts have directed researchers to them. It is time to start using them.
Related topics
multilingualism; language and migration; bilingual and multilingual education; psycholinguis-
tic approaches to language learning
Further reading
De Angelis, G., Jessner, U. and Kresi, M. (eds.) (2018) Crosslinguistic Influence and Crosslinguistic
Interaction in Multilingual Language Learning, London: Bloomsbury Academic. (This book explores
the concept of multilingual mind – what it is and how it works. State-of-the-art studies on crossling-
uistic influence, crosslinguistic interaction, metalinguistic awareness, psychotypology, L2 status, and
language proficiency with various language pairings are discussed in order to explain how learning a
new language works in multilingual speakers.)
Herdina, P. and Jessner, U. (2002) A Dynamic Model of Multilingualism: Perspectives of Change in Psy-
cholinguistics, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. (The authors combine theories from second language
acquisition [SLA] research and dynamic systems theory [DST] and put forth a new framework to
study multilingualism. The dynamic model of multilingualism [DMM] is a holistic perspective that
views language development as a non-linear and unpredictable process.)
Montanari, S. and Quay, S. (eds.) (2019) Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Multilingualism: The Fun-
damentals, Boston and Berlin: De Gruyter. (This volume provides an overview of various aspects
related to multilingualism, such as societal multilingualism in different world regions, language use
in multilingual communities, individual language development, and differences between bi- and mul-
tilingualism. The theories and case studies presented in the book contribute to the understanding that
multilingualism is a multifaceted phenomenon that should be investigated under different research
prisms.)
Schmid, M. and Köpke, B. (2017) ‘The relevance of first language attrition to theories of bilingual devel-
opment’, in Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 7(6), John Benjamins Publishing Company. (This
keynote article of the epistemological issue on linguistic approaches to bilingualism challenges pre-
conceived notions of bilingualism and proposes that language development in bilinguals is a dynamic
process and crosslinguistic interference is multidirectional. Thus, the authors call for a theoretical
framework that can be applied to both language acquisition and language attrition studies. The com-
mentaries that follow provide a rich debate of the topic.)
References
Allgäuer-Hackl, E. and Jessner, U. (2019) ‘Cross-linguistic interaction and multilingual awareness’, in S.
Montanari and S. Quay (eds.), Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Multilingualism: The Fundamentals,
Boston and Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 325–349.
250
Anderson, M. C., Bjork, R. A. and Bjork, E. L. (1994) ‘Remembering can cause forgetting: Retrieval
dynamics in long-term memory’, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cogni-
tion, 20(5): 1063–1087. https://doi.org/10.1037//0278-7393.20.5.1063
Appel, R. and Muysken, P. (2005) Language Contact and Bilingualism, Amsterdam: Amsterdam Uni-
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20
Clinical linguistics
Introduction
Clinical linguistics involves the study of how language and communication may be impaired.
In its narrowest and most applied sense, it focuses on the use of linguistics to describe, ana-
lyze, assess, diagnose, and treat communication disorders (e.g. Crystal 1981). However, it is
also commonly taken to include the study of how clinical language data can throw light on the
nature, development, and use of neurotypical language and thus to contribute to the advance-
ment of linguistic theory (Ball et al. 2008). Indeed, it is sometimes only through the analysis of
language breakdown that we become aware of hitherto unknown features of language structure
and function, and this is part of the reason that the discipline has grown considerably over the
last few decades. More recently, Cummings (2008) adopts a definition of clinical linguistics to
include ‘disorders which result from disruption to the wider processes of language transmis-
sion and reception and disorders of the vegetative functions that are an evolutionary precursor
to language’ (p. 1). This definition views clinical linguistics not only as an academic discipline
but also as being part of clinical practice, which covers disorders that speech and language
therapists encounter in different clinical contexts.
The scope of clinical linguistics is broad, to say the least. No level of language organization
from phonetics to discourse is immune to impairment, with problems manifested in both the pro-
duction and comprehension of spoken, written, and signed language across the human lifespan.
The subject matter of clinical linguistics is thus amenable to study through virtually all branches
of linguistics, and various sub-specialisms have been accorded their own distinct labels, such as
clinical phonetics, clinical phonology, clinical pragmatics, and clinical sociolinguistics. The fact
that communication disorders may be manifested linguistically does not necessarily mean that
they will always have a specifically linguistic cause, and thus, if we are interested in explain-
ing them fully, we are inevitably drawn beyond linguistics to its interfaces with other domains
such as physiology, neurology, general, cognition and social interaction. One might thus define
clinical linguistics as ‘the study of communication disorders, with specific emphasis on their
linguistic aspects (while not forgetting how these interact with other domains)’. This cross-
disciplinary perspective is a key feature of clinical linguistics. Such a breadth of focus notwith-
standing, establishing a clear causal link between behavioural symptoms and underlying deficits
is not always easy. For example, there is no clear consensus regarding whether developmental
254 DOI: 10.4324/9781003082637-23
language disorder (DLD, a condition found in otherwise healthy children who have problems
with speech and language) is best attributed to underlying deficits in auditory perception, gen-
eral cognitive processing, a dedicated language module or some combination of all of these
(see below for further discussion). Nevertheless, it is still possible to characterize the linguistic
features of DLD precisely enough to be able to design assessments and remedial programmes. It
is this key grounding in linguistics – and in particular, the focus on linguistic behaviour – which
distinguishes clinical linguistics from related fields such as neurolinguistics and speech and
language pathology, which accord primary importance to the underlying causes of communica-
tion disorders. This important distinction was first outlined by Crystal (1980) in terms of the
‘behavioural’ as opposed to the ‘medical’ model of language pathology.
Our understanding of communication impairment has come a long way in the last hundred
years. As late as the 1920s, Scripture (1923) was still attributing a particular variety of lisp-
ing to neurosis with a recommendation that it be treated using ‘[a]rsenic, quinine, strychnine,
and other tonics, cold rubs, lukewarm or cold half-baths, sprays, moist packs, electrotherapy,
massage, change of climate, and sea baths’ (p. 185). A major milestone in putting the study
and treatment of communication disorders on a more scientific footing, based on the discipline
of linguistics, was Roman Jakobson’s Kindersprache, Aphasie und allgemeine Lautgesetze
(Jakobson 1941) (later published in English as Child Language, Aphasia and Phonological
Universals [Jakobson 1968]), which emphasized the importance of studying systematic pat-
terns of similarity and contrast in clinical language data and relating these to linguistic theory.
The assumption that atypical speech or language, however deviant, must still be systematic and
rule-driven – and thus amenable to analysis – has remained an article of faith among clinical
linguists ever since Jakobson’s work became more widely known in the 1970s.
Jakobson’s influence is evident in publications from the early 1970s particularly in the
USA, the UK, and Scandinavia, though the development of clinical linguistics as a branch of
applied linguistics was given a boost in the UK in particular by the publication of the Quirk
Report (1972) which recommended that the training of speech therapists – whose exposure to
linguistics had hitherto been largely restricted to phonetics – should be extended to embrace
all levels of language organization, and that ‘the would-be practitioner of therapy, whether of
speech or hearing, of reading or of writing must in future regard language as the central core of
his basic discipline’ (6.60). Gradually from the mid-1970s, former two-year diploma courses
were superseded by three-to-four-year bachelor’s degrees in speech and language therapy at
a number of universities across the UK, which resulted in the emergence of a new generation
of speech and language therapists who were not only more linguistically knowledgeable than
their predecessors but also had at their disposal an increasingly extensive linguistic toolkit for
use in assessment, diagnosis, and remediation. The linguists who were recruited to teach these
students in turn became more knowledgeable about communication impairments, which in
many cases influenced the subsequent direction of their linguistic research. The main driving
force behind these developments in the 1970s and 1980s was David Crystal, who set up the
first-degree course in linguistics and language pathology at Reading University in 1976. With
his colleagues, Crystal developed an influential range of analytical procedures for ‘profiling’
the phonological, grammatical, semantic, and prosodic characteristics of developmental and
acquired communication disorders (Crystal et al. 1976; Crystal 1982). Versions of LARSP
(Language Assessment, Remediation, and Screening Procedure), the most widely used, are
now available in many different languages (Ball et al. 2012, 2019). A further milestone was
255
the publication of Clinical Linguistics (Crystal 1981), which consolidated and defined the
field. Although the term ‘clinical linguistics’ had appeared in print earlier (e.g. Baltaxe 1976),
Crystal’s book had accorded the term official status, as it were, and clinical linguistics became
more widely accepted as a distinct subdiscipline of linguistics.
The first issue of the journal Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics (CLP) appeared in 1987,
inviting submissions ‘either applying linguistic/phonetic analytic techniques to clinical prob-
lems, or showing how clinical data contribute to theoretical issues in linguistics/phonetics’
(Ball and Kent 1987: 2), thus acknowledging the reciprocal relationship between language
pathology and linguistic theory. Growing awareness of the inability of the International Pho-
netic Alphabet (IPA) to capture a whole range of articulatory distinctions found in impaired
speech led to the development of a supplementary set of phonetic symbols called ExtIPA
(extended IPA) (Duckworth et al. 1990), which were officially recognized by the International
Phonetic Association and incorporated in its Handbook (International Phonetic Association
1999). Various revision to the ExtIPA have been published, the latest being in 2018 (Ball et al.
2018). CLP became the official journal of the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics
Association (ICPLA; www.icpla.info), which was founded in 1990 and has since raised the
global profile of clinical linguistics through its conferences around the world.
Critical issues and topics in clinical linguistics

Given the broad scope of clinical linguistics as a subdiscipline of linguistics, the topics and
critical issues covered within clinical linguistics include phonetics and phonology, morpho-
syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse.
Phonetics and phonology

The phonetic characteristics of atypical speech may be captured using speech instrumentation
and phonetic transcription, both separately and in combination. Several instrumental methods
exist. Electropalatography, EMA (electromagnetic articulography), and ultrasound have each
been used to explore aspects of articulator activity: tongue, lip, and jaw movements and coor-
dination in different speech disorders (Cleland et al. 2015; Lee et al. 2019). Atypical patterns of
nasal resonance, airflow and pressure, as encountered in speakers with neuromuscular difficul-
ties associated with dysarthria and in speakers with structural abnormalities linked to a history
of cleft palate have been investigated using nasometry and aerodynamic techniques (Whitehill
and Lee 2008). Recently, studies have emerged for less studied languages, providing nor-
mative data using nasometry which enables cross-linguistic comparisons in populations with
and without cleft palate (e.g. Kim et al. 2016, for Mandarin; Martins Sampaio-Teixeira et al.
2019 for Brazilian Portuguese). Laryngography and videofluoroscopy allow the gathering of
detailed and diverse information about vocal fold activity (Abberton and Fourcin 1997) and
spectrography has a long history of application to a wide range of aspects of atypical speech
production from an acoustic perspective (Kent 2003; Lundeborg et al. 2015).
Clinical phonetic transcription can be broad, when used to characterize a speaker’s segmen-
tal or phonemic sound systems, and narrow, when used to capture the fine phonetic detail of
speech output in segmental and prosodic domains, which is often required when dealing with
individuals with cleft palate (Harding and Grunwell 1996), those with hearing impairment
(Teoh and Chin 2009), or those with diverse linguistic backgrounds (McLeod et al. 2017).
There are a range of challenges and pitfalls for anyone attempting to make a phonetic
transcription of radically atypical speech production (Howard and Heselwood 2002), and
256
objections have often been raised regarding its validity and reliability. Some of these objec-
tions have been met by the development of consensus methods where a final version is reached
through discussion among two or more transcribers (Shriberg et al. 1984) and through careful
critiques of the flawed methodological approaches which have sometimes been used to chal-
lenge the value of transcription (e.g. Cucchiarini 1996). Recently, attempts have been made to
use computerised tools to compare phonetic transcriptions, and some of these are freely avail-
able to use (e.g. Bailey et al. 2022; https://aptct.auburn.edu).
Compared with clinical phonetics, which has a pedigree dating back at least as far as
Aristotle (Eldridge 1967), clinical phonology emerged in the 1960s and 1970s at the time
when linguistic approaches generally were beginning to be applied to communication
impairments. Nonetheless, it has proved a hugely influential and creative force in clini-
cal linguistics. Early phoneme and feature-based accounts of atypical sound systems gave
way in the 1980s to the application of natural phonological process analysis to atypical
speech production, particularly in developmental speech difficulties, with work by Ingram
(1976) in the USA and Grunwell (1981) in the UK exerting a huge influence on phonologi-
cal analysis in the clinical context, which still endures today (see, for example, Asad et al.
2018; Mayr et al. 2001). Current clinical phonological approaches are drawn from different
theoretical perspectives, including optimality theory (Gierut and Morrisette 2005), non-lin-
ear approaches (Bernhardt and Stemberger 1998), gestural phonology (Hodson and Jardine
2009), and cognitive/usage-based phonology (Sosa and Bybee 2008), with accompanying
debate about the status of phonological accounts of atypical speech data: are they merely
extremely useful descriptive devices, or do they reflect actual psycholinguistic processes?
Phonological accounts of speech impairment have shown, crucially, that they are not neces-
sarily the product of articulatory constraints but reflect difficulties with the organization and
use of sound segments in words.
Morpho-syntax
Compared to clinical phonetics and phonology, the body of research focusing on morpho-
syntactic issues in clinical data is smaller though it has been steadily growing over the last
couple of decades to include a wide range of languages and phenomena. One of the issues that
has been debated is the extent to which morpho-syntactic impairments result from a deficit in
linguistic knowledge or from processing limitations, therefore inextricably linked with physi-
ology and cognitive processes such as memory and attention. The kind of structural language
deficits evident in Example 1 (e.g. omission of obligatory clause and phrase elements and
problems with agreement and pronominal case marking), spoken by a 51-year-old person with
agrammatic aphasia, are seen by some as the direct consequence of damage to a language mod-
ule, in line with an innate modularity view (Clahsen 2008), whereas others attempt to explain
such deficits as a secondary consequence of processing limitations (Leonard 2014)
Example 1
and then yeah . well . waste of time . cos mother . here everyday . sit down you know .
mm . go and . clean . forget about it . and then er . me said well rubbish that . rubbish . er .
doctor come for me [‘.’ = a short pause].
(Perkins and Varley 1996)
Similar debates have also been going on in research into developmental language disorder
(DLD), formerly referred to as specific language impairment (SLI), where questions have
257
been asked as to whether the language deficits seen in children with DLD result from lack of
linguistic knowledge or whether the language deficits result from non-linguistic/processing
factors and the role played by the developmental process itself. Some argue, for example, that
the purported modular independence of linguistic and cognitive functions found in adults is not
present – at least to such a large extent – in infants and is largely a consequence of maturation.
Thus, early difficulties of non-linguistic nature may impact on other processing areas including
language, setting in train a complex chain of compensatory adaptations with knock-on effects
for the whole organism (Karmiloff-Smith 1998). The initial trigger may be entirely unrelated
to language – for example, a problem with auditory processing or procedural memory (Tallal
and Piercy 1973; Ullman and Pierpont 2005).
Semantics
Clinical interest in semantics has focused mainly on gaps in the lexicon, problems with lexical
access (or word finding), and thematic/semantic relations. The first is illustrated by the fact
that it is not uncommon to find individuals with aphasia who are unable to name members of
specific semantic categories such as vegetables, fruit, body parts, and tools (Caramazza 2000),
although it is also common for individuals with aphasia to retrieve common words (Schuchard
and Middleton 2018). This is sometimes seen as the direct consequence of a lack of conceptual
knowledge rather than as a purely semantic problem. In many cases, though, there is clear
conceptual understanding but an inability to retrieve a word and link it to its referent, as in
Example 2 from a conversation involving P who has anomic aphasia.
Example 2
T can you tell me what you are wearing on your wrist? [pointing to his watch]
P it’s er – [sighs] what I put on my hair on . er not my hair . er – [tuts] put it right er .
[sighs] dear dear dear get it . I’ll get it in a minute [looks at watch and shakes his
head] it’s not going through.
The issues that have been discussed in the literature include how theoretical models of lexical
access can be applied to clinical data (Schwartz et al. 2006). Within the literature on develop-
mental language disorders, topics have revolved around the underlying nature of word finding
difficulties, such as phonological and semantic representations, the size and depth of the lexi-
con, and how lexical skills are acquired compared to typically developing peers.
Pragmatics and discourse

Pragmatics and discourse analysis have proved particularly helpful in characterizing the com-
munication difficulties manifested in conditions, such as autism spectrum disorders, traumatic
brain injury (TBI), and right hemisphere brain damage (RHD), whose underlying causes are
usually seen as being primarily neurological and cognitive rather than linguistic. People with
autism, for example, can find it difficult to work out precisely what others mean by what they
say, as in Example 3:
Example 3
Adult: can you turn the page over?
Child with autism: yes (makes no move to turn the page)
258
Individuals with TBI are known for wandering off topic, as in Example 4:
Example 4
I have got faults and . my biggest fault is . I do enjoy sport . it’s something that I’ve always
done . I’ve done it all my life . I’ve nothing but respect for my mother and father and . my
sister . and basically sir . I’ve only come to this conclusion this last two months . and . as
far as I’m concerned . my sister doesn’t exist.
(Perkins et al. 1995: 305)
The challenge for clinical linguists is to explain such behaviours in ways which are both theo-
retically coherent and practically useful. Extensive use has been made of constructs and con-
cepts from pragmatic theories, such as speech act theory, Gricean conversational implicature,
and relevance theory to characterize pragmatically anomalous communication, but although
these provide a useful set of descriptive labels for assessment purposes (e.g. we could describe
Example 3 in terms of a lack of illocutionary uptake on the part of the child or a failure to derive
the adult’s intended implicature), in explanatory terms we are still only scratching the surface.
For example, how do we differentiate between symptoms and causes for remedial purposes?
An alternative, non-reductionist approach is to see pragmatic and discourse impairment as
being located in the social space constituted by communicating dyads and groups rather than
being solely attributable to an underlying deficit within an individual. A number of studies
using conversation analysis, for example, have shown that people with neurological and/or
cognitive deficits who have been diagnosed with pragmatic impairment on the basis of formal
assessments in laboratory conditions are still, nonetheless, capable of considerable pragmatic
sophistication outside the constraints of the testing situation (e.g. Schegloff 2003). A related
line of research, which gives equal weight to the contribution of the conversational partner,
has demonstrated that in some cases, the effect of some supposed deficit within an individual
may be exacerbated – or alternatively ‘neutralized’ – at the level of the dyad by the actions of
the interlocutor (Muskett et al. 2010).
One way of integrating these various different perspectives is to see pragmatic/discourse
impairment not as some unitary condition uniquely caused by an underlying neurological or
cognitive deficit within the individual, nor as being a purely socially construct, but instead as
an epiphenomenal consequence of all of these. The so-called emergentist account sees prag-
matic and discourse problems as a by-product of the way in which neurological, cognitive,
linguistic, and even sensorimotor difficulties play out in dyadic or group interaction (Perkins
2008). Such an approach also acknowledges the fact that pragmatic impairment is not a unitary
condition. Indeed, the label has been applied to a wide array of disparate behaviours in addition
to those already illustrated, such as problems with fluency, prosody, lexical selection, cohesion,
eye contact, turn taking, stylistic variation, and sociolinguistic sensitivity (Perkins 2007).

Within the field of clinical phonetics and phonology, current contributions include work on
how to use a psycholinguistic framework for the diagnosis and treatment of speech disorders.
Terband et al. (2019) propose a process-oriented approach which entails a distinction between
developmental delay and developmental disorder. The approach assumes a very detailed analy-
sis of speech production and perception, applying concepts from phonetics and phonology,
such as phonological representations and phonotactic rules. These process-oriented approaches
259
have been used successfully in recent studies (Iuzzini-Seigel et al. 2015; Terband et al. 2018;
Geronikou and Rees 2016).
The last couple of decades have also seen a significant increase in research on phono-
logical profiles in typically and atypically developing children speaking different languages,
such as Putonghua (a standard spoken form of modern Mandarin Chinese) (Wu et al. 2020);
Vietnamese (Le et al. 2022). Other recent research developments include the creation of
speech corpora of individuals with speech/language/communication disorders, which are
invaluable resources for education and research. The DisorderedSpeechBank is a venture
initiated by Nicole Müller and Martin Ball in 2015. The project was later renamed DELAD,
(Database Enterprise for Language and Speech Disorders) and is currently in progress, with
researchers currently working on a number of languages, including Catalan, Croatian, Dutch,
English, Finnish, French, German, Irish, Norwegian, Polish, Spanish, Swedish, and Welsh
(Lee et al. 2022).
Furthermore, while phonological analyses have traditionally focused on single word pro-
duction, research over the past 15 years has pointed to the value of examining the phonetics
and phonology of longer utterances and in particular how connected speech processes and
the organization of words into longer prosodic domains also demonstrates consistent pat-
terns and strategies which can be directly related to speaker intelligibility, where a speaker’s
intelligibility in single words may differ radically from their intelligibility in longer utter-
ances (Howard 2007). Recently, the connected speech transcription protocol (CoST-P) was
developed and trialled on the transcription of speech of children with childhood apraxia of
speech (Barrett et al. 2020). Although preliminary in nature, the protocol is promising, and it
provides information on features unique to connected speech, such as the presence of inap-
propriate inter-word segregation and juncture, but future research is needed to determine
whether features such as juncture may be beneficial in the assessment and diagnoses of
clinical cases.
Regarding current research into morpho-syntax and its clinical linguistic applications, the
current state of affairs seems to be one of emerging new data from less studied languages and
perhaps less focus on specific theoretical approaches and more emphasis and acknowledge-
ment of the fact that impairments, such as aphasia and DLD, have non-linguistic underlying
mechanisms. Although aphasia and DLD have attracted the most attention from clinical lin-
guists because of the supposedly specifically linguistic nature of the impairment, they are in
fact frequently accompanied by non-linguistic problems, and it would probably be more accu-
rate to regard them as one end of a continuum of linguistic-cognitive disorders. For example,
there has been a thriving body of research into deficits in phonological short-term memory
being one of the underlying mechanisms of the language difficulties of children with DLD and
a possible clinical marker (Gathercole and Baddeley 1990; Graf Estes et al. 2007; Taha et al.
2021). Furthermore, a growing body of research has also been documenting non-linguistic
deficits in aphasia and correlations between linguistic and non-linguistic deficits (Gonzalez
et al. 2020).
Recent research in the domain of pragmatics and discourse has been building further on
the seminal work by Herbert Paul Grice, by focusing on communicative intentions of the
speaker during communication where communicative intentions are situated in a model of
mental state attributions. Using such a framework allows one to explain pragmatic impairments
as limitations in the ability to attribute mental states (mentalizing) essential for effective com-
munication (Cummings 2021). Mentalizing skills can be targeted in interventions, and there
is a growing body of evidence (Parsons et al. 2017) about the possible effectiveness of such
interventions in children with autism spectrum disorder.
260
The linguistics tradition

Because of its inherent interdisciplinarity, clinical linguistics embraces a wide range of research
methods, including the linguistic tradition and the social and medical sciences. The core of the
discipline, with its roots in the earlier work of Jakobson and Crystal, has been the qualitative
research paradigms of mainstream linguistics. One strong tradition, typified by Crystal’s lan-
guage profiles (Crystal 1982), is that of linguistic fieldwork and language description. In the
case of clinical linguistics, the ‘field’ is typically the speech and language therapy clinic/or
another clinical setting. In this tradition, the emphasis is on naturalistic language data, which
is audio- or video-recorded and then transcribed and analyzed. Analysis involves the iden-
tification of systematic patterns in the data, making use of either pre-determined or ad hoc
categories as appropriate. In both cases, but particularly in the latter, hypotheses are commonly
reached inductively, then subsequently tested and revised by returning to the data iteratively.
Because clinical intervention usually focuses on the individual, there has been a strong tradi-
tion of individual case studies. However, larger diagnostic groups can also be identified based
on their linguistic characteristics, and an increasing number of clinical language corpora are
available in repositories, such as CHILDES and TalkBank (http://talkbank.org/), as are increas-
ingly sophisticated computational tools for their analysis, such as CLAN (MacWhinney 2000).
In addition to the data-driven, naturalistic corpus approach, which focuses on language
behaviour and its products, the theory-driven generative perspective on language as knowledge
is also well represented in clinical linguistics (for an overview, see Clahsen 2008). Over the
years, various categories and concepts from generative grammar have been used as explanatory
tools to account for atypical language patterns. For example, the difficulties experienced by
people with Broca’s aphasia in understanding passive sentences have been described by refer-
ring to the deletion of movement traces (Grodzinsky 2000) under what is known as the trace
deletion hypothesis. The differences in the production of wh-questions and yes/no questions
by people with aphasia speaking different languages has been explained by reference to the
tree pruning hypothesis (Friedmann 2002). Difficulties with tense marking in children with
developmental language disorder have been explained by referring to the optional infinitive
hypothesis (Rice et al. 1995).
Complementing the focus on the treatment of individuals, clinicians also need to be able
to allocate each individual to one or more larger diagnostic groups whose nature and char-
acteristics are established using the methods of the social sciences, in particular psychology.
These typically involve either small or large group studies using both clinical populations and
neurotypical controls in which hypotheses are tested through experimentation and the results
analyzed using statistical analysis.
More importantly, as the need for evidence-based speech and language therapy practice has
increased, so has the focus shifted to creating more robust and higher quality evidence from
speech, language, and communication studies where experimental designs are higher up the
evidence pyramid than individual case studies (Murad et al. 2016). Thus, clinical linguistics
also interacts with medical and health sciences. Furthermore, underlying anatomical, physi-
ological, and neurological ‘causes’ of speech, language, and communication disorders have
become increasingly amenable to analysis through technological advances in research methods
such as neuroimaging (e.g. Friederici 2017).
Another approach, which has been gaining ground in clinical linguistics in the past cou-
ple of decades is that of ethnography, which sees communication as an integral feature of
261
contextualized social action. Rather than targeting underlying linguistic and cognitive deficits,
analytical methods such as Conversation Analysis (Dindar et al. 2016; Wilkinson 2008) see
communication impairment as a function of the way individuals orient to each other, and are
based on fine-grained analysis of interaction, turn by turn, in usually non-contrived settings.

Clinical linguistics has informed speech and language therapy practice since its emergence as
a discipline. It has provided tools for linguistic analysis of clinical data, detailed description of
the way speech/language/communication are impaired in different clinical populations and in
different languages, and theoretical frameworks which allow systematic data interpretation and
explanation. For example, the theoretical framework of natural phonology (Stampe 1969, 1973)
has informed the assessment and clinical practice of phonological disorders. Many standard-
ized speech, language, and communication assessments have been designed based on research
findings from clinical linguistics. For example, the Language Assessment, Remediation, and
Screening Procedure (LARSP) (Crystal et al. 1976, Crystal 1982; Ball et al. 2012, 2019) has
been used widely in different countries to inform clinicians about relative linguistic strengths
and weaknesses and inform further assessment and treatment. The work by Susan Ebbels and
colleagues on shape coding relies on clinicians using their extensive grammatical knowledge
in order to select specific targets (whether that’s tense marking, noun phrases, or verb phrases,
among others) to improve the grammatical skills of children and adolescents with developmen-
tal language disorder (Balthazar et al. 2020; Ebbels 2014). The extensive work by Mabel Rice
and colleagues on tense marking deficits found in children with DLD within domain-specific
approaches to language disorders has resulted in the creation of the Test of Early Grammati-
cal Impairment (TEGI) based on a domain-specific view of language, is a sensitive tool used
in the clinical setting which allows the clinician to obtain detailed knowledge about a child’s
tense marking and importantly to be able to disentangle phonological from morphological
problems (Rice and Wexler 2001). Usage-based approaches (domain-general) for explaining
clinical data have proven promising in the remediation of difficulties with passives in children
with developmental language disorder (Riches 2013). In summary, the literature suggests that
research into clinical linguistics has gone almost hand in hand with the development of a range
of assessment tools for speech/language/communication difficulties, with perhaps a bit of a
lag in applying research findings to inform clinical interventions. Thus, there is still plenty
of scope in the field to develop and trial intervention protocols informed by current research.
Future directions
Clinical linguistics has grown extensively as a discipline over the last few decades. While
focusing primarily on the linguistic and phonetic characteristics of communication disorders,
it is typified by an awareness of other interlinked areas of processing, such as neurology, cog-
nition, and social interaction. This inherent multidisciplinarity is also evident in the variety
of research methods used, including linguistic, social, and medical sciences. Among its many
achievements, clinical linguistics has demonstrated that it is possible to enhance our under-
standing of language structure and use through an awareness of how it can go wrong.
Looking to the future, a number of sub-areas within clinical linguistics are likely to prove
particularly influential in the years ahead. Work in genetics and neuroscience, aided by tech-
nological advances in brain imaging, has the potential to transform our understanding of com-
munication disorders and the way that language is represented in the brain. Linked to this
262
is a growing interest in focusing on the interfaces between different areas of linguistic and
cognitive functioning rather than on their properties in isolation – that is, on their associations
rather than their dissociations. This is very much in line with a recent proposal by Botting and
Marshall (2017) in which they appeal to the research community to work together in amalgam-
ating the strengths of the domain-specific and domain-general approaches to describe clinical
impairment of language and communication.
A related growth area for the study of clinical populations is the way in which spoken
language functions as an integral component of a multimodal signalling system together with
other components, such as gesture, posture and eye gaze, and the crucial role played by com-
munication partners and the social context. Another expanding area of study, which is helping
to refine the distinction between universal and local properties of language, is the way in which
communication disorders vary across speakers of different languages and how they may mani-
fest differently in speakers of more than one language. Finally, corpora of disordered language
have grown over the years, thus affording the opportunity to understand how the same phenom-
ena may manifest in different languages informing differential diagnoses of communication
disorders and intervention.
Related topics
neurolinguistics; psycholinguistics; medical communication, grammar; lexis, phonetics and
phonology
Further reading
Ball, M. J., Perkins, M. R., Müller, N. and Howard, S. (eds) (2008). Handbook of Clinical Linguistics.
Oxford: Blackwell. (The most comprehensive overview of clinical linguistics to date, with authorita-
tive contributions from leading researchers in the field)
Cummings, L. (ed) (2008) Clinical Linguistics, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. (A great col-
lection of chapters which document the wider scope of clinical linguistics, incorporating linguistic
description within speech and language therapy clinical practice)
Damico, J. S., Ball, M. J. and Müller, N. (eds) (2021) The Handbook of Language and Speech Disorders,
second edition. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. (A linguistically well-informed overview of a comprehen-
sive range of communication disorders)
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21
Language and ageing
Lihe Huang
Introduction
Studies on ageing in language are essential for exploring language development and neuro-
cognitive changes of human beings. Substantial development of studies of linguistic change
and the ageing process has focused the work into a multidisciplinary one involving different
perspectives and practices. Critical issues in the study of language and ageing include the lin-
guistic decline or disorders in ageing or age-related diseases, the psycholinguistic explanation,
and socio-pragmatic exploration of older adults’ communication and language as resources for
clinical intervention or successful ageing.
Different terms have been used in previous studies of language and ageing. This chapter uses
gerontolinguistics, a term adopted by Lütjen (1978) when exploring older adults’ difficulty in
finding words, to categorize all the studies of linguistic change in the ageing process, socio-
pragmatic exploration of older adults’ communication, clinical practice of linguistic attempts in
age-related diseases diagnosis or intervention, and language as resources for successful ageing.
Historically, language features in ageing have been an active topic since early experimental
investigations in cognitive ageing and psychology (Burke and Shafto 2008: 373). As early as
the 1960s and 1970s, scholars attempted to understand the mechanism of older adults’ speech
processing (e.g. Wetherick 1965; Craik and Masani 1967; Riegel 1968) and analyzed the lan-
guage of older adults with dementia (Irigaray 1973; de Ajuriaguerra and Tissot 1975). Later,
Cohen (1979) pointed out that geriatric psycholinguistics is an unexplored field. Since then,
developmental psychology, psycholinguistics, and other experimental paradigms have become
the dominant research strand of geriatric linguistics (de Bot 2007). Thereafter, scholars con-
ducted more extended analyses of the features of vocabulary, syntax, semantics, pragmatics,
and narration in healthy older adults and those with dementia in the 1980s and 1990s. For
example, age-related declines in the linguistic ability were found in normative studies, includ-
ing vocabulary decline (Albert et al. 1988), syntactic processing deficit (Kemper 1986), or more
repetition and redundancy in discourse level (Obler 1983). Meanwhile, the early influential
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082637-24 267

Lihe Huang
studies of dementia communication also arose (Hamilton 1994; Shakespeare 1998), and the
study of language in dementia gradually became a focus for clinical linguistic analyses (Davis
and Guendouzi 2013: 21). With the development of studies of cognitive ageing and linguistic
performance, Makoni (1997: 63) reused the word gerontolinguistics to refer to ‘work in lan-
guage and ageing’ in general, and then referred to the study of discourse between older adults
and caregivers from a socio-pragmatic perspective in Makoni and Grainger (2002). Currently,
researchers are focusing more on clinical pragmatics, covering the topics of pragmatic assess-
ment, pragmatic disorders, and socio-pragmatic issues in the interactions of healthy older adults
or those with dementia. In this sense, the scope of gerontolinguistics has been expanded. Now
this term has gone beyond a descriptive label and has been shaped into a name for a theoretical,
interpretive, and applied research field of language and ageing (Huang 2022).
Psycholinguistic perspectives
Language problems faced by older adults are mainly the deterioration of language ability and
linguistic disorders caused by physiological and pathological ageing. Physiological ageing
refers to typical physiological degradation, while pathological ageing refers to the neurocog-
nitive changes caused by different factors including ageing-related diseases. Current studies
mainly focus on the cognitive ageing mechanism behind linguistic performance of typical age-
ing in older adults and the language impairment they suffer from age-related diseases (Roncero
and de Almeida 2014; Cummings 2017; Sherratt and Bryan 2019).
Physiological ageing and language change

The well-being of older adults’ linguistic life is generally overlooked, except that they present
language impairment and communication failure (Gu 2019). Actually, typical physiological
ageing will also result in language change, in which the most observable one is perhaps voice
ageing. It involves a widespread change in the physiology of phonatory organs: including
thinning of laryngeal mucosa; atrophy of vocal muscles; relaxation and weakening of facial
muscles, chewing muscles, and pharyngeal muscles; ossification and calcification of the lar-
ynx cartilage; degeneration of mucosal glands; loss of lung elasticity; hardening of the chest;
and weakening of respiratory muscles, etc. Therefore, older adults will experience changes
in sound quality, reduced formant frequencies, sound tremors, and decreased volume. For
instance, in women, speaking fundamental frequency has a slight drop (approximately 10–15
Hz) as the result of hormonal changes during menopause resulting in vocal cord edema; in
men, fundamental frequency rises substantially (approximately 35 Hz) into advanced old age
compared with middle age (Linville 1996: 191). Ageing will lead to a decline in peripheral
auditory sensitivity (Schneider and Pichora-Fuller 2000) and central auditory function (Lister
et al. 2011), and the sound frequency coding function will be weakened. Additionally, age-
related decline is also seen in retrieval of phonological and orthographic information about a
word (Thornton and Light 2006).
Cognitive ageing and language decline

Current studies show that the fundamental cause of language ageing is the structural degrada-
tion of the brain, manifested in impaired processing speed, memory, inhibition ability, and so
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on (Shafto and Tyler 2014). Cognitive ageing leads to a variety of changes in linguistic perfor-
mance. Overall, the ability of word recognition and comprehension declines, the efficiency of
word and sentence processing is reduced, and sentence comprehension with complex syntax
becomes difficult; language production manifests as difficulty in naming, reduced vocabulary
fluency, syntactic complexity decline, and difficulty in recalling propositions and producing
complex sentences. Meanwhile, discourse comprehension and production are also affected by
the ageing process. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to list all the language features here,
but some key aspects are as follows:
Lexical semantics
Under such cognitive change in the ageing process, the most dominant linguistic performance
in lexical level is the tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) phenomenon, also called word-retrieval dif-
ficulty. Although both younger and older adults experience occasional TOT problems due to
weak access to phonological representations, TOTs markedly increase across an individual’s
lifespan. This is believed to be one of the most typical pieces of evidence in cognitive ageing
due to phonological retrieval deficit. Studies also suggest that older adults make more errors
in picture naming (objects or actions) than young adults. More recent explorations show that
vocabulary ability scores level off in late adulthood, but start to decline sometime after the
age of 70 (Burke and Shafto 2008: 406–407). Additionally, there are greater semantic priming
effects for older adults than young adults, but the cause is uncertain: larger priming effects
for older adults are caused either by cognitive decline or by an increase in the interconnected
nature of the semantic network due to experience. Studies also conclude that semantic concep-
tual representations underlying language meaning at the word, sentence, or discourse level are
relatively well preserved in healthy ageing. Older adults may score higher than young adults in
the lexical semantics test. However, the influencing factors may vary, including education and
verbal experience. The causes for this phenomenon need further discussion.
Sentence comprehension
Older adults’ sentence comprehension capacity may be negatively influenced due to working
memory decline. Cognitive ageing has a certain impact on individuals when they produce
morpho-syntax with excessive cognitive load. In the process of ageing, an individual’s syn-
tactic structures with higher complexity and lower frequency of use will decrease. There is an
overall age-related decrement in the complexity of older adults’ speech, but this decrement
is more precipitous for certain sentence patterns. For example, older adults tend to use right-
branching construction in both spoken and written language (Kemper et al. 1989). This phe-
nomenon is related to the decrease in working memory capacity, and the leftward expansion
structure causes greater burden on the speaker’s working memory, which makes older adults
more inclined to the less cognitively burdened form when producing certain types of sentences.
Discourse comprehension
The current outcomes of discourse processing and ageing has been somehow equivocal. On the
one hand, discourse comprehension is particularly important for assessing age-related process-
ing deficits. This is because discourse comprehension is related to working memory, which
requires integrating concepts and maintaining thematic information over multiple sentences.
On the other hand, given age-related declines in cognitive domains, the strategic management
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of resource allocation may provide older adults the possibility to maintain discourse process-
ing abilities. Some researchers find that the age-related growth in crystallized abilities (the
accumulation of knowledge, facts, and skills that are acquired throughout life) may give older
adults an advantage in discourse processing, and the previously accumulated experience may
enable them to allocate processing resources. Meanwhile, researchers also believe that using
discourse-level features, such as the situation model, enables older adults to ‘create a distinct
and elaborated text-base on par with that of the young’ (Stine-Morrow and Soederberg Miller
2002). The situation model (van Dijk and Kintsch 1983) regards language as a set of processing
instructions on how to construct a mental representation of the described situation rather than
treating language as information to analyze syntactically and semantically and then store in the
memory (Zwaan and Radvansky 1998), which means that this model refers to representational
content over language form. Older adults may have a bias towards top-down processing, but
obviously more research is needed to determine why they prioritize situation model formation
and other discourse-level processing during discourse comprehension.
Pathological ageing and language deficits

Pathological ageing refers to the cognitive impairment of older adults suffering from neu-
rocognitive diseases (such as neurodegenerative disease, stroke, hypertension, and diabetes,
etc.), resulting in language impairment, which can be manifested at multiple language levels
including phonetics, vocabulary, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics.
Dementia is the general term used to describe a number of different brain degenera-
tive diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease (AD), vascular dementia (VD), frontotemporal
dementia (FTD), and dementia in Parkinson’s disease (PD) and Huntington’s disease (HD).
These neurodegenerative diseases manifest similar clinical features and linguistic impair-
ment, but their neuropathological origins vary. Language deficits will be typically noticeable
from the early stage of the disease. In clinics, many subtle changes in language level are
measurable (Mesulam et al. 2008; Ahmed et al. 2013), with the help of effective neuro-
psychological rating scales, such as cognitive screening scales (MMSE, MoCA-B, DRS),
overall cognitive function rating scales (ADAS-cog, SIB, CDR), and language proficiency
scales (BNT, VFT, ABC, WAB), in that language-related items are essentially included in
these scales. For example, studies have shown that, for AD patients, the pathology may
cause damage in the brain for many years, even several decades, before it can be effec-
tively diagnosed (Wang 2019: 613). Yet they will have some early manifestations, including
growing difficulty in word retrieval, impaired auditory and written comprehension, empty
speech content, and semantic paraphasia. Moreover, in AD patients’ speech, syntactic errors
increase and syntactic processing problems appear; discourse comprehension and produc-
tion deficits occur; in the later course of the disease, the patient’s linguistic competence is
severely impaired. From a clinical point of view, however, linguistic impairment of older
adults with AD does not occur simultaneously at all levels. Table 21.1 shows that from MCI
to severe AD, language characteristic changes appear at almost all language levels, from
phonetics-phonology to discourse-pragmatics.
Lexical-semantic damage in AD patients’ speech is the first to be noticed by researchers
in these clinical manifestations, and AD impairs the sentence construction ability, especially
at the later stage (Huang et al. 2022a). However, some researchers have also found that AD
patients suffer more in narrative discourse coherence and cohesion (Croisile et al. 1996, etc.).
With the development of the disease, there exists a significant difference between pragmatic
speech ability of patients and healthy controls, which is deemed as a language marker for
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Table 21.1 Language characteristic changes from MCI to severe AD (Szatloczki et al. 2015: 4)
Language characteristic changes MCI Mild AD Moderate AD Severe AD
Phonetics-phonology
Temporal changes in spontaneous speech + + ++ +++
(increasing hesitation number and time)
Phonemic paraphasia + + ++ +++
Lexical-semantics
Word fnding and word retrieval diffculties + + ++ +++
Verbal fuency diffculties Phonemic (letter) + + ++ +++
Semantic + + ++ +++
Semantic paraphasia ? + ++ +++
Syntax
Reduced syntactic complexity − − + +++
Agrammatisms − − − +++
Discourse-pragmatics
Reduction in productive and receptive −/+ + ++ +++
discourse-level processing
+: linguistic impairments
−: no clinical manifestation
differential diagnosis (Ripich and Terrell 1988; Bucks et al. 2000; Drummond et al. 2015; Ash
and Grossman 2015, etc.).
Socio-pragmatic perspectives
Decline in language processing capability, such as increased difficulty in understanding spo-
ken language or in producing words or sentences, will weaken older adults’ ability and desire
to communicate (Burke and Shafto 2008: 373). The socio-pragmatic study of language and
ageing refers to pragmatic and discourse perspective exploration concerning how older adults
experience language and ageing. Current research on the pragmatic-discourse level has con-
cluded that, compared with the healthy groups, cognitive-impaired individuals show more
obvious and severe obstructive discourse characteristics and insufficient discourse coherence.
Analytic theories, such as speech act theory, cooperation principle, relevance theory, polite-
ness principle, and other classic pragmatic theories, have been used to analyze communicative
intentions in older adults’ discourse and reveal interaction patterns between them and their
interlocutors.
Discourse-pragmatic impairment
Discourse-pragmatic impairment is one of the significant language disorders in dementia
patients. Therefore, differences in pragmatic communication and social interaction between
healthy and cognitive-impaired older adults have always been attention-focused. Dijkstra
et al. (2004) examined patterns of discourse-building and discourse-impairing features in con-
versations between conversation partners and healthy older adults and those with dementia.
The former refers to discourse features that contribute to the continuation of the conversa-
tion, including cohesion, coherence, and conciseness; the latter refers to features that hinder
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Lihe Huang
the conversation’s continuation. Some discourse features, such as topic maintenance, elabo-
rations on a specific topic, and disruptive topic shifts, can contain both discourse-building
and discourse-impairing components. Dijkstra et al.’s study revealed a higher frequency of
discourse-building features for healthy older adults compared to those with dementia. Con-
versely, discourse-impairing features, such as disruptive topic shifts and empty phrases, were
found more often in conversations of older adults with dementia. Furthermore, Davis (2005)
analyzed the pragmatic functions of the three discourse markers well, oh, and so in the dis-
course of Alzheimer’s patients, pointing out that the development of AD will influence the use
of discourse markers. Ripich et al. (1991) compared the differences in the use of speech act
categories between AD patients and healthy older adults; the study found that the use of reques-
tives and assertives presented a significant difference.
Social interaction perspectives

These studies include face maintenance and threats to older adults’ communication; image
and identity; narrative discourses of old age, illness, and death; the decline and ageing of older
adults’ bilingual (or multilingual) ability, etc.
Identity and face issue

Interaction between older adults and caregivers has shaped a specific speech variation (Cou-
pland et al. 1991; Nussbaum and Coupland 1995). The basic point of such research is that the
interaction between the meaning of ‘ageing’ in the discourse and the identity of individual
ageing is a socially constructive behaviour (Coupland 2009: 859). N. Coupland and J. Coup-
land presented their research outcomes in the 1990s, emphasizing the use of multi-perspective
methods (such as sociolinguistics, social psychology, etc.) and paying attention to the social
dimension of ageing. For example, their research examined older adults’ language use in
reviewing life courses, age-telling or age-disclosure, intergenerational interactions, and per-
sonal identities construction.
The importance of exploring how AD patients, with various levels of language disorders,
construct their identities and maintain face in pragmatic interaction with others is also acknowl-
edged. For example, Hamilton (1994) explored the significant role of language in building and
maintaining a relative social identity by analyzing two spontaneous dialogues between an AD
patient and researcher. Guendouzi and Müller (2006: 164) propose that evaluating the concept
of self-identity is part of understanding the critical perspectives of AD patients since self-
identity involves communicative context, speakers’ feedback, working memory, and social
experience. Hamilton (2019) investigates the cognition challenge and face issue of dementia
patients in their everyday life settings. Huang et al. (2022b) conclude that AD patients adopt
both verbal and non-verbal strategies to bridge linguistic impairments to enhance the prag-
matic effects of their identity, which shows that self-identity construction helps them generate
a discourse strategy when encountering pragmatic impairment. They will utilize multimodal
resources, including prosodic features and non-verbal acts, to help themselves perform speech
acts and unfold face-saving pragmatic strategies under the pragmatic compensation mecha-
nism (Huang et al. 2023; Huang and Che 2023). Additionally, in the last one or two decades, the
study of individual autobiographical narration based on positioning theory also provokes new
exploration of older adults’ identity research in sociolinguistics, which reveals the discursive
positioning of the person with both healthy cognition and dementia (Sabat and Harré 1999;
Guendouzi and Müller 2006: 150–153). These studies discovered the pragmatic functions of
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AD identity and further confirmed that patients frequently retain individual pragmatic aware-
ness despite their linguistic impairment.
Older adults’ interaction in caregiving

In nursing and family-care interaction, it has been noted that oversimplified talk is often uti-
lized by people talking to older adults, especially to dementia patients. An increasing number
of studies pay attention to ‘elderspeak’, a register of speech used with older adults, described
as ‘slow speech rate, exaggerated intonation, elevated pitch and volume, simple vocabulary,
reduced grammatical complexity, changes in affect, collective pronoun substitutions, diminu-
tives, and repetition’ (Corwin 2018: 724). Although the intention of caregivers is to help older
adults understand and to promote efficiency of communication, many studies have found that
the use of ‘elderspeak’ will lead older adults to more communication difficulties, communi-
cation skills reduction, negative self-assessment, social isolation, and decline of social com-
munication skills and cognitive function, which is associated with negative health outcomes
(Ryan et al. 1995; Williams et al. 2003; Williams 2011). Another rising research topic in this
field is communication in dementia caregiving. Individuals with AD experience cognitive and
behavioural impairments that affect their ability to communicate, and caregivers will perceive
communication to be problematic at each stage of the disease. However, the ways of looking
at dementia caregiving and how to interact with dementia patients are not always available
in practice. Therefore, practical and adaptable discussions of communicative interactions in
dementia caregiving have received a growing interest from linguistics, gerontology, and nurs-
ing researchers (Davis and Maclagan 2022). Some communication strategies have been devel-
oped to accommodate declining language and cognitive functioning in AD patients, which
shows the effort to improve communication quality (Small and Gutman 2002).
Clinical and medical interaction

Older patients seeking medical treatment is also a topic that has attracted rising research atten-
tion, which includes the linguistic performance of older adults in the interaction of seeking
medical treatment, the influence of the viewpoint of life and death on older adults’ treatment-
seeking conversation, communication skills and strategies in diagnosis, treatment and care, and
conversational features and psychological counselling of older adults suffering from diseases.
Additionally, the study of interaction of both older patients and medical staff in medical-care
interaction also provokes a series of socio-pragmatic explorations, including older patients’
inquiries and needs for health information in doctor-patient interactions, ageism in medical-
care interactions, topic-initiating and turn-taking in the medical primary care encounter, how
social and medical framings of talk are established and blended, interaction for better under-
standing and execution of medical orders despite low literacy, remote medical service and
doctor-patient interaction, etc. These research outcomes will encourage medical staff to present
more productive decision-making conversations with older adults.
When thinking about socio-pragmatics applied in the study of language and ageing, read-
ers should bear in mind that ‘several threads are interwoven’ (Davis and Guendouzi 2013:
19). Pragmatic research in language and ageing refers to a more general subfield embodied in
studies combining various perspectives and approaches from micro- and macro-pragmatics,
discourse analysis, conversation analysis, sociolinguistics, ethnography, and other fields. In
recent decades, the study of pragmatics and dementia has showed a cognitive turn (Davis and
Guendouzi 2013: 23), with some cognitive pragmatic theories (e.g. theory of mind, emergentist
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Lihe Huang
pragmatics, and compensatory adaptation) being adopted for the analyses of pragmatic disor-
ders. This is an important attempt in reading the cognitive impairment mechanism for neuro-
degenerative disease from the perspective of linguistics.

Although linguistic decline in ageing is usually associated with widespread grey- and white-
matter brain changes, the correspondence between the degree of neural change and linguistic
performance is not that simple. Researchers find that a certain group of older adults can
maintain relatively good cognitive function (including language) even if pathological charac-
teristics exist in the brain. It is believed that these individuals have different states of cogni-
tive reserve, referring to the improvement of brain neural network connections by receiving
education and participating in cognitive activities during their lifespan, which helps older
adults tolerate more neuropathology without cognitive and functional decline. The renowned
‘Nun Study of Ageing and Alzheimer’s Disease’ is a typical example, which suggests that
‘an engaged lifestyle can moderate intellectual decline in old age’ (Kemper et al. 2001: 237).
Studies in psychology, medicine, and linguistics have shown that increasing cognitive reserve
can reduce or slow down cognitive ageing or reduce the risk of dementia.
For example, linguistics has long assumed that possessing two or more languages confers
certain cognitive benefits, which can manifest in a variety of ways. Bilinguals can shift rapidly
back and forth between two languages, sometimes even within a single sentence, which might
lead to overall cognitive flexibility and control in their brains (Kreuz and Roberts 2019: 131).
By observing the neuroimaging of multilingual older adults, it has been found that they have
more grey matter in the subapical lobules. The length of second language use, vocabulary, and
language exposure are key factors affecting grey matter volume (Abutalebi et al. 2012). In
recent years, studies of ageing and multilingualism have grown, due partly to previous encour-
aging findings on the cognitive advantages of multilingualism in ageing. In view of this, some
studies suggest bilingual patients developed dementia 4.5 years later than monolingual ones
(Alladi et al. 2013). But other researchers claim that utilizing language learning as a means to
stave off older adults’ cognitive decline needs further research support.
Clinically speaking, a consensus has been reached to evaluate the language ability of
patients with cognitive impairment and make full use of language as a tool in diagnosis, treat-
ment, and rehabilitation, as language is both a marker and non-drug intervention method in
related diseases. However, more linguistic markers with satisfactory sensitivity and specificity
are still needed for cognitive assessment, and more measurement standards and explicit indi-
cators are needed for rehabilitation. Current cognitive-impairment-related scales focus mainly
on phonological and lexical-semantic dimensions, while less attention is paid to syntactic and
pragmatic levels. Additionally, most cases in cognitive assessments refer to induction data,
failing to attend to spontaneous or connected speech and the value of speech features in pre-
screening in disease prevention and control.
Previous studies indicate that most language and communication non-pharmacological
interventions will benefit AD patients’ communicative skills, in which the lexical-semantic
interventions, language activities integrated with physical activities, and intervention involv-
ing several cognitive skills (including language) show greater levels of effective evidence or
predominantly beneficial results. However, current studies with such high evidence levels are
only being produced on a small scale and, therefore, more studies with larger sample sizes are
still required (Morello et al. 2017).
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Major research methods

The study of language and ageing is intrinsically interdisciplinary. Experimental or quasi-
experimental research is usually adopted regarding studies with a psychological approach to
explore the relationship between linguistic performance and cognitive ageing. Frequently used
methods include ERP, fMRI, eye-tracking, and behavioural experiments. They provide advan-
tages in exploring cognitive ageing with normal brain function and language disorders in older
adults suffering from degenerative diseases. Based on these methods, research on disorders in
different older adults’ phonological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic level has become the
mainstream in gerontolinguistics. Both quantitative and qualitative methods such as corpus-
based research, cohort studies, questionnaires, ethnographies, conversation analysis, interac-
tion analysis, critical discourse analysis, and sociolinguistic studies have also been frequently
adopted (Huang 2022).
In addition to the previous studies, there has been a trend to construct large corpora, includ-
ing multimodal corpora, for language and ageing study. Data in corpora of oral or written
discourse are solicited from older adults by using the picture test in the neuropsychological
scale, or by repeating a certain classic story (such as the story of Cinderella), or through struc-
tured or semi-structured interviews or spontaneous speech in a situated discourse. The most
representative corpora include DementiaBank, CorpAGEst, the Bonn Longitudinal Study on
Ageing (BOLSA), the Carolinas Conversations Collection (CCC), the LangAge Corpora, and
the Multimodal Corpus of Gerontic Discourse (MCGD, China). A new trend in this field is
initiating a longitudinal study with corpus construction, as it is known that the decline of lin-
guistic competence in ageing is a relatively slow process. Therefore, collecting longitudinal
data is essential for exploring the process of language decline and its underlying mechanism.
However, there are few such studies and longitudinal corpora in the world, mainly because the
cost of such follow-up data collection and corpus building is relatively high. It is suggested
that such longitudinal data be paid more attention and collected at different time intervals with
different research purposes.
New research focuses on the multimodal study of pragmatic expression of older adults and
interaction of prosody, expression, and action in interaction of both healthy and cognitively
impaired older adults (Davis and Guendouzi 2013; Mikesell 2016; Bolly and Boutet 2018).
For instance, it has been noted that in referential communication tasks for older adults with
dementia, deictic gestures, and indefinite gestures have increased, while symbolic gestures
and conceptually complex gestures have decreased (Glosser et al. 1998; Carlomagno et al.
2005). Non-verbal performance is considered an important aspect in evaluating individuals’
pragmatic competence and, therefore, clinicians have proposed that clinical evaluation should
include non-verbal features (Prutting and Kirchner 1987). This promotes the development of a
multimodal corpus approach to language ageing study (Gu 2019; Huang 2022).
Additionally, the ethnographic method also receives growing attention, which requires
researchers to conduct face-to-face interviews with older adults in different ways according to
various research purposes. Guendouzi and Müller (2006) used this method to collect the corpus
of older adults with dementia. Based on this, a qualitative study of individual speech was car-
ried out in speech-pathology clinics and care centres. In this process, data collection, transcrip-
tion, and analysis are based on conversational analysis protocol, and similar methods include
life story approach and narrative analysis. These methods can also be implemented to explore
the linguistic behaviour of older adults of different ethnic groups or with specific backgrounds.
The chapter would also like to reiterate that the exploration of language and ageing must
be an ethical study, since the research object of gerontolinguistics is an ageing human being.
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Lihe Huang
Researchers should observe primary ethical considerations throughout relevant research plan-
ning, implementation, and dissemination. Ethical considerations should follow a specific
rationale (it usually includes beneficence, nonmaleficence, competence, integrity, compliance,
respect, etc.), provide informed consent, and undergo ethics review procedures (highly recom-
mend to read: Horner and Minifie 2011; Powell 2013; Stickle 2020).
Future directions
Change of language ability is the direct and external manifestation of the deterioration of
cognitive function of older adults in daily life. Relevant research will further enrich the disci-
plinary knowledge system of language and realize the disciplinary task of describing, analyz-
ing, and interpreting all language phenomena throughout an individual’s life in the sense of
‘lifespan linguistics’, if we may call it this. In this sense, the current contributions of geronto-
linguistics cover a wide range of theoretical, clinical, and social significance. Despite several
decades of development of the studies of language and ageing, this area is still in its infancy.
The psychological approach has contributed to abundant outcomes of linguistic decline and
corresponding cognitive-neurological mechanism, but a more profound exploration in differ-
ent levels of linguistic performance in ageing is further needed, especially the interface of
linguistic performance and older adults’ socio-pragmatic practice. It is also suggested that
research should be conducted based on large-scale multimodal data, that diachronic discourse
corpus should be built, and that the early screening of AD should be improved according to
the characteristics of speech impairment. To further explore all these issues, researchers should
show due responsibility when encountering the challenges in the context of global ageing and
provide a necessary and timely response from linguistics.
Related topics
clinical linguistics; neurolinguistics; psycholinguistics; pragmatics; geroscience
Further reading
Cummings, L. (2020) Language in Dementia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (This book
undertakes a comprehensive examination of language and communication in individuals with cog-
nitive impairment and dementia. Each chapter covers a specific neurodegenerative disorder and
addresses the epidemiology, aetiology, pathophysiology, prognosis, and clinical features, along with
the assessment and treatment of these disorders by speech-language pathologists. Many examples
of language from individuals with neurodegenerative conditions are included to clearly explain the
effects of dementia on communication. There are exercises at the end of each chapter to develop
language analysis skills.)
Davis, B. H. and Guendouzi. J. (2013) Pragmatics in Dementia Discourse, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cam-
bridge Scholars Publishing. (This book is an attempt to address some of the discussed issues by
bringing together a group of researchers whose work focuses on interaction in the context of dementia.
The authors represent the fields of linguistics, clinical linguistics, nursing, and speech pathology, and
each chapter draws on methods associated with discourse analysis and pragmatics to examine how
people with dementia utilize language in the presence of cognitive decline.)
Harwood, J. T. (2007) Understanding Communication and Ageing: Developing Knowledge and Aware-
ness, London: SAGE. (The book provides a comprehensive framework for considering communication
and ageing in the context of biology, sociology, and psychology. It explores communication in older
adulthood, particularly in the areas of interpersonal, intercultural, and mass communication, and
includes coverage of communication using new technology. The book synthesizes existing research
outcomes and builds a case for more positive attitudes towards ageing and for the power of commu-
nication to shape such attitudes.)
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Kemper, S. and Kliegl, R. (2002) Constraints on Language: Ageing, Grammar, and Memory, New York:
Kluwer Academic Publishers. (The book adopts a variety of methodological approaches to the study
of language processing, including psycholinguistic investigations of comprehension and production,
psychometric studies of the component processes of reading and of individual differences, neuroim-
aging studies of linguistic function, and neurolinguistic investigations of pathologies of language.)
References
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22
Forensic linguistics
Introduction – what is forensic linguistics?

The scope and naming of forensic linguistics have been somewhat contested and can include
areas referred to as law and language, legal linguistics, language as evidence, investigative
linguistics, and so on. The recent edition of the Routledge Handbook of Forensic Linguistics
(Coulthard et al. 2021) covers a breadth of topics including the language of the law and the
legal process, the linguist as expert in the legal processes and other topics such as police
negotiations and online trolling. An analysis of graduate programmes in forensic linguistics
shows a similar spread – the Aston University MA programme has substantive time devoted to
both linguistics in legal contexts and investigative and evidential linguistics, the Cardiff MA
programme offers a similar balance with perhaps less focus on language as evidence, and the
Hofstra University MA programme, in contrast, appears to focus almost exclusively on investi-
gative and evidential techniques. This diversity of interest leads to broader and more functional
definitions. The Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics defines the discipline as an attempt to
improve the delivery of justice through the analysis of language, and this puts application front
and centre as part of the discipline.
Forensic linguistics is a branch of applied linguistics, taking methods and insights from the
academic discipline of linguistics and applying them to forensic texts and forensic contexts.
Forensic texts can include specifically forensic genres, such as threatening communications or
police interview interactions, and also more incidental texts that accidentally become part of
court proceedings. Thus, for example, an innocuous series of text messages may suggest that an
individual was alive at a certain point in time, if it can be demonstrated that they were indeed
the author of those messages, or lyrics from a song might be seen as involving an individual
in a violent murder. Forensic contexts can include not only police interview suites and court-
rooms but also quasi-judicial hearings and public inquiries, emergency call centres, and sign-
up interactions to website terms and conditions. Although forensic linguists may sometimes
carry out analyses for purely academic interest, more often than not they hope their insights
and findings will be applied. One such application is where linguists’ conclusions can inform
an investigation or be used as evidence in a court. For example, in authorship analysis work,
the conclusion might amount to evidence that someone had written an incriminating message.
280 DOI: 10.4324/9781003082637-25

A different application may be where the conclusions lead to improvements in policy or prac-
tice. Thus, in work on investigative interviews, research analyses might show how language
could be used differently to improve the outcome of investigations. Forensic linguistics is a
critical discipline, and a forensic linguistic analysis is one that seeks to make a change in the
world, and the defining feature of that change is that it will improve the delivery of justice.
This chapter is structured into three descriptive sections each discussing literatures which
represent different contexts in which forensic linguists currently work: first, we examine work
on legal language and mostly written legal texts to describe the nature of legal language, the
problems legal language can bring and some solutions to those problems. Second, we examine
context of mostly spoken legal interactions, such as cautioning, police interviewing, and the
courtroom, and we examine how studies in these areas have made contributions to improving
communication. Third, we look at the investigative context and how linguistic analyses can
assist law enforcement investigations and provide evidence to courts. The chapter finishes
with a final section that examines new contexts, in border lands of forensic linguistics, where
new work is being carried out and we examine these areas as marking the future for forensic
linguistics.
Language of written legal texts

The discipline area of language and law is often seen to refer principally to the study of written
legal texts and quite naturally starts with the description of what is sometimes called legalese.
Legalese is characterized by somewhat archaic lexis, including self-referential function words
such as ‘whereas’ and ‘herein’, nominalization, multiple embedding of sub-clauses, and the
use of redundant or near-redundant lists (see e.g. Tiersma 1999 for a full discussion). Explana-
tions for these kinds of features tend to focus on the need for legal texts to be precise and also
independent from change in contexts. Some legal texts, such as wills or deeds, will need to
travel through time with unchanging meaning, and the purpose of legal language is often to
ensure this. There is of course an issue with legal certainty coming at the price of lay persons’
comprehension of legal texts, particularly with regard to consumer contracts, or lay-legal texts,
such as website terms and conditions, and this can drive efforts for plainer legal language cam-
paigns. Complexity or comprehension in legal texts can have legal implications; in the UK, for
example, the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations (1994) stipulate that terms in
consumer contracts must be in ‘plain and intelligible language’ and where this is not the case
‘the interpretation most favourable to the consumer shall prevail’ (§6).
Not all linguistic legal disputes, however, turn on the comprehensibility of legal terms. The
need for precision can give rise to disputes which turn on a tension between what legislators
meant or intended and what the written law in fact says. A good example of such a dispute is
provided in the case of Brian Haw, a long-term anti-war protestor who demonstrated outside of
the Houses of Parliament from 2001 to 2007, often using a megaphone to berate increasingly
annoyed members of Parliament. In 2005 the MPs passed a new Serious and Organised Crime
Bill, which stated that demonstrations in Parliament Square must have authorization from the
police ‘when the demonstration starts’. Haw’s protest was cited in parliamentary debates as
part of the motivation for this clause and the intent of the legislators to silence Haw was clear.
After Haw was arrested on the basis of this law, he initially successfully argued that that his
demonstration had begun before the act was passed and so did not apply to him. This strictly
textualist interpretation of the statute was then overturned on appeal on the basis that the intent
of Parliament had been to require all demonstrations in the area to require permission.
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This case demonstrates a distinction textualist and intentionalist statutory interpretation,

and in this there is a general division of approach between the attitude of UK and US courts.
Most US courts are more textualist and will pay greater attention to the precise words used,
and this has created an opening for corpus linguists to contribute to a number of cases. Lee
and Mouritsen (2017) describe cases where the determination of ordinary meaning is at issue
and point to the inadequacy of relying on the judges’ reasoning in determining those ordinary
meanings. Such cases include whether ‘carrying a firearm’ in a drugs case should include
it being present, but in a locked glove compartment without playing a role in a transaction;
whether the meaning of ‘interpreter’ should be restricted to simultaneous oral translation in
contrast with a person who translated written documents; and whether ‘harbouring an alien’
required some element of concealment, or whether allowing someone to live openly would be
enough. Lee and Mouritsen go on to argue that a better approach than judges’ ad hoc reason-
ing as to the ordinary meanings, or to the use of dictionary definitions, is to instead approach
the problem of disputed meaning in such cases through corpus methods. Corpus methods have
indeed been taken up by the US courts in these cases and across several jurisdictions – for
example, including in California the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals requesting corpus analyses
to determine the original public meaning of the term ‘a well regulated Militia’ in the US Con-
stitution. The scope of corpus linguistic approaches to statutory interpretation may be limited
to jurisdictions with more textualist traditions such as the United States jurisdictions, but these
analyses provide a vivid example of how linguistic analysis can assist in the delivery of justice.
Spoken interaction in legal contexts

As it was evident in the previous section, law ‘is an overwhelmingly linguistic institution’ (Gib-
bons 2003) and is among the very few professions that ‘comes into being through language’
(Tiersma 1999: 1). Spoken interaction pervades the legal system and every legal process, from
the first encounter and cautioning to the police interview, court hearing, and the announcement
of the verdict. Analysis of the spoken interaction in legal context is an area which has attracted
the attention of many researchers over the past two decades or so.
One of the most important insights into legal spoken interaction is that all legal texts and
interactions and forensic discourses involve ‘deeply rhetorical practices aimed at persuad-
ing decision makers’ Heffer (2013: 459). In this context, forensic discourses emerge from
‘a particular context that calls on the speaker or writer to create rhetorical discourse’ (Heffer
2013: 467). The purpose of which is ‘to persuade an audience to act or react according to the
speaker’s goals’ (Heffer 2013: 462). As Heffer (2013: 468) notes, forensic discourse deals with
actions that have taken place in the past, and seeing that persuasion is the overriding aim in
these contexts, ‘the most effective way of packaging the past for persuasive effect is through
narrative’. In most legal contexts, the linguistic and discursive strategies gain prominence
because it is through the persuasive nature of narratives that conflicting versions of the truth
are placed against each other to compete and win the attention of the jury (Cotterill 2003). An
important feature of persuasive narratives is how lexical choices and rhetorical moves and
strategies are used to construct facts and create a convincing representation of those who were
involved in the alleged offence and whether this could lead to miscarriage of justice (Cotterill
2003; Eades 2008).
Another recurring theme in the study of spoken legal interaction revolves around the obser-
vation that spoken interaction also takes place between the legal and lay participants (see
Rock et al. 2013 for a critical review of legal-lay distinction). One particular type of legal-
lay interaction that has over the years received special attention is police interviews with the
282
suspect, victim, and witness (Edwards 2006, 2008; Stokoe and Edwards 2008; Heydon 2005,
2011; Haworth 2017; Richardson et al. 2019 to name only a few). Although police interviews
take place as part of a ‘highly regulated form of discourse’ (Heydon 2005: 4), miscarriage of
justice can arise as a result of interview practices and most notably as a result of the unequal
power and control that legal professionals have (see Ainsworth 2021). The avowed purpose
of police interviews in many jurisdictions (including the UK) is to obtain and record the most
accurate accounts of the events in question with the aim being to synthesize that into a writ-
ten statement. The record of the interview can become ‘evidential object’ (Haworth 2010) to
persuade the court. One power dynamic is the differing understandings between interviewer
and interviewee as to the nature and audiences of the interaction. Haworth (2020: 155–156)
notes that interviewees often ‘tailor their account according to cues from the interviewer as sole
audience for their talk, often to their cost’ and that they are often unaware of how their answers
will be taken by the court.
Further to this, Heydon (2005) argues that the language used by the police can influence
the interviewee to provide a ‘preferred version’ of the events in question (Heydon 2005:
33; see also Auburn et al. 1995). Heydon (2011: 2315) also emphasizes the importance of
silence as a legal construct in police interviews arguing that the ‘the suspect’s attempts to
access their right to silence, to ignore a question or to offer an alternative explanation without
explicitly denying an accusation, are all heavily constrained by the discourse environment
of the police interview’. In these contexts, the judge and the jury could potentially apply
‘the usual rules of conversational preference to accusation – response pairs’ (Heydon 2011:
2315) and interpret the silence as acceptance of the allegations in question. These pragmat-
ics issues, as Heydon (2011) argues, need to be implemented in such a way as to avoid the
threat of ‘adverse inference’.
Antaki and Stokoe (2017: 2) point out that police interviews are among few institutional
contexts in which the interviewer might be required to use ‘less co-operative and more scepti-
cal standards to what their interlocutors say’. By analyzing a sample of more than 100 UK
interviews with suspects arrested for minor offences and 19 witnesses of sexual assaults, they
argue that ‘follow-up questions’ by the police often presume that the initial normal answers
provided by the interviewee were not cooperative. They argue that the unexceptionable answers
are often treated this way so that the police could create a narrative that (1) would be appropri-
ate for the court, (2) ‘could yield a version of events that indicated more clearly what criminal
charge could be brought’ (2017: 14), and (3) could not be challenged in a subsequent hearing.
The courtroom itself is also a well-studied context for researchers interested in how lan-
guage is used to create and maintain social power in the courtroom (Ehrlich 2010). Similar to
police interviews, research on the language of courtroom has focused on both questions and
answers, particularly between lawyers and witnesses in examination, cross-examination, and
re-examination (Harris 1984; Woodbury 1984; Gibbons 2003; Archer 2005; Heffer 2005; Hen-
derson et al. 2016). The questions raised by the lawyers are always strategic. As Stygall (1994:
146) notes, lawyers raise their questions in such a way as to be able to control the witness
because ‘their assumption is that by controlling what the witnesses say, they will also control
what jurors think’. In fact, as Ehrlich and Sidnell (2006: 655) note, the power of lawyers ‘is
crucially dependent on their ability to compel witnesses to produce type-conforming answers
to these controlling and restrictive questions’.
What seems to be at the very heart of most studies conducted on spoken legal interaction
is the important role of language in creating a persuasive narrative and construction of facts,
which will ultimately influence how judges and juries make their decision and how justice is
delivered. While there are so many variations in the legal system in general and in institutional
283
discourse in particular, as Ehrlich (2010: 372) following Conley and O’Barr (1998) notes, lan-
guage scholars ‘need to move beyond the mere description of linguistic variation in the legal
system in order to understand how language and discourse is consequential for the law’. For
Eades (2000) as well, this interest in consequences arises out of a critical stance and an interest
in the delivery of justice.
Investigative forensic linguistics

There is a strong focus in the forensic linguistics literature on the nature of linguistic evi-
dence that might be taken to court and on the varying standards of admissibility which
can allow this. It can be useful to situate these discussions as a subset of the discipline
sometimes referred to as investigative linguistics or investigative forensic linguistics. Inves-
tigative linguistics was first defined in Grant and Woodhams (2007: 1) as ‘that branch of
forensic linguistics which assists investigation’ and more recently has been characterized as
broadly offering ‘linguistic investigative advice’ (Grant and Macleod 2020: 141). Grieve and
Woodfield (2021) suggest that the term is better understood as a category alongside activity
described as language as evidence, but here, we suggest it is better understood as a super-
ordinate to include contributions to investigations that result in an evidential product and
those that do not. The term investigative forensic linguist also helpfully recognizes that the
linguist might occupy a role parallel to the ‘behavioural investigative advisor’ – the formal
job description of what in popular culture is sometimes seen as a ‘profiler’ or ‘investigative
forensic psychologist’.
Investigative linguistics broadly can be conceived as the investigation of forensically inter-
esting texts to aid investigation and/or provide evidence. The forensic context in this sense
will incorporate both civil and criminal contexts and is not limited to admissible evidence.
There are various legal disputes that do give rise to linguistic evidence, and these can include
trademark disputes (e.g. Shuy 2002; Butters 2010), issues of the meaning of slang terms where
textual or spoken conversations have been collected in some way as part of an investigation
(e.g. Grant 2017), issues of failures of interpretation in police interviews (e.g. Kredens and
Morris 2010), and finally, there are authorship analysis cases, where what needs to be resolved
is who wrote a particular text.
Comparative authorship analysis, where one or more anonymous texts are compared against
known texts of potential authors, can and is admitted as evidence across many jurisdictions. In
the UK context, it has withstood appeal in R v Hodgson [2009 EWCA Crim 742], where Mal-
colm Coulthard gave evidence of authorship of text messages that contributed to Hodgson’s
conviction for the murder of Jenny Nicholl (see discussion in Coulthard et al. 2021). While
this indicates that comparative authorship analysis can be done well, there are cases where it is
contested. One example is the Yukos Oil dispute. In 2005 GML Ltd., the former owner of 60%
of the Yukos oil company took the Russian Federation to the Permanent Court of Arbitration
in The Hague. In 2014 the tribunal awarded GML a $50 billion compensation, but this finding
was contested by Russia partly on the basis of an authorship analysis carried out by Carole
Chaski (and later Walter Daelemans). Chaski and Daelemans asserted that the secretary to the
Tribunal had illicitly authored more than half of the sections of the Awards text. Coulthard
and Grant provided a significant linguistic critique that the analyses of Chaski and Daelemans
were flawed because they presupposed that each subsection of the Awards text had a single
author. Drawing on Love (2002), Coulthard and Grant argued that this was a particularly naïve
assumption for legal judgements. Using Love’s framework on the varied functions of author-
ship, they argued that no section of the Awards text was likely to be the product of a single
284
executive author, and in February 2020, The Hague Court of Appeal essentially agreed with
this analysis, commenting,
The Court of Appeal considers the studies by Chaski and Daelemans to be problematic in
the sense that indeed – as argued by HVY – the text of a multiple-handed judgement will
not always be written by a single author and that the assumption that the other authors
‘usually at most respond with a single proposal for deletion or insertion” is by no means
always valid’.
(HVY v. The Russian Federation §6.6.5)
What matters in the end is that the arbitrators have decided to assume responsibility for
the draft versions of Valasek, whether in whole or in part and whether or not amended by
them.
(HVY v. The Russian Federation §6.6.10)
Another authorship analysis task is sociolinguistic profiling, but it is much rarer for it to be
admitted as evidence in court. Profiling attempts to take the writings of an unknown author
and create a description of that writer in terms of their social background – focusing on edu-
cational level, dialect, evidence of influence from another language, evidence from a writer’s
use of professional registers, and even sometimes on the gender and age of the writer. Profiling
analyses such as these move from general linguistic observations of between group variation to
individual-level predictions and, as such, are always uncertain, and this is one reason that they
are unlikely to admitted to court. A further issue is that it is of course only possible to profile
an individual’s linguistic performance as opposed to their biological sex, age, or other essen-
tialist characterizations of their identity. Bamman et al. (2014) examined gendered language
on Twitter, and they were able to discriminate tweeters who declared themselves to be male
or female, respectively, but they also demonstrated that men who had more female followers
tweeted with a more ‘male’ language style and that women with more male followers tweeted
with a more ‘female’ language style. Such observations suggest that the courts are right to be
wary of admitting profiling but also that the outcomes might be useful in the broader endeavour
of author search.
Author search is a new field (Grant and Macleod 2020) that attempts to assist law enforce-
ment in investigations that involve the search for an offender. In such cases, investigating
officers often combine various disciplines (behavioural science, computer forensics, and lin-
guistics) in devising a search strategy to find an unidentified offender. In forensic linguistics,
perhaps the most reported author search case is that of the Unabomber investigation, where the
search for the offender was assisted by an FBI profiler’s analysis of the language of the Una-
bomber’s Manifesto. Fitzgerald (2017) describes the investigation and how a co-selection set
of linguistic features (Coulthard 2004) narrowed the search to an individual, Ted Kaczynski.
Profiling as a form of author search may indicate that a writer is drawn from a set of inter-
secting social groups, but picking out an individual from a large group is much harder and is
currently an active area of research in computational forensic linguistics (see Narayanan et al.
2012; Kredens et al. 2019; Theóphilo et al. 2019).
A final area of research in investigative forensic linguistics Is that of authorship synthe-
sis rather than analysis. This is described by Grant and Macleod (2020), who worked with
and trained undercover online police officers. Their work distinguishes between identity
assumption and linguistic legend building. In identity assumption operations, also known as
account take-overs, the linguistic objective is to seamlessly take over and carry on an online
285
text-based conversation without giving away any linguistic tells that the writer has been
substituted at the keyboard. In legend-building, an undercover operative needs to make up a
linguistic persona that will be sufficiently different from their own ‘voice’ but also consistent
in their performance. Less typical tasks such as these applications are likely to grow as the
potential of investigative forensic linguistics is better understood by the law enforcement
communities.
Contexts on the edge of forensic linguistics

In this section, we examine the varied landscape of forensic linguistics and discuss new and
emerging subfields and innovative research. These new areas of inquiry are often created as a
result of the rapidly growing use of modern communication technologies and the Internet and
may mark a rich and expanding future for forensic linguistics.
While advances in technology, the rapid spread of the Internet, and the availability and
accessibility of digital and smart devices have profoundly transformed our lives, they have also
created a fertile ground for various online illegal and criminal activities, also known as cyber-
crimes. It can be useful to distinguish between computer-oriented and computer-assisted cyber-
crimes (Wall 2007). The former encompasses criminal activities that are unique to the new
electronic media and did not exist before the days of the Internet technology and are ‘directed
towards computer systems or computer-based networks’ (Sandywell 2010: 46). Examples
include different forms of ‘malicious software (viruses, worms, Trojans) that corrupt software’
(Jewkes and Yar 2010: 3), hacking and digital piracy, spamming, denial-of-service attacks,
and so on. As it would be expected, these types of crimes offer few opportunities for forensic
linguists as they are often not language-based crimes.
Computer-assisted crime, on the other hand, may be of more interest to forensic linguists as
the targets of these offences are not necessarily the electronic infrastructure but are individual
users of the new technology. Computer-assisted crimes refer to traditional criminal activities
and offences which ‘while pre-dating Internet technology and having an existence independent
of it, find a new lease of life online’ (Jewkes and Yar 2010: 3). These cybercrimes can further
be broken down to three major categories, depending on the level of physical harm and danger
they expose their victims to.
The first type of these includes non-violent crimes which do not require physical contact
with the victim. These crimes are often forms of fraud and carried out through some sort of
trickery, deception, and persuasion. The most common types of such crime can include invest-
ment fraud, romance fraud, email fraud, credit card fraud, and pension fraud (Freiermuth 2011;
Whitty and Buchanan 2012; Carter 2015), which are ‘exploitative and psychologically and
financially traumatic to victims’ (Carter 2021: 283). For example, one recent area of forensic
linguistic research is romance fraud, in which the victim is lured into believing that they have
entered a romantic relationship with the scammer whose primary goal is to extort money from
the victim. Carter (2021: 287), for example, through a linguistic analysis of the narrative of
romance fraudsters, reveals that scammers ‘develop the victim’s sense of control and groom
them into compliance while manipulating their emotional and communicative environment’
before overtly asking for money. The purpose of such research might be both to help others
avoid falling victims to such types of fraud and to help different organizations and stakeholders
with proposing strategic preventive measures.
The second type of computer-assisted crimes involve activities that do not always inflict
direct physical harm to the victim but could have significant detrimental impact on the victim’s
mental health and may even lead to suicide. Examples include various forms of activities,
286
such as cyberbullying, stalking, harassing, abusing, and hate speech, which have been on the
rise, particularly over the past few years, due to the ever-increasing use of social media plat-
forms. Recent reports by YouGov have reported a rise in the experience of online cyberbully-
ing amongst 18-to-24-year-olds. Similarly, the Office for National Statistics in the UK have
demonstrated that one in five children aged 10 to 15 years in England and Wales have been the
target of at least one form of online bullying behaviour. Over the past decade, there has been
a surge in linguistic research on various forms of online behaviours which take place through
the medium of language, such as online hate and language aggression (Kienpointner 2018;
Parvaresh and Tayebi 2018; Culpeper 2021 to name only a few), trolling (Hardaker 2010;
Petyko 2019), death and rape threats (Hardaker and McGlashan 2016), and so on. While these
studies have greatly contributed to our understanding of the linguistic characteristics of online
hate and language aggression and the various strategies that trolls or online bullies use, this is
still one of the most challenging issues that policy-makers, stakeholders, and individual users
are faced with.
One issue in tackling these crimes is that there has been a lack of consistency in chal-
lenging and prosecuting online behaviour (Bliss 2017: 174). This lack of consistency may
be due to the rather subjective and unpredictable nature of the phenomenon in question. For
example, the Malicious Communications Act 1988 indicates that an electronic communication
which conveys an indecent or grossly offensive message is a criminal act. However, draw-
ing a dividing line between what is offensive and what is grossly offensive – which warrants
prosecution – is uncertain. The linguistic research on offensive language and those on wrongly
prosecuted cases, such as the famous case of Chambers v DPP in 2012 (see Gillespie 2012),
demonstrate that words cannot be taken at face value and that pragmatics meanings and context
play a major role. Furthermore, concern for victims needs to be balanced with Article 10 of the
Human Rights Act 1998, which states that ‘everyone has the right to freedom of expression’,
which allows them to ‘hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without
interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers’. Where and how one can draw the
line between expressions of opinion and antisocial and criminal behaviour on the Internet is an
important question that requires further research.
The final category of computer-assisted crimes includes the most extreme types of online
criminal activities, which often take place under the radar in the dark web and can lead to physi-
cal violence and harm, sexual exploitation, child pornography, radicalization, and self-harm,
among others. Forensic linguists have already played a major role in undercover policing of
child sexual abuse (Grant and MacLeod 2020) by bringing together various linguistic tools,
such as forensic authorship analysis, sociolinguistics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, and so
on, to the investigation of how criminals communicate with each other (Luchjenbroers and
Aldridge Waddon 2011), how sexual offenders create numerous personas to approach children
(Chiang and Grant 2019), and how online child sexual grooming takes place (Lorenzo-Dus and
Izura 2017; Lorenzo-Dus et al. 2020.)
Such analyses can apply to other contexts, such as counterterrorism work and other types
of dark web activity. For example, suicide websites which promote self-harm have received
relatively less attention from linguists. These websites, which often attract vulnerable young
adults, ‘allow the expression of more permissive attitudes toward self-harm and suicide’, pro-
vide information on different methods of self-harm (Baker and Fortune 2008: 118), and nor-
malize and glamourize suicide and self-harm (Lewis and Baker 2011). The linguistic analysis
of such websites or fora can greatly contribute to the provision of help and support for the
victims (see Harris and Roberts 2013) and better policing of the Internet, thereby making the
Internet a safer place, particularly for children and vulnerable adults.
287
Conclusions
The scope of forensic linguistics is growing rapidly as the methods and insights of linguists in
the delivery of justice increase in reach and significance. New applications include using estab-
lished techniques of corpus linguistics and applying them to statutory interpretation, develop-
ing new computational techniques to assist author search, and applying current research on
dark web policing to more extended context such as the investigation of self-harm and suicide
websites. In each of these areas, we see linguistics being applied to forensic texts and contexts
and most importantly linguistics applied to improve the delivery of justice.
Related topics
institutional discourse; the media; clinical linguistics; discourse analysis; critical discourse
analysis; sociolinguistics; stylistics; corpus linguistics
Further reading
Coulthard, M., May, A., and Sousa-Silva, R. (eds) (2021) The Routledge Handbook of Forensic Linguis-
tics 2nd Ed, London: Routledge. (This handbook offers an overview of current research on forensic
linguistics and familiarizes the reader with the breadth of topics in the field.)
Grant, T. (2022) The Idea of Progress in Forensic Authorship Analysis Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press. [Available as Open Access on Cambridge Core]. (This book is about research and practice in
forensic authorship analysis and provides an overview of the existing research on the topic while dis-
cussing new knowledge about the nature of authorship and methods in stylistics.)
Haworth, K. (2006). The dynamics of power and resistance in police interview discourse. Discourse &
Society, 17(6), 739–759. (This article addresses spoken language in legal contexts by focusing on
police interviews and discusses various factors affecting the balance of power and control and dynam-
ics of discourse.)
Parvaresh, V. and Tayebi, T. (2018) ‘Impoliteness, aggression and the moral order’, Journal of Pragmat-
ics, 132: 91–107. (This article examines the offensive and aggressive language on Facebook and
discusses how language aggression is sometimes justified on social media.)
Solan, L. M., & Gales, T. (2017). Corpus linguistics as a tool in legal interpretation. Brigham Young
University Law Review, 1311. (This paper focuses on the use of large linguistic corpora and discusses
how such corpora can be used by judges or those construing legal documents.)
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23
Linguistic ethnography
Karin Tusting
Introduction
Linguistic ethnography refers to research combining ethnographic and linguistic approaches.
This chapter explores the disciplinary antecedents and history of the field, describes the main
research methods, and outlines current contributions in areas including education, multilingual
communities, and workplaces and institutions. It identifies critical issues and future direc-
tions, including working with practitioners, embodiment and space, and creative and arts-based
approaches.
Linguistic anthropology
Linguistic ethnography has historical roots in linguistic anthropology, a field which Duranti
(2003) characterizes as constituted by three paradigms. The first was a focus on Native Ameri-
can languages from the 1880s, when Boas and his students began to use linguistics as a tool for
the analysis of culture (Boas 1940). Early linguistic anthropologists documented the languages
and associated worldviews of fast disappearing North American aboriginal societies.
The second paradigm Duranti identifies was a more socially constituted linguistic anthro-
pology from the 1960s onwards, reacting against the formalism of structural linguistics and
Chomskyan cognitivism. This approach foregrounds language use rather than the language
system, emphasizing the situated and culturally constituted experiences of language users in
communities. Duranti explains that this paradigm developed particularly through work on lan-
guage performance (Bauman and Briggs 1990), primary and secondary language socialization
(Ochs and Schieffelin 1984, He, this Handbook, Volume 1), indexicality (Silverstein 1976),
participation frameworks (Goffman 1981), and reported speech (Bakhtin 1981).
Hymes was an important figure in this paradigm with his development of the ‘ethnography
of speaking’, using the mnemonic ‘SPEAKING’ (1974: 53–62) to list the dimensions of lan-
guage in use that speakers need to function in a given context (their ‘communicative compe-
tence’). This expanded into the ‘ethnography of communication’ through Hymes’ collaboration
292 DOI: 10.4324/9781003082637-26

with Gumperz, a sociolinguist who used ethnographic methods to study language contact and
multilingualism. Gumperz was also a strong influence on research in the UK, in part through
his involvement with the pioneering Industrial Language Training Service (ILTS) in the 1970s,
which analyzed communication in multilingual workplace settings using frameworks from
anthropology and conversation analysis (Gumperz 1982). The project aimed to improve com-
munication by challenging stereotypes and identifying the systematic cultural and linguistic
differences underlying misunderstandings (Roberts et al. 1992).
The third paradigm Duranti identifies arose through the influence of social constructionism
from the 1980s onwards, highlighting the encoding of subjectivities and power relationships
within discursive practice. This stimulated the development of a distinct approach, concerned
with issues like the construction of meanings, narratives, and language ideologies; multiple
voices and identities; and relationships between interaction and society. The focus is on social
constructs like hierarchy, prestige and taste, and social processes like formation of self, speech
community, and nationhood.
One distinctive area of work within the latter two paradigms is research in educational
contexts. Wortham (2008) argues that the focus of linguistic anthropology on ‘how language
use both presupposes and creates social relations in cultural contexts’ (p. 38) has particular
relevance for understanding how social, linguistic, and cultural processes are dynamically con-
figured in educational practices. Linguistic anthropologists have used Silverstein’s work on
language ideology and metapragmatics (Silverstein and Urban 1996) to examine how societal
beliefs about language as a symbol of nationalism, a marker of difference, or a tool of assimi-
lation are reproduced and sometimes challenged by individuals within schools (Wortham and
Rymes 2003).
Linguistic ethnography in Britain and other parts of Europe developed from around the start
of the 21st century in close connection with US work in the two latter paradigms, strongly
influenced by Hymes’ legacy (Rampton 2007), but from a different disciplinary starting point.
With some exceptions, language and linguistics have not been as central a concern in British
anthropology as they have been in the US. The connections between language, culture, and
society have been explored more directly by a number of British and European scholars in
areas of linguistics (Rampton et al. 2004; Creese 2008). Linguistic ethnography has drawn on
several distinct lines of research in applied linguistics (Rampton 2007), including interactional
sociolinguistics, literacy studies, critical discourse analysis, sociocultural research in educa-
tion, and interpretative English language teaching research.

Linguistic ethnography combines ‘the commitment within ethnography to particularity and
participation, holistic accounts of social practice and openness to reinterpretations over time’
with ‘a more formalist framework from linguistics, with its powerfully precise procedures
and terminology for describing patterns within communication’ (Rampton et al. 2004). This
combination is seen, on the one hand, as having the capacity to ‘tie ethnography down’ through
pushing for more precise, falsifiable analyses of local language processes, while it can also
‘open linguistics up’ through stressing the importance of reflexive sensitivity in the production
of linguistic claims, foregrounding issues of context, and highlighting the primacy of direct
293
Karin Tusting
field experience in establishing interpretative validity. While the term ‘ethnography’ is often
taken to signal particular ways of collecting data, in a more profound methodological and
theoretical sense, it is an approach to understanding the social world which has a particular
understanding of the nature of culture and human life and the position of language within this
(Blommaert and Jie 2010).
Participant observation and fieldnotes

Participant observation lies at the heart of ethnography. It requires the researcher to be present
in the context under study, observing what is happening, learning what it means to be a par-
ticipant in that context by being part of it, and reflecting on that experience. Both the observa-
tions of what is happening around the researcher and their reflections on their experience are
recorded in fieldnotes written during or very shortly after each instance of participation in the
context (Emerson et al. 2011; Creese et al. 2008).
Recording language data

Data is also collected on language use. This may form part of fieldnotes, but it is also com-
mon to supplement participant-observation with audio and/or video recordings of interaction,
enabling analysis of specific language patterns. Dewilde and Creese (2016) describe the value
of ubiquitous audio-recording in tracking interaction across speech events. Written documents
(paper and digital) are also frequently collected and analyzed.
Ethnographic interviews
Ethnography seeks both to understand patterns of behaviour and interaction and to grasp what
these mean from the perspectives of those involved – the emic perspective. Thus, participant
observation and audio and video recordings are frequently accompanied by ethnographic inter-
views, usually semi-structured, which provide participants in the research with the opportunity
to describe their own experiences, in response to questions and probes. The same participant
might be interviewed several times as an ethnography proceeds, as new understandings and
questions are developed. As well as recording participants’ reflections and understandings,
interviews provide direct evidence of their language practices. Maybin (2006) uses data from
interviews with children, as well as from continuous recordings of peer talk, in her analysis
of their uses of narrative and reproduced speech to interrogate personal experience. Equally,
ongoing informal conversations can be very important.
Data analysis
Given the complex datasets which can be generated by these methods, there can be no singular
approach to data analysis in linguistic ethnography. A research project might, for example,
combine the identification of social theory-informed themes in fieldnotes using a qualitative
approach to coding (Saldaña 2016) with micro-level analysis of segments of video-recorded
interactional data drawing on conversational analysis (Heinrichsmeier 2020) or multimodal
analysis (Bezemer and Kress 2016). Each researcher brings (and develops) their own expertise
in approaches to the analysis of language and of culture, and each time faces the challenge
anew of managing tensions between a systematic focus on language and a broader focus on
the unfolding of context, as well as holding in productive tension the emic perspective of
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participants and the etic theory of their own emerging analytic framework (Hammersley 2007).
So it is hard to provide a ‘recipe’ for data analysis in a linguistic ethnographic project.
Nevertheless, some common analytic actions can be identified. Rampton (2006) describes
a sequence including reassembling datasets into groupings on particular topics, protracted
immersion in data representing specific episodes, comparison between episodes, and finally,
producing descriptive generalizations. He draws on phonetics and phonology, conversation
analysis, Goffmanian interactional analysis, and theories of indexicality, taking a ‘slow, close
look at the moment-by-moment unfolding of each episode’ (p. 398).
The advent of easy and cheap digital video recording has provided new possibilities for ana-
lyzing multimodal dimensions of communication. Researchers have looked at the affordances
of different modes (e.g. speech, writing, image, body movement, gesture, or gaze) in terms of
their limitations and potential for meaning-making in particular communicative contexts and
how these are brought together to create ensembles of meaning. Combining observations and
detailed video analysis with social theory, researchers have studied how modal configurations
contribute to meaning and learning in classrooms and to the construction of particular disci-
plinary subjects (Kress et al. 2001, 2004).
Crucially, focused analysis of language data is carried out and interpreted in the light of
broader contextual understandings generated through ethnography and informed by social
theory. Unlike conversation analysts, who limit their accounts of context to that which can be
grounded in references made by speakers, linguistic ethnographers use their knowledge of the
wider cultural context to interpret specific instances of language use. However, tensions persist
between the detailed micro-level analysis of interaction and the desire to identify larger-scale
patterns. Understandably, many researchers tend to focus on manageable chunks of data: a few
minutes of interaction rather than continuous stretches over days and weeks. While patterns
of language use can be productively identified and compared across these chunks of data, it is
more difficult to map long-term processes of situated meaning-making.
A number of mediational concepts have been developed which help to bridge between text
and dynamic context (see Lillis 2008 on academic writing and Lillis and Maybin 2017 on
textual trajectories). The concept of indexicality (Silverstein 1976; Bauman and Briggs 1990)
refers to how particular uses of language point to different dimensions of context, from past,
present, or future, at a local or more general scale. The term ‘style’ (Rampton 2006; Eckert
2000) links linguistic choices to social constructs and processes. Concepts like these create
a synergy between linguistic and ethnographic analyses, describing the mutual shaping of
language and social life to provide insights into identity, ideology, or institutional processes.
Reflexivity and ethics

Participant-observation makes the researcher themselves a central instrument of data collec-
tion. Therefore, the researcher’s role in producing truth claims in ethnographic work requires
serious consideration. An ethnographic approach involves not only accumulating data which
attempts to capture insider or emic understandings of social phenomena. It also requires the
rearticulation of these understandings within the conceptual frameworks of social science dis-
ciplines which inform the researcher’s outsider or etic orientations (Heath and Street 2008).
There is thus a tension between the goal of making claims on the basis of the data (recordings,
transcripts, fieldnotes, photographs, etc.) and the recognition of the role of the researcher’s
positioning, interpretative capacities, and theoretical framings in shaping research findings.
A stance of continual reflexivity, in which the researcher interrogates their own role and posi-
tionings, is essential throughout in navigating this tension. This includes awareness of how
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research participants are making sense of your identity (Pérez-Milans 2011) and of how the
process is transforming you as a researcher (Giampapa 2011).
Researcher reflexivity is often spoken of in an abstract way, so it is important to point out
that it is best supported by ongoing practices of reflexivity, such as keeping a written research
journal on a regular basis and challenging oneself with specific questions about the researcher’s
role or having regular discussions with other people. One of the strengths of team ethnography
is in enabling members of a research team to engage in collective, critical reflexivity through
dialogue (Creese et al. 2016; Gregory et al. 2012).
Reflexivity is also crucial to the ethics of linguistic ethnography. The requirements of uni-
versity ethics committees for clear specifications of a research project in advance sit uneasily
with the more discovery-oriented stance of ethnography (Copland and Creese 2016). Given
this unpredictability, it is particularly important that linguistic ethnographers maintain open
communication with research participants throughout data collection and beyond. Informed
consent may need to be renegotiated in the field, as the focus develops and as people come into
and out of their purview. Regular self-questioning on ethical issues and power relationships is
an important element of ethnographic work (Patiño Santos 2011).
Education
Education has long been a key site for linguistic ethnography. Research in this area has helped
us to understand the complex and dynamic relationships between language ideologies, identi-
ties, pedagogic practice, and learning in diverse classroom contexts.
Early work in educational settings was influenced by linguistic anthropologists like Heller
(1999), who showed how the legitimacy of particular language varieties was constructed
through language choice and turn-taking in classrooms in a Canadian French monolingual
school, and Jaffe (1999), who explored the school as a site of struggle in the revitalization of
the Corsican language. Studies from a range of international contexts in Heller and Martin-
Jones (2001) traced how relationships of power and inequality in society (often related to
colonial histories) are reproduced and sustained in classrooms.
Language ideologies and unequal power relationships in classrooms continue. Karrebæk
(2013, 2014) shows how everyday practices around language use, even around the contents of
linguistic minority children’s lunch boxes, reinforce a monolingual and monocultural ideology.
Rampton and Charalambous (2016) illustrate what happens when taken-for-granted social and
linguistic ideological divisions are foregrounded in classroom interaction and highlight the
value of such interactional data for teacher professional development.
As well as critiquing established relations of power, linguistic ethnographic work has
enabled us to understand how young people play with linguistic and social ideological catego-
ries in their talk. Rampton (1995) analyzes how teenagers of Indian, Pakistani, and English
descent challenge dominant notions of ethnicity through strategic use of each other’s languages,
a process he terms ‘crossing’. Rampton (2006) builds on this, drawing on another school-
based ethnography to show teenagers creatively using a range of ways of speaking, including
mock-German, ‘Cockney’, and ‘posh’, as well as varieties influenced by heritage languages,
to position themselves within school, class, and ethnic identities and to play with concepts of
authority. More recent research has shown pupils skilfully using their language resources to
navigate class and ethnic hierarchies, including Snell (2010, 2018) on schoolchildren using
both local dialect and Standard English, Jaspers (2005) on Moroccan boys using several Dutch
296
varieties to playfully wrong-foot authority figures, and Milani and Jonsson (2012) on young
people drawing on the youth style Rinkeby Swedish and on Standard Swedish, displaying a
sophisticated understanding of the ideologies and values systems associated with each.
Linguistic ethnographers have also been interested in students ‘voicing’ other voices, often
drawing on Bakhtinian concepts of heteroglossia and multivoicing. Lytra (2007) traces Turkish
minority students in an Athens school using references to mainstream popular culture in off-task
talk to claim a shared bicultural identity with Greek peers. Maybin (2006) analyzes children
reproducing the voices of parents, popular culture, and education, with varying degrees of com-
mitment, as they apprentice into social practices. The voicing of popular texts by students has
been seen as a potentially valuable educational resource, producing hybrid learning practices
which enable teachers and students to fuse authoritative and inwardly persuasive discourses
(Kamberelis 2001). However, Lefstein and Snell’s (2011) analysis of discussions of The X Fac-
tor in a literacy lesson problematizes this, showing that while bringing in popular culture height-
ened the level of student involvement, the effect on opportunities for learning was less positive.
Another strand of work has focused on pedagogic practices, such as Snell and Lefstein’s
(2018) analysis of episodes of dialogic pedagogy or Charalambous et al.’s (2021) analysis
of peace-building in the pedagogic practices of a Turkish lesson in a Greek Cypriot school.
Linguistic ethnography can explore how policies are being implemented in the classroom,
sometimes in ways which differ from the policy’s intent. Lefstein’s (2008) discussion of the
enactment of the English National Literacy Strategy showed how the goals of the policy were
taken over by habitual classroom interactional patterns. Accounts of teachers drawing on mul-
tiple linguistic resources to navigate strict monolingual policies in multilingual classrooms are
presented by Jaspers and Rosiers (2021) in Belgium and Krause and Prinsloo (2016) in South
Africa. Creese (2005) provides a detailed analysis of how policies of inclusion play out in
multilingual classrooms.
Much linguistic ethnographic work in education has taken place in multilingual and diverse
classrooms. Within this, the concept of translanguaging, people drawing flexibly on all the
communicative resources at their disposal, has attracted significant attention (Li Wei, this vol-
ume). Rosiers (2017) argues for the pedagogic value of translanguaging as a scaffold based on
research in superdiverse classrooms in Belgium. Gynne (2019) describes the tensions between
the implementation of translanguaging as a pedagogic practice in a highly diverse Swedish
school and practices of language policing. Tai and Li (2020a, 2020b) show translanguaging
being used playfully as a pedagogic resource in EMI mathematics classrooms in Hong Kong.
Interaction between in-school and out-of-school cultures (Pahl 2007) has been a key area of
interest. Early research in the ethnography of communication highlighted mismatches between
home and school language use for students from minority groups and the resulting misunder-
standings and inequities (e.g. Michaels 1981). Similar issues have been highlighted by Poveda
and Martín (2004) working with Gitano children. Madsen et al. (2016) move outwards from
school to address the complex worlds and diverse languaging practices of the everyday lives
of young people in Copenhagen.
Multilingual and diverse communities

Multilingual and diverse communities have provided fertile ground for research addressing
questions around post-colonialism, globalization, migration, and mobilities. Blommaert et al.
(2005) have described patterns of interaction in multilingual neighbourhoods in Ghent, arguing
that semiotic and material processes offer a sensitive indicator of globalization ‘on the ground’.
This work is characteristic of linguistic ethnography: drawing on detailed, fine-grained
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sociolinguistic fieldwork to give insight into broader social processes. Kell (2015) explores
questions of scaling in theorizing relations between the local and the global and the movement
between these of practices, text-artefacts, and translations.
Ethnographically grounded studies of language competence have been carried out in many
multilingual settings. Collins and Slembrouck (2005) include research from Belgium, the
Netherlands, Italy, and South Africa exploring the production of space through language prac-
tices shaped by language ideologies. This work interrogates and challenges established socio-
linguistic concepts, as globalization processes force us to ‘reshuffle’ existing ideas – one good
example of ethnography ‘opening linguistics up’.
The concept of translanguaging has been drawn on beyond education. The Translation and
Translanguaging project (tlang.org.uk) aimed to research communicative practices in superdi-
verse wards in four British cities, using ethnographic methods, providing evidence of people
engaging positively with diversity through translanguaging in a wide range of settings, includ-
ing a market (Creese et al. 2017; Blackledge et al. 2017), a library (Creese and Blackledge
2019), and a karate club (Zhu Hua et al. 2020a), among others.
Language practices around migration, particularly asylum procedures, have been the focus of
linguistic ethnographic research for some time. This goes back to Blommaert’s (2001) descrip-
tion of the inequalities encountered by African asylum seekers in Belgium, disadvantaged by
the systems they encounter which assume mastery of linguistic-narrative resources that they
do not have. Maryns’ work identifies the monolingual ideologies built into the Belgian asylum
system, including the imposition of English as a de facto lingua franca (2005, 2017). Exclu-
sionary practices and linguistic double-binds are identified by Codo (2011) and Pöyhönen and
Simpson (2020), while Jacquemet’s overview of a range of ethnographies (2011) draws out
global drivers of such inequality. Maryns and Jacobs (2021) argue for the central importance of
analyzing the discursive constitution of asylum procedures, given these inequalities of voice,
and the need to engage with local grassroots organizations.
Workplaces and institutions

Institutional and workplace language has been another area of interest for linguistic ethnogra-
phy. Detailed ethnographic research with attention to language has enabled the identification
of contradictions within institutions, examining orientations to class in the discourses of child
protection social workers (Slembrouck 2005) or identifying the paradoxical formal/informal
practices of residential child care institutions (Palomares and Poveda 2010). Shaw et al. (2015)
find contradictions between health policy think tanks’ public presentations as independent and
their backstage activities engaging with policy-makers. Flynn et al. (2010) argue that linguistic
ethnography can provide insight into institutional discourse, particularly the dynamic between
its inside and outside aspects, and the role of discourse in enacting institutional power.
Another group of workplace linguistic ethnographies addresses written texts in the work-
place. Some of this shows workers negotiating tensions around writing, such as Lillis et al.
(2020), which identifies tensions between professional social workers’ writing and other ele-
ments of their professional practice, or Tusting’s (2010) study of childcare practitioners jug-
gling the writing of observations with the demanding embodied tasks of caring for children. In
healthcare, Swinglehurst (2014) articulates the dilemmas faced by general practitioners in con-
sultations with patients managing tensions between face-to-face interaction and the demands
of the electronic patient records system.
Ethnographic analyses of the complex trajectories of texts in workplaces have illuminated
how power is negotiated and knowledge produced textually. Van Hout and Jacob (2008) trace
298
the production of a news report, from press release to article, highlighting the journalist’s
struggles for power and control arising from his relationships with actors and sources. Rock
(2017) presents the complex trajectory of production of a police witness statement, showing
how the interviewer makes the writing process visible for the interviewee through ‘frontstage
entextualisation’. Woydack’s (2019) analysis of the text trajectories of a calling script used
in a multilingual call centre provides insights into staff in a globalized workplace negotiating
compliance and agency.
Interaction and social structure

Linguistic ethnography seeks to address questions about language, society, and the relationship
between the two, exploring social questions, such as the impact of globalization on multilin-
gual communities, or how class and ethnicity affect learning in schools. Exploring such ques-
tions is challenging because it entails attempting to explain phenomena at different ‘levels’ of
reality: local interaction and social processes.
The challenges of bringing together linguistic and social theoretical frameworks of explana-
tion are formidable. Social interaction can be directly observed, but social inequalities, class
structures, and ethnic identities cannot simply be ‘read off’ linguistic data. Broader patterns
of language use can be inferred from social interactions. To explore class, ethnicity, or global-
ization requires theories about broader forces in the social world. Researchers need to think
through the complexities of these relationships, and the mechanisms by means of which these
different levels of reality can influence one another. Our underlying understandings of how real-
ity works and how we can know about it, that is, the ontological and epistemological framings
of the research, shape how these relationships and mechanisms are understood.
Engagement with practice

Another critical issue relates to engaging with practitioners in ways that make research appli-
cable in real world settings. The critical orientation of much research in this area is clear from
the discussion above, and ethnography’s embeddedness in everyday practice builds in relation-
ships with practitioners from an early stage. However, translating complex research findings
into insights which can be used in practice is not necessarily straightforward. De Maeijer
et al.’s (2017) linguistic ethnography of collaboration meetings between a multinational high-
tech company and a research institute shows how distrust can build when there are conflicts
between the goals and timescales of academia and industry. Lefstein and Israeli (2015) and
Bezemer (2015) reflect on the challenges and rewards of working closely with practitioners
in the areas of education and healthcare, respectively, identifying some of the important dif-
ferences between the perspectives of research and practice and underlining the importance of
listening and partnership working.
Future directions
Online and digital research

Extending linguistic ethnography to engage with online interaction is inevitable and important.
Online ethnography raises questions about the constitution of social groups, the nature and
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Karin Tusting
significance of context, and approaches to participant observation. As mobile technologies

have made online interaction a ubiquitous part of daily life, linguistic ethnographic research
has had to grapple with the ethical challenges of dealing with data which includes communica-
tion both face-to-face and at a distance, where those involved in the communication may not
even be aware of the researcher’s presence alongside their interlocutor (Tagg et al. 2017). The
enormous and rapid extension of video-mediated communication associated with the COVID-
19 pandemic is another arena in which our communicative practices have changed rapidly, and
it is important for linguistic ethnographers to develop tools for data collection and analysis
which can incorporate these media into research.
Embodied communication, space, and materiality

Another area pushing the boundaries of linguistic ethnography is the embodied nature of com-
munication, combining attention to language with analysis of the semiotic repertoires of bodily
interaction and gesture (Blackledge and Creese 2017; Zhu Hua et al. 2020b) and analyzing the
importance of space alongside language in sense-making (Zhu Hua et al. 2017; Spotti 2020).
This aligns with interests in socio-material perspectives across the social sciences.
Linguistic ethnography in Deaf communities and in the study of signed languages has
expanded in recent years. Kusters and Hou (2020) brought together a range of linguistic ethno-
graphic studies in this area in a special issue of Sign Language Studies. They argue that linguis-
tic ethnography challenges existing classifications of and ideologies around sign languages and
shows the complexity of signed practices in their social contexts, including the spontaneous
emergence of manual communication and the complex strategies of multimodal and digital
communication used by deaf people.
Collaborative arts-based and creative approaches

Finally, there is an interesting strand of recent work which adopts collaborative and arts-based
approaches to linguistic ethnography. Moore et al. (2020) present a collection of examples of
collaborative arts-based and activist work, much of which draws on linguistic ethnographic
perspectives, using approaches as diverse as film-sharing, collaborative photography, poetry,
and bricolage, to explore how working together using creative approaches can promote posi-
tive social transformations. There is also some experimentation with creative approaches to
writing up research; Blackledge and Creese (2020) present a linguistic ethnography as a play-
script, taking the reader inside the experience in a very different way from conventional aca-
demic research publications.
Linguistic ethnography is still at a relatively early stage of development, although its ante-
cedents stretch back to the 19th century. This research addresses broad and complex social
questions in areas as diverse as learning, inequality, globalization, and identity construction,
often with a strong orientation towards intervention and always drawing attention to the com-
plex interdependencies of language use and social process. Awareness and ongoing discussion
of theoretical and methodological challenges is driving expansion of the field. New media-
tional concepts continue to be developed, and existing ones refined, as new researchers come
into this area of work, enriching it with their intellectual histories and positionalities. New
technologies open up possibilities both for researching changing practices and for developing
new techniques for data collection, analysis, and communication of research. The definition
of ‘linguistic’ is being challenged by work which insists on the embodiment and complex
contextuality of communicative practices. And the methodological capacity of ethnography
300
is being enhanced by linguistic procedures and terminology which facilitate a more precise
understanding of how culture and social life are mediated through language.
Acknowledgements
This chapter owes a great debt to Janet Maybin, who co-authored the chapter in the first
edition of the Handbook and provided very helpful feedback and comments on drafts of this
version.
Related topics
bilingual and multilingual education; language and culture; language socialization; literacy;
multilingualism; language and migration; institutional discourse; medical communication;
identity; languaging and translanguaging
Further reading
Copland, F. and Creese, A. (2015) Linguistic Ethnography: Collecting, Analysing and Presenting Data,
London: Sage. (A methodological guide for carrying out research in linguistic ethnography, supported
by example case studies)
Snell, J., Shaw, S. and Copland, F. (2015) Linguistic Ethnography: Interdisciplinary Explorations, Bas-
ingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. (A collection of studies representing the range of work in linguistic
ethnography)
Tusting, K. (ed.) (2020) The Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Ethnography, Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
(A collection of chapters from scholars active in the field of linguistic ethnography, exploring histori-
cal antecedents, key concepts, methods, and examples of linguistic ethnography in a range of settings)
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24
Posthumanism and applied
linguistics
Kelleen Toohey
Introduction
It is old hat now to remark that modern theoretical physics uses metaphors that are consistent with
First Nations’ cosmologies . . . [There are many] areas of academic discourse in which Native
scholars recognize ‘new’ knowledge as being consistent with our ‘old’ ways.
(Urion 1999: 15)
Métis scholar Urion pointed to what he saw as the then-commonplace recognition of the align-
ment of theory in several academic fields with Indigenous cosmologies. While this recognition
may have been old hat to some in 1999, it is fairly recently that increasing numbers of com-
mentators, especially those from settler societies that colonize(d) Indigenous peoples, ask, like
Pennycook (2018: viii), ‘What if we started to think in terms of animals and their spirits, of
the active role of land and objects in everyday life, in the idea of climate as commons?’ Or as
Bennett (2010: 47) put it, ‘What would happen to our thinking about politics if we took more
seriously the idea that technological and natural materialities were themselves actors alongside
and within us?’ The growing scholarship that encourages such speculation has been labelled
posthumanism, new materialism, speculative materialism, relational or quantum ontologies,
or process philosophies, and it has many diverse emphases and interpreters in several disci-
plines (feminist poststructuralism, science and technology studies, anthropology, philosophy,
and others), in addition to Indigenous scholarship.1 These perspectives offer relational, non-
binary, and non-hierarchical interpretations of humans, other species, languages, machines,
other objects, and the natural and built environments, and interpretations that are very differ-
ent from traditional understandings. If we are to understand the implications of these often
unfamiliar and on-the-move views for applied linguistics, we must begin, in a sense, further
back from where many applied linguistics discussions begin, to understand how posthumanism
sees: ontologies, what we believe exists; epistemologies, what knowledge is and how knowl-
edge is gained; ethics, how good action is determined; and language. This chapter begins
with a description of how posthuman concepts have been variously articulated in feminism,
philosophy, animal science, physics, and other fields, then describes how this constellation of
ideas has been utilized recently by applied linguists and other scholars. Following this review,
306 DOI: 10.4324/9781003082637-27

Posthumanism and applied linguistics
I briefly discuss some of posthumanism’s inquiry methods and examine what implications for
practice the perspective might hold. I conclude with a brief discussion of future directions
posthumanist inquiry in applied linguistics may take.
Posthumanism’s ethico-onto-epistemology: ‘existence is not an individual

affair’ (Barad 2007: ix)
The term posthumanism refers to speculation about what might come after the social, intel-
lectual, political, and philosophical Western European project of humanism, which held that
entities in the world were discrete, unrelated, unequal in value, and stable. Humanism also
posited binary distinctions between humans and animals, ideas and their material manifesta-
tions, culture and nature, soul and body, reason and feeling (and men and women, humans and
animals, brains and bodies, rationality and emotion, and so on). Zanotti (2020: 2) observed
that Western thought2 has rested not only on Cartesian dualisms of mind and matter but also
on Kant’s distinction between reason and nature and Newton’s physics, which ‘explains the
world as consisting of entities with stable characteristics, standing in a relation of externality to
one another’. Like Urion (ibid.), Métis scholar Todd (2016: 9) observed that the nature/culture
split, often seen as universally shared, is actually a Western European knowledge tradition and
does not describe the long history of scholarship and thinking of diverse Indigenous peoples.3
Some commentators on posthumanism recognize Indigenous peoples’ knowledge and
scholarship, but most draw primarily on sources like the pre-Socratic monists, philosophers
Spinoza and Nietzsche, contemporary science that makes ‘it impossible to understand matter
in ways that were inspired by classical science’ (Coole and Frost 2010: 5), feminism, science
and technology studies (notably actor-network theory), and contemporary poststructuralist
theorists like Foucault (1979) and Deleuze and Guattari (2005 [1987]). Alaimo and Hekman
(2008) argued that poststructural feminism urged the deconstruction of binaries, particularly
the male/female dichotomy, because binaries inevitably lead to hierarchy. Posthumanists see
the world composed of co-constituted and non-hierarchical entities that materialize in constant,
indeterminate, and ever-changing relations with one another, and exceptionalism for humans
is denied. People, animals, objects, nature, space and place, discourses, and so on are seen as
unstable and indeterminate phenomena, proceeding (or performing) together in relation. Femi-
nist physicist Barad (2007: 35) described early 20th-century quantum physics experiments
that showed that ‘individual things with their own set of determinate properties’ could not be
identified. Rather, individual things were always ‘entangled’ with other things and together,
these entanglements acted in unpredictable and indeterminate ways. Barad used the term intra-
action to refer to these entangled entities changing and becoming together.
Posthumanism tells us that things are what they are in relation to other things, and they do
not pre-exist (or post-exist) their intra-actions. While Barad used the quantum physics term
‘entanglement’, other scholars draw on the concept of ‘assemblage’, the English translation of
the French term agencement, originally introduced by Deleuze and Guattari (ibid.) to reference
much the same kind of relations. Dagenais et al. (2022: 252) explained, ‘humans and materials
are seen as forming unpredictable and shifting assemblages constituted by a multiplicity of
vital things . . . which together create phenomena under investigation’. Deleuze and Guattari’s
(ibid.) concept of the rhizome has also been drawn upon by many to reference the complex
relations that exist within and between assemblages. In botany, rhizomes are plants with mul-
tiple horizontal roots which put up multiple stems and spread in all directions. For Deleuze and
Guattari, rhizomes refer to the multiple and unpredictable connections that are made between
and among assemblages (Bangou et al. 2020). In contrast to Newtonian physics but as in
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Kelleen Toohey
rhizomatic relationships, entities do not have a priori independent (essential) characteristics,

but they are entangled in, assembled with, and are not external to one another. And they are
constantly changing or emerging.
A relation that has interested many posthumanists is that of affect. Proposed by 17th-
century philosopher Spinoza, Boldt et al. (2015: 432) understood affect as ‘the registration on
the body of being affected by something’ and emotion as ‘the meaning we [humans] attribute
to affect’. Grosz (2008) gave as an example of affect the bodily sensations and intensities expe-
rienced while encountering art, before judgement, emotion or meanings are ascribed. Many
posthumanists argue that humanist inquiry pays too little attention to affect, emotion, and other
bodily experience but that affect is experienced by all bodies (not only human) in assemblages.
Leander and Ehret (2019) explained that affect theory is concerned with the intensities pro-
duced and with what emerges when heterogenous elements intra-act. Attention to affect and
emotion, they argued, permits a wider and perhaps messier view of how bodies, discourse, and
other material are assembled in their field of concern, literacy.
Posthumanists reject assumptions of human exceptionalism (over animals, for example).
Animal scientist Fraser (2009) claimed that affect and emotion had been ignored in animal stud-
ies because positivism deemed that which was not ‘objective’ was not scientific, and together
these justified inattention to the subjective experience of animals. He and others argued that
contemporary interest in animal welfare and animal rights, and in the contextual, relational,
and to what we might term the intra-action of human observers with animals enable not only
affect and emotion to be part of such inquiry, but also the relevance of the question, what is
a good life for animals? (Tennessen and Caldwell 2020). While Western scientific practice
required the observer to be rational, disinterested, and detached from that which or those whom
she observed, posthumanism emphasizes that knowledge-making entails affect and emotion
occurring in all bodies in assemblages.
Feminism early resisted patriarchal, racist, and classist claims that because of their biologi-
cal makeup (their bodies), certain kinds of humans are able, and others unable, to engage in
various kinds of activities; instead, feminists urged investigation of the historical, cultural, and
discursive formations that limited the participation of women and others in social life. More
recently, feminist posthuman scholars like Grosz (ibid.: 24) suggested the timeliness of
rendering our conceptions of social, cultural, political, and sexual life [to be] more com-
plex, more open to questions of materiality and biological organization, more nuanced in
terms of understanding both the internal and external constraints on behavior as well as
the impetus to new and creative activities.
Interdisciplinary studies of embodiment (including studies of [dis]abilities, continuums of

health or illness, sexualities, neurodiversities, cultural practices, and so on) and their impacts
on quotidian life and thinking show the intra-actions among biological, discursive, material,
and other entities. Youdell et al.’s (2018) bio-social investigation, for example, captured and
analyzed physiological markers of high levels of stress (volatile organic compounds in exhaled
breath) when students underwent testing in classrooms. They recommended further interdis-
ciplinary investigation of how affect ‘flows between bodies and across school sites, [and]
produces particular teacher, learner and abject bodies’ (225).
Related to affect and embodiment, desire is another important concept for posthumanists:
for Deleuze and Guattari (ibid.), desire is a force of life (or a flow) that entities experience in
intra-action, a force that involves transformation, enhancement, and expansion. Desire is a
leaning toward, a joining with, an attraction to doing more, being more. Braidotti (2011: 154)
308
explained, ‘Desire is the propelling and compelling force that is driven by self-affirmation . . .
not to preserve but to change.’ Mozère (2007: 298) urged attention to the ‘language of desire
of young children’, which may not be verbal.
All these concepts are important in understanding posthuman ontologies and posthuman
epistemologies. The humanist world of independent stable entities discoverable by rational
and disembodied observers using standardized quantification measures and/or universalistic
taxonomies was critiqued by poststructuralists as ‘the view from nowhere’ (Nagel 1986). Post-
structuralists argued that knowledge was always situated and specific, and they recommended
genealogies of knowledge and concepts to understand their provenance and power (e.g. Fou-
cault 1979). Adding to these poststructural insights, posthumanists have argued that knowers
are ‘already part of the substances, systems, and becomings of the world’ (Alaimo 2014: 14)
and that knowers, knowledge, and knowledge-making practices are always entangled with
previous and still-to-come discourses, human and non-human bodies, observation instruments,
taxonomies, place, and so on.4 From this perspective, neither being nor knowledge can be fixed,
determinate, universal, or independent of time, space, the embodied observer, or observation
instruments. Rather, from this perspective, knowing is relational, intra-actional and entangled
with matter. Barad (ibid.: 185) used the term ‘onto-epistemologies’ to stress that ‘[p]ractices of
knowing and being are not isolable; they are mutually implicated. We don’t obtain knowledge
by standing outside the world; we know because we are part of the world’. For posthumanists,
knowledge is sensitive to all the intra-actions in which it is created and used. Knowing is not a
matter of individuals internalizing (putting into their brains) representations of a world outside
themselves. Rather, knowing is materially entangled with the human, the non-human, objects,
discourses, what is taken to exist, and so on and is never finished.
Seeing everything in non-hierarchical, dynamic, and intra-acting relations has implications
for action and for ethics. Posthumanism, especially in its iteration as feminist new material-
ism, is particularly interested in the ethical repercussions of what is taken to matter in any
given context. Western dualist politics posit that humans are privileged over animals and other
living and non-living things, and some humans are privileged over others (they matter
more). Flattening hierarchies, as posthumanism urges, means recognition of the entangle-
ments of all entities in phenomena and ‘questioning what is being made to matter and how
that mattering affects what it is possible to do and to think’ (Davies 2016: 83). Barad (ibid.:
393) saw ethics as ‘responsibility and accountability for the lively relationalities of becoming
of which we are a part’. This openness to others and to change is also evident in the work
of Haraway (2016: 178), who explicitly rejected ethical relativism: ‘Cultivating response-
ability . . . requires the risk of being for some worlds rather than others and helping to compose
those worlds with others.’
Like Bennett (ibid.), who argued that recognizing the importance of the material world
required a new politics, Taylor (2016: 15) centred interdependence ‘by including nonhumans
in an ethics of care, by understanding the human always and only in-relation-to nonhumans
who are no longer “others” but are, intimately and always, ourselves as the body multiple’.
Indigenous scholar TallBear (2015: 234) reminded us that these are not new ideas in Indig-
enous cosmologies:
[I]ndigenous peoples have never forgotten that nonhumans are agential beings engaged in
social relations that profoundly shape human lives . . . for many Indigenous peoples, their
nonhuman others may not be understood in even critical Western frameworks as living.
‘Objects’ and ‘forces’ such as stones, thunder, or stars are known within our ontologies to be
sentient and knowing persons (this is where new materialism intersects with animal studies).
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Kelleen Toohey
Posthuman perspectives on language

A historical and influential binary in applied linguistics is that between languages as idealized
systems of rules and languages as actually (often imperfectly) used in real-life settings, with
the former seen as the proper object of linguistic investigation. Sociolinguists in the 1960s and
1970s urged attention to language usage, noting that speakers and writers were influenced by
social and cultural conventions, in addition to linguistic rules (e.g. Hymes 1962). Later, mul-
timodal theorists argued for attention to the multiple modes and media of human communica-
tion (e.g. Kress and van Leeuwen 2001), to humans’ employment of a wide range of semiotic
resources in addition to the linguistic (e.g. gesture, image, bodily comportment, items in the
environment, the environment itself, and so on).
Posthuman scholars de Freitas and Curinga (2015: 250) pointed out that language is not
only words, their orders, and their meanings but also as an assemblage of multiple features –
human bodies and their vocal musculature and intensity – ‘the tone, the rhythm, the variation
of emphasis, the loudness, the changes of pitch . . . that make the human song possible’. Others
have stressed the assembled materiality of language but also point to its immaterial, ideational,
and representational qualities (Grosz 2017; MacLure 2013). Many posthumanists (and others)
prefer the gerund languaging to indicate the processual, becoming, emergent, and assembled
nature of communication. Applied linguists García and Li (2014: 8), for example, argued, ‘The
term languaging is needed to refer to the simultaneous process of continuous becomings of
ourselves and of our language practices, as we interact and make meaning in the world.’ With
a disposition to breach traditional ontological and epistemological boundaries, posthumanists
thus see communicative behaviour unfolding in processes with many non-human entities and,
like them, dynamically differentiating over space and time.
Posthumanists are developing a sense of language not existing outside of or before its entan-
glements (with dress, other living species, non-living things, affect, emotion, space, time, other
language events, and raced, gendered, and sexed human bodies, among others). A posthuman
perspective on language might draw from Ingold’s (2018: 24) notion of agency: ‘not given in
advance of action, as cause to effect, but is rather ever forming and transforming from within
the action itself”. Ingold suggested using the gerund ‘agencing’, and we might similarly think
about languaging as forming and transforming within its specific entanglements, acting in
indeterminate ways, and always emerging anew. Such a view presents real challenges to tradi-
tional and even contemporary understandings of language as repertoires of resources, existing
before and apart from users. The implications of this view have yet to be fully explored.
While this introduction to various posthuman conceptions of ontologies, epistemologies,
ethics, and language was seen as necessary because these perspectives are different from tra-
ditional Western views, what such a view might offer applied linguistics and related fields can
possibly best be illustrated through an examination of some of the lively inquiry that puts these
perspectives to work. We turn now to a description of these rapidly multiplying studies.
Current contributions and inquiry

The Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (n.d.) includes the following key topics in our field:
‘language learning and pedagogy, second language acquisition, sociolinguistics, language pol-
icy and planning, language assessment and research design and methodology’ (cambridge.org/
core/journals/annual-review-of-applied-linguistics/information). Posthuman concepts illumi-
nate matters in all these areas and are drawn upon as well by scholars who do not identify as
applied linguists but whose work in language and literacy education parallels some of applied
310
linguistics’ major interests. This scholarship is currently very energetic, and space constraints
make it impossible here to review more than a subset of this literature or to convey the richness
of its analyses.
Early childhood educators in Sweden have been thinking with and developing posthumanist
concepts for some time (Lenz Taguchi 2010, 2013; Olsson 2009, 2020). Drawing on Deleuze
and Guattari’s (ibid.) concepts of continuous becoming and emergence, Olsson (2009: 183)
described events in preschools in which children were ‘permitted to work within the construc-
tion of sense and problems’ and in which teachers and researchers attempted to listen (inter-
preted broadly) to children in order to follow them in their desiring for examining problems
and learning. Teachers engaged in pedagogical documentation (MacDonald 2007): gathering
classroom photographs, writing field notes, audio- and videotaping, and doing other means
of documentation, not to document ‘what really took place’ but rather to try to understand
children’s desires, their affects, and their interests in and experimentation in the problems that
engaged them. On the basis of those documentations, teachers and researchers then experi-
mented with ways of arranging the learning environment to provoke children’s further learning
(making different apparatuses, materials, and persons available). With teachers in three Swed-
ish preschools in an interdisciplinary project involving neuroscientists performing brain scans
and other individual child testing, researchers Aronsson and Lenz Taguchi (2017) described
teachers’ initial resistance because of their training in collectivist, non-normative early child-
hood education practices. Refusing customary distinctions between neuroscience and educa-
tion, the authors argued that teacher consideration of neuroscience literature, along with their
pedagogical documentations and the researcher’s ethnographic fieldnotes, served to rearrange
these adults’ learning environments and unsettled their understandings of children and learning
and to lead them to new questions and new problems.
The work of American researcher Kuby and teacher Gutshall Rucker (2016) has many
resonances with the Swedish research. In Gutshall Rucker’s elementary school classrooms,
they documented children’s responses to the open-ended invitation ‘Go be a writer!’ and the
provision of a wide range of what is customarily seen as ‘art’ materials. Children eventually
produced puppet shows, dramatic sets, scripts, poems, murals, stories, games, and sometimes,
nothing at all. Kuby and Gutshall Rucker created the concept of literacy desiring to describe ‘the
rhizomatic and intra-active processes of children-creating-with-materials-and-one-another, not
always in intentional ways with materials, modes, time, space, language and bodies’ (15). In a
later publication (Kuby and Gutshall Rucker 2020: 30), they noted the alphabetic skills-based
approach to literacy has been detrimental to so many children, and they quoted Truman’s
(2019: 2) observation that ‘literacy in its multiplicities still operates hierarchically such that
some kinds of literacies – reading, numeracy, speaking in a dominant language – matter more,
and are considered superior to others’. Gutshall Rucker and Kuby (2020: 29) asked, ‘What
are the ethics and consequences to the world when we tell children what counts as literacy or
writing (and what does not)?’ (29).
Toohey (2018) worked with posthumanist concepts to reconsider sociocultural ethnographic
research she had previously conducted in classrooms with children of various language back-
grounds learning English at school over three years (Toohey 2000). In the later publication,
she argued that posthuman perspectives challenged humanist methodologies of the ‘set-apart’
researcher and also enabled new understandings of the consequences of certain children com-
ing to be seen as more or less able in language and other learning than others. She considered
how socio-material concepts of embodiment, affect, and intra-action showed how subordina-
tion of some child learners of English was produced and what consequences these hierarchies
produced.
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Kelleen Toohey
Editors Hackett et al. (2020: 5) claimed in a special issue of the Journal of Early Child-
hood Literacy that definitions of literacy that privilege rationality and hierarchies of intelli-
gence and aptitude for learning ‘end up producing intense divisions and social inequalities’.
This issue’s articles used posthuman concepts to investigate how geopolitical realities,
race, capitalism, neoliberalism, educational assessments, children’s bodies, and other
issues are evident in literacy assemblages and how thinking differently about language and
literacy education might ‘provide an adequate account of, or critical position against, the
positioning, pathologizings and inequalities families and young children live out in their
daily lives’ (10).
Some posthumanists, notably Latin American education scholars, see close relations
between posthumanist and decolonial views. Sousa and Pessoa (2019: 530), for example,
argued colonial understandings of living, thinking and being endure as ‘racial, class, sexual,
gender, linguistic, spiritual and epistemic hierarchies, which characterize our Eurocentrist
world-system’. Veronelli (2015) pointed out that white European colonizers justified their
domination of non-white colonized people, extraction of their resources, and institution of
capitalist economies by constructing the colonized as cognitively, morally, and linguistically
inferior, with their languages being incapable of communicating more than rudimentary mean-
ings. Connecting these ideas about coloniality (the lingering effects of colonization) to
posthuman critiques of human exceptionalism (and some humans being more exceptional than
others) and to ideas about relationality, materiality, ethics, and entanglements, Sousa and Pes-
soa argued that a decolonial and posthumanist perspective can help us to consider more than
the human in educational assemblages and develop ‘new ways of thinking and becoming that
may help us in the process of delinking from exclusionary narratives posed by humanism and
coloniality’ (ibid.: 531)
Considering how it is that we can start to think and act with ideas delinked from colonialism
and humanism, Pennycook (2016: 446) presented data from online and face-to-face encounters
and showed how location(s), non-human materials, multiple languages, texts, popular culture,
and so on were all part of communicative events. He argued that recognition of the distributed,
located, and emergent nature of language practices allows us to ‘consider the subject in more
material terms, as part of a wider distribution of semiotic and material resources, as interpel-
lated by objects, as no longer the guarantor of meaning, as a product rather than a precursor of
specific interactions’ (2016: 457). In Pennycook (2018: 140), he further explored these themes
and concluded that ‘both a modified materialism from political economy and a modified new
materialism [can] make the case for a new way of thinking about our ethical responsibility to
each other and the world’.
Ethical responsibilities to other humans, other species, and the world have been taken up in
various ways by posthumanist applied linguists. Some, interested in the environmental effects
of humanism, specifically critique the ideology of humans being uniquely intelligent, lan-
guage-using, and rational. Applied linguist Sealey (2019: 306) showed the anthropocentrism
of discourse about animal communication (seen as rudimentary and incapable of abstraction),
arguing that this approach ‘may limit not only our means of representing the myriad sensory
experiences of other species but also the potential for understanding [of] and empathy’ for those
species. Appleby (2019: 86) examined multiple discourses (in art, movies, popular media,
and so on) about sharks analyzing how they reinforce normative heterosexuality and hege-
monic masculinity, arguing that ‘applied linguists have a role in interrogating the deleterious
ways in which language and other semiotic resources define and shape relationships between
human and non-human species’ (8). Bucholtz and Hall (2016) considered how humans and
animals build caring intersubjective relations through embodied and skilful joint interactional
312
accomplishments, foregrounding how bodies and affect become vital media through which to
bridge human and nonhuman modes of communication.
Leander and Ehret (2019: 3) were also centrally interested in affect, writing that ‘attending
to the felt intensities of literacy learning and teaching . . . provides openings that may reori-
ent us to what could be, what should be and to shifting relations and mangled movements up
close and far away’. Their edited book presents diverse authors’ attempts to imagine affec-
tive pedagogies that might amplify possibilities for social justice and how writing affectively
might become transformative for authors and readers. Lenters (2019), for example, a child
whose affective draw to animals (and cute puppy videos) enabled her to express a position
on a pertinent and critical ethical question not taken up by her other group members. In an
earlier publication, Ehret et al. (2016) examined assemblages of bodies-materials-place in a
school in which youth were making digital videos of books. The authors showed how bound-
aries between media-based and book-based videomaking ideas and affect were constructed in
assemblages in which the spaces in which the students worked and their movement (e.g. from
a classroom to a playground) had important effects on their learning.
Many posthumanist scholars stress the importance of space and place in assemblages. While
previous scholarship does acknowledge space and environments, this literature typically has
been interested in coming to universalistic environment-neutral understandings of language
and language use. Applied linguist Canagarajah (2017: 33) proposed examining space, mate-
riality, and environments as active, generative, and agentive, and he argued that a spatial ori-
entation ‘appreciates the ecological interconnection of all things and beings’. Kell (2015: 426)
analyzed two examples of how ‘meaning making is not just carried across time and space
through spoken language, but is mediated across space and time through various types of text-
artefacts and material objects’.
Applied linguist O’Halloran (2020) described an assignment in a higher-education class
that asked students to choose texts taking opposite positions on some matter of concern; these
texts then were interpreted through digital corpus analysis, resulting in students’ critical and
novel interpretations of these texts. Arguing that agency in human-digital-tool intra-actions is
indeterminate and distributed, he argued for a rhizomatic or posthuman pedagogy that ‘stresses
the importance of students undergoing personal learning adventures that experiment with novel
connection-making and, in turn, lead to unpredictable turns, to positive difference and creativ-
ity, to fresh and unusual perspectives’ (851).
Methods for posthuman inquiry

The studies summarized thus far show that many posthuman applied linguistic inquiries use
various qualitative methodologies5 to collect their data6 and often ethnographic methods, such
as participant observation, interviews, document collection (including digital content), focus
groups, and so on. Some researchers have described the discomfort they have experienced try-
ing to maintain detachment, objectivity, and neutrality recommended by humanist approaches
in their fieldwork with particular groups of people (often disadvantaged people) or, in some
cases, children and teachers (Astuti 2017; Toohey 2021).
Educational sociologist St. Pierre (2019: 12) proposed post-qualitative inquiry, arguing that
posthuman understandings require new concepts and new ways of thinking, beginning with
consideration of a ‘concrete encounter with the real, not with a research question’. She recom-
mended that, rather than focus on research methods, inquirers might better study those con-
cepts (often provided by philosophers) that provoke new ways of thinking, and finally, finding
creative and experimental means to report the inquiry in ways that invite new thinking and
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Kelleen Toohey
new action. Lenz Taguchi (2017: 702) similarly discussed how methods emerge ‘as we grapple
with various problems or matters of concern, to live, create, and invent in an experimental
play of ongoing differentiation’. For her, as for many other posthumanists, method should be
‘doubled’: while the researcher documents (with concepts) aspects of the matter(s) of con-
cern, she simultaneously should ‘actively engag[e] in reconfiguring those conditions and thus
the concept itself’. Springgay and Truman (2017) described their multiple ‘walking projects’
(www.walkinglab.org) as creative experiments with imagining and creating different worlds.
Guided by posthuman ontologies, epistemologies, and ethics, posthuman inquiry entails
active engagement with problems and issues researchers (and their human and non-human
relations) encounter. Such engagement may include careful intervention, experimentation, and
importantly, thinking with theory. Engagement very significantly involves ethics, and as Barad
(ibid.: x) put it,
acknowledgement, recognition [and] . . . the ongoing practice of being open and alive to
each meeting, each intra-action, so that we might use our ability to respond, our responsi-
bility to help awaken, breathe life into ever new possibilities for living justly.
The projects described earlier illustrate a variety of posthuman inquiry methods. Kuby and
Gutshall Rucker (2016) engaged in joint (researcher and teacher) participation in observing,
documenting, and asking children questions about their intra-actions in the classroom; the
researchers also experimented with presenting transcriptions using different fonts for mark-
ing different kinds of rhetorical contributions. They also presented their representations of
children’s activities and products in a variety of genres (e.g. using a board game format for
describing a child’s construction of a board game). Davies (2014) described narratively her
impressions of children’s intra-actions in a preschool in which teachers engaged in pedagogi-
cal documentation and consulted (initially unfamiliar) literature on social psychology to design
pedagogical interventions. It is unlikely that the variety of methods posthumanists researchers
pursue will ‘congeal’ into a set of approved practices, but rather, they will continue to rely on
the ingenuity and creativity of researchers and the problems/issues/questions that stimulate
them, aligning with new ontologies, epistemologies, and ethics.
Implications for theory/practice

Posthumanism stresses the singularity of intra-actions, making it impossible to articulate
‘best’, ‘universal’, ‘successful’ practices in applied linguistics. The studies reviewed here
report on projects authors conducted in particular situations, locales, and assemblages. Their
applicability to other assemblages is uncertain. St. Pierre (2019) recommended that novice
post-qualitative researchers study philosophy, perhaps implying changes to the grounding in
linguistics of many applied linguistics programs. Interdisciplinary studies have also intrigued
posthuman researchers, as have studies of posthuman ethics. As Barad (2008: 144) put it,
‘particular possibilities exist at every moment, and these changing possibilities entail a respon-
sibility to intervene in the world’s becoming, to contest and rework what matters and what is
excluded from mattering’.
Future directions
How Indigenous cosmologies of relation and how understandings of decolonialization might
speak to posthumanist applied linguistics are important open questions for our field. Together,
314
Indigenous and posthuman thinking may provide effective challenges to the boundaries and
binaries that have led to systematic racism and myriad other inequities minority language speak-
ers and racialized others experience, as well as speciesism, environmental destruction, and the
climate crisis. Posthuman concepts and interdisciplinary practices also provide challenges to
foundational concepts in our field, including language, languaging, repertoires, agency, and
agencing. Conceptualizing an assembled, activity-oriented, creative, and processual notion of
how it is that we and others ‘language’ will be important future work for posthumanist applied
linguists. A posthumanist applied linguistics might understand language as not primarily given
in advance of action but as ideational, forming, and transforming in the multiple intra-actions
in which it assembles with other matter in the world.
Related topics
languaging; literacy; linguistic repertoires; language and materiality
Notes
1 I here refer to these perspectives as posthumanism, although I have elsewhere referred to new
materialisms (Toohey 2018, 2019). Ferrando (2013: 26) defined posthumanism as an umbrella term
for recent onto-epistemologies, including new materialism as ‘a feminist development’ within the
posthumanist frame.
2 While ‘Western thought’ does not describe the ways all Westerners think, the dualism of Western
humanism is widespread and a foundation of the cultural movement that conceptualized humans as
rational, autonomous, and agentive (and often, male) (Braidotti 2013).
3 Like ‘Western thought’, ‘Indigenous ways of thinking’ is an ahistorical generalization that elides diver-
sities among Indigenous peoples’ ways of thinking, knowing, and acting; however, some commenta-
tors argue that commonalities among Indigenous views are based on their common experiences of
colonization. Still others have argued, like Tewa educator Cajete (2017), that while Indigenous people
globally are very diverse, they share deep connections to their home places.
4 Barad (2007) credited the early-20th-century realization in physics that instruments of observation
(apparatuses) for knowledge-creation were entangled with (and, in effect, created) that which was
being observed, as a paradigmatic illustration of a knowing that is different from Cartesian understand-
ings: with one apparatus, for example, light behaves like (is produced as) a particle, but with another
apparatus, light behaves like (is produced as) a wave.
5 Posthumanists challenge the binary quantitative/qualitative. They are interested in transdisciplinary
perspectives and in imagining and experimenting with a range of perhaps completely new inquiry
methods.
6 Ingold (2014: 383) argued that to think of what we learn in fieldwork as data is to adopt humanist
perspectives: ‘To convert what we owe to the world into “data” that we have extracted from it is to
expunge knowing from being. It is to stipulate that knowledge is to be reconstructed from the outside,
as an edifice built up “after the fact’” rather as inhering in skills of perception and capacities of judg-
ment that develop in the course of direct, practical and sensuous engagements with our surroundings.’
Further reading
Bangou, F., Waterhouse, M. and Fleming, D. (eds.) (2020) Deterritorializing Language, Teaching, Learn-
ing and Research: Deleuzo-Guattarian Perspectives on Second Language Education, Leiden: Brill
Sense. (This edited book brings together 11 chapters explicitly concerned with showing how sev-
eral Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts have relevance and importance for research on classroom language
teaching, international postgraduate teacher education, second language writing, and second language
teacher education.)
Coole, D. and Frost, D. (eds.) (2010) New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics, Durham, NC:
Duke University Press. (This edited book is foundational in understanding the feminist roots of new
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Kelleen Toohey
materialism. In 13 chapters, authors discuss materiality, politics, and how new materialism articulates
with historical materialism.)
Davies, B. (2014) Listening to Children: Being and Becoming, London: Routledge. (In this accessible
single-authored book, the author describes her encounters with children in various settings, interpret-
ing those encounters through posthuman concepts, showing how she engaged in co-experimentation
with teachers and children.)
Toohey, K., Smythe, S., Dagenais, D. and Forte, M. (eds.) (2020) Transforming Language and Literacy
Education: New Materialism, Posthumanism and Ontoethics, New York: Routledge. (This edited
book contains 11 chapters which combine explication of posthumanist concepts with accounts of
pedagogy with various ages of students [from young children to prospective and practising teachers]
and various foci [e.g. literacy, affect, place inquiry, instructional coaching, filmmaking, and stop-
motion photography].)
Tuhiwai Smith, L., Tuck, E., Yang, K. W. (eds.) (2019) Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Edu-
cation: Indigenous and Decolonizing Research Methodologies, New York: Routledge. (This book
presents 15 Indigenous and decolonizing studies, which ‘highlight the role of Indigenous cosmologies,
axiologies, and epistemologies in the design and implementation of research’ (xi). Relationality with
other humans, animals, the land and water, and so on characterize all these studies, which present a
variety of research methodologies, activities, and perspectives.)
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25
Social semiotics and multimodality
Theo van Leeuwen
Multimodality
The term ‘multimodality’ dates from the 1920s. It was a technical term in the then relatively
new field of the psychology of perception, denoting the effect different sensory perceptions
have on each other. An example of this is the so-called McGurk effect: if people are shown a
video of someone articulating a particular syllable, such as /ga/, while hearing another syllable,
such as /ba/, they perceive neither /ga/ nor /ba/ but /da/ (Stork 1997: 239). In other words, per-
ception is multimodal. It integrates information received by different senses.
More recently, linguists and discourse analysts have taken up the term, broadening it to
denote the integrated use of different modes, such as facial expression and gesture in speech,
and image, layout and typography in writing. As soon as they had begun to study texts and
communicative events, rather than isolated sentences, they realized what they should have
known all along: that communication is multimodal, that spoken language cannot be ade-
quately understood without taking non-verbal communication into account, and that many
forms of contemporary written language cannot be adequately understood unless we look, not
just at language but also at images, layout, typography, and colour. In the last 30 or so years,
this led to the development of multimodality as a field of study investigating the common and
the distinct properties of the different modes in the multimodal mix and the way they integrate
in multimodal texts and communicative events.
It is not difficult to see why such a field of study should have developed. From the 1920s
onwards, public communication has become increasingly multimodal. The sound film changed
speech, enlarging subtle aspects of non-verbal communication and so influencing how people
talk and move and smile the world over. Later, television made non-verbal communication a
decisive factor in politics, most famously in the televised debate between Nixon and Kennedy.
Writing, too, had become multimodal, as illustrations and layout elements, such as boxes and
sidebars, broke up and reshaped first the printed page and, later, the web page. Most recently
social media have enabled the use of multimodality in private communication.
Like scholars in other fields of study, linguists took notice. In the course of the 20th century,
several schools of linguistics engaged with communicative modes other than language. The
first was the Prague School, which, in the 1930s and 1940s, extended linguistics to the visual
320 DOI: 10.4324/9781003082637-28

arts and the non-verbal aspects of theatre and which included studies of folklore and collabora-
tions with avant-garde artists (see, for example, Matejka and Titunik 1976). The structuralist
semiotics of the 1960s also used concepts and methods from linguistics to understand com-
municative modes other than language. Largely inspired by the work of Roland Barthes, it
mostly focused on analyses of popular culture and the mass media rather than on folklore and
avant-garde art (e.g. Barthes 1967, 1977, 1983). In roughly the same period, American lin-
guists began to take an interest in the multimodal analysis of spoken language and non-verbal
communication in everyday interaction. Birdwhistell (e.g. 1973) developed an intricate set of
tools for analyzing body motion; Hall (1964, 1966) introduced his highly multimodal theory
of proxemics, the study of the distance people keep from each other in social interaction; and
Pittenger et al. (1960) published a detailed and ground-breaking multimodal analysis of the
first five minutes of a psychiatric interview. In the late 1960s, conversation analysis replaced
the 16 mm sound camera with the cassette recorder as the research tool of choice, which
diminished attention to non-verbal communication. More recently, however, scholars in this
tradition have rediscovered multimodality (Ochs 1979; Goodwin 2001; Mondada 2018), and
mediated discourse analysis, inspired by the work of Ron and Suzie Scollon (2003, 2004),
linked micro-analysis of social interaction to the wider social and political context and added
a new emphasis on technological mediation (e.g. Jones 2014). A fourth school emerged in the
1990s. Inspired by M. A. K. Halliday’s social semiotic approach to linguistics (Halliday 1978),
it was this school which adopted and broadened the term ‘multimodality’ and introduced it into
applied linguistics, especially into the study of language and literacy in education.
Today, multimodality has its own biannual conference, textbooks (e.g. Jewitt et al. 2016;
Ledin and Machin 2020), and edited books (e.g. O’Halloran 2004; Jewitt 2014) and is regularly
included in handbooks and encyclopaedias of linguistics, discourse analysis, visual communi-
cation, and so on. Although it encompasses a number of distinct theoretical and methodological
approaches, it has nevertheless remained a united field of study, with productive dialogue and
mutual influence between different schools.
Social semiotics
Based on the linguistics of Halliday (1978), social semiotics differs in a number of ways from
its predecessor, structuralist semiotics, which was based on the linguistics of Saussure (1975
[1916]). As Hodge and Kress wrote in the introduction of their pioneering book Social Semiot-
ics (Hodge and Kress 1988: 1–2),
‘Mainstream semiotics’ emphasizes structures and codes at the expense of functions and
social uses of semiotic systems. . . . It stresses systems and codes rather than speakers and
writers or other participants in semiotic activity as connected and interacting in a variety
of ways in concrete social contexts. It attributes power to meaning instead of meaning to
power. It dissolves boundaries within the field of semiotics, but tacitly accepts an impen-
etrable wall cutting off semiotics from society and from social and political thought.
It is this wall social semiotics seeks to penetrate and for that reason it does not trace its origins
to Saussure, but to Malinowski (1923, 1935), who introduced two concepts that would become
crucial in social semiotics: ‘context of situation’ and ‘context of culture’. Malinowski saw
language as inextricably intertwined with situational contexts, with practical activities such
as fishing or gardening as well as with narrative and ritual practices, and he broadened his
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definition of language to include ‘not only spoken words, but also facial expression, gesture,
bodily activities, the whole group of people present during an exchange of utterances, and the
environment in which these people are engaged’ (1935: 22), recommending the use of sound
film, then a new medium, to study ‘fully contextualized utterances’.
Social semiotics therefore foregrounds practices rather than structures. While many lin-
guists and semioticians have described language as a kind of ‘object’ with different layers
(strata). Kress and Van Leeuwen (2001), inspired by Goffman (1981), focus not on language
but on embodied and material practices of speech and writing, describing these as combining
a range of activities such as designing, producing, disseminating, recording, and so on, which
may be performed simultaneously by a single person or sequentially and organized as a divi-
sion of labour between different participants.
Particularly influential is Malinowski’s emphasis on recontextualization. In his appendix
to Ogden and Richards’ The Meaning of Meaning (Malinowski 1923), he described how fish-
ing, as practiced by the Trobriand islanders whose culture he studied, was recontextualized
in stories about fishing, enacted in the different context of storytelling, which introduced a
different purpose, ‘justifying the social order’ and ‘regulating conduct in relation to hunger,
sex, economic values’ (1935: 7). These stories, in turn, were recontextualized in what he called
‘the language of ritual and magic’, verbal acts which ‘exercise a powerful influence on social
organizing’ (1935: 9), perhaps not entirely unlike today’s vision and mission statements.
Equally important, finally, is Malinowski’s concept of ‘context of culture’, ‘the whole cul-
tural history behind the kind of practices [people] are engaging in, determining their significance
for the culture, whether practical or ritual’, as Halliday summarized it (Halliday and Hasan
1985: 6). To study the context of culture, social semiotics must connect with social theory and
with social, cultural, and political history – that is, with resources that can explain why semiotic
practices and products are the way they are. In Saussure, society had remained an ‘inscrutably
powerful collective being’ (Hodge and Kress 1988: 22). And though Peirce had emphasized
the process of semiosis and did have a dialogic conception of language, he presented this as
‘a fact of personal psychology, without explicit roots in the social process’ (Hodge and Kress
1988: 20). Social semiotics chose a different path. Nevertheless, it also retained much that was
valuable in the theoretical concepts and analytical practices of earlier semiotics, especially its
emphasis on developing ‘ways of semiotically describing and explaining the processes and
structures through which meaning is constituted’ (Hodge and Kress 1988: 2).
One other fundamental aspect of social semiotics was its adoption of Halliday’s metafunc-
tional theory (Halliday 1978). For Halliday, different kinds of meaning co-exist in mutually
informing layers that function in different ways. Halliday refers to them as the interpersonal,
ideational, and textual metafunctions. Respectively, they enact social relations, construe
human experience and enable communication, and they do so by drawing on different and dis-
tinct linguistic resources – resources for interpersonal meaning-making, for instance, include
forms of address (e.g. personal pronouns), speech acts (e.g. mood choices such as declarative
interrogative and imperative), and more. This approach was subsequently applied to other
semiotic modes, for instance, to visual communication (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2021) and the
built environment (Ravelli and McMurtrie 2016).
The social semiotic approach to analyzing multimodal communication analysis has two key
concerns: investigating the similarities and differences between different semiotic modes and
media and studying how different semiotic modes and media integrate into multimodal texts
and communicative events. Both require attention to the semiotic resources and their commu-
nicative potential, as well as to the way these resources are taken up in concrete settings. In the
next section, I will deal with the first of these two concerns.
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The social semiotic analysis of modes and media

A key question for linguists turning to the study of non-linguistic modes of communication is
the question of whether or to which degree non-linguistic modes are like language and to which
degree they can be studied with the concepts and methods of linguistic analysis. Christian Metz
(1974a, 1974b), investigating the language of cinema, came to a negative conclusion: cinema
does not have equivalents to the key units of language – to phonemes, words, clauses, and so
on. In Reading Images, Kress and Van Leeuwen (2021) came to a different conclusion. They
agreed that the forms of visual communication are radically different from those of language.
But this does not mean that text and image cannot fulfil the same communicative functions and,
at some level, express the same meanings. They, therefore, combined functional concepts and
methods from the linguistics of Halliday (1978, 1985) with formal concepts and methods from
the art theory of Arnheim (1969, 1974, 1982) and others, assuming that visual communication,
like language, can realize Halliday’s metafunctions and that the ‘grammar of visual commu-
nication’, like language, can be described as a set of systems of functional-semantic choices.
To take a relatively simple example, both language and image can realize social distance,
but they do so in different ways. In language, social distance can be realized through degrees
in formality of style and mode of address, or through pronoun systems, as in languages with
formal and informal second person pronouns. In images, social distance is realized by ‘size
of frame’ – the close shot, showing only head and shoulders realizing close distance; the long
shot, showing people at full length, realizing far social distance; and the medium shot some-
thing in between. Figure 25.1 represents this as a Hallidayan system network.
This clearly relates closely to the way Edward Hall (e.g. 1966) described the distance we
keep from each other in everyday interaction. Normally, only people with whom we have a per-
sonal relationship may come close enough to allow easy touching, while we ‘keep our distance’
from others, for instance, but just where each ‘zone’ begins and ends will differ from culture
to culture. In other words, cultures have semantic systems of social distance that function as
resources for enacting interpersonal relations, but these systems can be expressed in different
modes – through language, through proxemic behaviour, through images, and so on.
Kress and van Leeuwen (2021) presented a range of system networks, detailing the ide-
ational, interpersonal, and textual meanings images can realize. Their account of visual ideation
broke with earlier traditions which recognized only the symbolic and connotative meanings
of the people, places, and things in images as semiotic, but interpreted the compositions that
combine them aesthetically rather than semiotically. Kress and Van Leeuwen argued that, just
as linguistic grammar connects nominal groups and verbal groups into clauses, so visual gram-
mar can connect the ‘volumes’ that realize grammatical participants and the ‘vectors’ that
realize grammatical processes (the terms come from Arnheim 1982) into larger compositional
syntagms that function like clauses.
Intimated/personal Close Shot
Social Distance Social Medium Shot
Impersonal Long Shot
Social Distance (System Network)
Figure 25.1 The system of social distance
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For Kress and Van Leeuwen visual syntagms can combine together or be embedded into
each other in a number of different ways. O’Toole (2010 [1994]), on the other hand, analyzed
images in terms of clearly defined ranks analogous to the ranks of linguistic analysis (word,
word group, clause, clause complex) – the rank of the ‘work’ as a whole, the rank of the ‘epi-
sode’ (defined as a configuration of ‘figures’ involved in a common action or situation), the
rank of the ‘figures’, and the rank of ‘parts of the figures’. At each rank, specific systems real-
ize the different metafunctions. The figure, for instance, will ideationally have specific attri-
butes, interpersonally a certain degree of prominence, and textually certain stylistic features.
O’Toole’s theory has been further elaborated and tested by Boeriis and Holsanova (2012).
Grammars of other semiotic modes followed the pioneering work of Kress and Van Leeu-
wen and O’Toole – grammars of gesture and movement (Martinec 2000, 2001), of music (Van
Leeuwen 1999), and of the built environment (Ravelli and McMurtrie 2016). Tseng (2013)
developed a systematic account of cohesion in film, inspired by the work of Halliday and
Hasan (1976) and Martin (1992). As will be discussed further here, these grammars have been
used as analytical frameworks in a range of contexts, including education, critical discourse
analysis, and the analysis of everyday interaction and digital media.
Kress and Van Leeuwen (2001) then distinguished between modes and media. They saw
modes as relatively abstract for the expression of ideational, interpersonal, and textual mean-
ings that are not tied to a particular means of expression. Language, for instance, can be mate-
rialized as speech or as writing, and as discussed earlier, the system of social distance can be
realized linguistically, proxemically, and visually. Media are the concrete material substances
or physical actions in and through which modes can be realized. To put it another way, modes
are resources for designing semiotic artefacts or events (e.g. composing a piece of music or
writing a play); media are resources for materializing them (e.g. performing the music or the
play). In doing so, they create the styles that express individual and group identities, including,
for instance, corporate branding.
Media make meaning not through systems but on the basis of provenance and experiential
metaphor. In the case of provenance, signifiers are imported from one context (for instance, a
historical period, a social group, or a culture) into another, in order to signify ideas and values
associated with that other context in the context that does the importing. Literary styles, for
instance, can import archaic expressions, foreign words, and dialects into the ‘standard lan-
guage’ (Mukařovský 1964: 338–339) to evoke ideas and values ‘standardly’ associated with
the periods, countries, and regions these expressions come from. Provenance, therefore, rests
on contextually specific cultural knowledges. The idea was inspired by Roland Barthes’ analy-
sis of the role of ‘connotation’ and ‘myth’ in popular culture (Barthes 1977).
Experiential metaphors transfer our experience of concrete material qualities to more
abstract ideas relating to these qualities. The idea derives from Lakoff and Johnson (1980),
who argued that the understanding (and we might add, the creation) of metaphors is based on
concrete experience: ‘No metaphor can ever be comprehended or even adequately represented
independently of its experiential basis.’Take the example of speech, the materiality of language
itself. We all know what happens when our voice tenses – it becomes higher, sharper, and
brighter. And we also know in what kind of circumstances our voice becomes tense – when
we feel threatened, for instance, or when we have to restrain strong emotions, whether anxiety
or excitement, to mention just some of the possibilities. This range of experiences therefore
creates a meaning potential. It can come to mean a range of things – anxiety, repression, fear,
excitement, and so on – and how that potential will be actualized and narrowed down depends
on the context – the specific situational context as well as the broader cultural context. The
same approach can be applied to analyzing material objects rather than bodily performances.
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The social semiotic analysis of experiential metaphor takes its cues not from grammar but
from phonology. Making meaning with materiality combines, first of all, a set of parameters,
such as melody and rhythm and timbre, welding them into a multimodal unity, and secondly, a
set of what Kress and Van Leeuwen, following Jakobson and Halle (1956), called the distinc-
tive features of these parameters – voice quality, for instance, combines tension and pitch and
loudness and roughness (and more, as can be seen in Figure 25.2). These distinctive features
are simultaneous choices. They are always all at play. And they are also gradable, ‘more or
less’ choices rather than binary choices, scales which run, for instance, from maximally tense
to maximally lax – in Figure 25.2, the curly bracket represents simultaneity and the double
arrow gradation.
Describing and analyzing semiotic modes and media separately, as many social semioti-
cians have done, is useful but does not begin to show what happens when they are put together
and integrated in multimodal texts and communicative events. This will be done in the next
section.
The social semiotic analysis of multimodal integration

Early studies of multimodal integration mostly focused on the relation between text and image.
In the 1960s, Roland Barthes distinguished between three types of image-text relation (Barthes
1977). In the first two, illustration and anchorage, image and text convey essentially the same
content, though of course in different ways. In the case of illustration, the text is primary,
Figure 25.2 The parametric system of voice quality
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Theo van Leeuwen
and the image interprets it in a particular context and for a particular audience; in the case of
anchorage, the image is primary and the text narrows down its meaning to suit a particular
context. In the Middle Ages, Barthes said, illustration had been the dominant text-image rela-
tion. The most highly valued images illustrated the key stories and key concepts of the time
– stories from the Bible and ancient mythology, as well as theological concepts. Anchorage
began to take over in the Renaissance when science and exploration encouraged images that
could document the world, so making it amenable to scientific labelling, classification, and
interpretation. In the case of relay, Barthes’ third category, text and image do not ‘say the same
thing’ but convey different, complementary content. In the dialogue scenes of films and comic
strips, for instance, the image shows the speakers the text of what they say. Text and image,
therefore, depend on each other to convey the whole of the content, a relation which is, today,
becoming increasingly significant, such as in the way people use emojis in text messaging.
Martinec and Salway (2005) have provided the most detailed Barthes-inspired account of
the semantics of text-image relations, focusing both on the relative status of text and image and
on their logico-semantic interrelations. When image and text are equal in status, they said, the
whole of the image connects to the whole of the text. An image may, for instance, show a group
of people walking to a courthouse while the text says, ‘Janklow walks up to the courthouse
with his legal team.’ If a newspaper article about the actions of a politician is illustrated by a
photograph of that politician, then that image is ‘subordinate’, relating only to part of the text.
Martinec and Salway’s account of the logico-semantic relationships between text and image
was based on Halliday’s theory of conjunction (1985). They first of all distinguished different
types of elaboration, instances where the text ‘rephrases’ the image in some way, or vice versa.
In the case of exposition, image and text are at the same level of generality, while in the case of
exemplification, either the text is more general than the image or the image more general than
the text (as, for instance, in a skull-and-crossbones icon accompanied by the words ‘high volt-
age’). Extensions add new, related information, as when the captions in art books add details,
such as the name of the artist, the year in which the work was created, and so on. Enhancements
add circumstantial elements to the image or vice versa – for instance, the location or timing
of an event, or its reason or result. Projection, finally, is the relation between the image of a
speaker and his or her words (this may also include the relation between a thinker and his or
her thoughts, as indicated by the thought bubbles of comic strips).
Martin and Salway’s approach took its cues from the linguistics of conjunction and complex
clause construction. But text-image relations can also be approached from the visual end, using
theories of visual composition. Kress and van Leeuwen (2021) have suggested that the spatial
zones of pictures, pages, and screens (left and right; top and bottom; centre and margins) inter-
relate textual elements, regardless of whether they are visual or textual, by providing them with
specific ‘information values’. To start with left and right, if there is polarization (some kind
of difference or contrast) between an element placed on the left and an element placed on the
right, then the left element will be understood as the Given, as a departure point for the message
that is, or is assumed to be, already familiar to the reader or viewer, while the right element is
understood as the New, the element that contains the information the message is trying to get
across. This left-right information flow clearly corresponds to the left-right mode of writing
and reading in Western culture and is indeed reversed in cultures that write from right to left.
When there is vertical polarization, polarization between an element placed in the upper and
an element placed in the lower section of the picture, page, or screen, the top element is the
Ideal, the idealized or generalized essence of the message, and the bottom element the Real,
contrasting with the Ideal in presenting, for instance, factual details, documentary evidence,
or practical consequences. In single-page magazine advertisements, the Ideal typically depicts
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the ‘promise’ of the product or the glamour, success, or sensual satisfaction it will bring to the
consumer, while the Real shows the product itself and perhaps provides factual information
about it.
The Centre, finally, is another key compositional zone. Instead of polarizing the elements
of the composition, the Centre unifies them, providing the Margins that surround it with a
common meaning or purpose. In a Rank Xerox company brochure, for instance, the Centre
presented a happy Rank Xerox employee, while the words that surrounded him suggested the
various ways in which Xerox makes its employees happy by ‘recognizing and rewarding’ their
efforts.
Such compositional schemas are multimodal for two reasons. They can apply to any kind
of spatial configuration, whatever its mode – image, text, museum display, stage design, archi-
tectural façade – and they can integrate different kinds of element (e.g. text and image) into a
multimodal whole. But it is a different kind of integration from that described by Martinec and
Salway. The connections it establishes between elements are visual rather than verbal, simul-
taneous rather than linear, informational rather than semantic, and geared towards hierarchies
of importance and attention rather than to internal, logical coherence. Verbal integration and
visual integration have their own logics and their own epistemological commitments.
In accounting for time-based, linear multimodal integration, inspiration came from theories
of intonation and rhythm, foregrounding, again, hierarchies of information and attention rather
than logico-semantic relations. Rhythm provides cohesion, bundling speech, action, and music
together and segmenting the resulting multimodal whole into the communicative moves that
propel it forward. It is also, and at the same time, the physical substratum, the sine qua non,
of all human action. Everything people do has to be rhythmical and in interacting people syn-
chronize with each other as finely as musical instruments in an orchestra.
Analyzing multimodality in films brings out how it is now the rhythm of speech, and now
the rhythm of action, and now the rhythm of music, which provides, as it were, the melody, and
with which the signs of other semiotic modes are rhythmically aligned. Figure 25.3 analyzes
a short excerpt from Hitchcock’s North by Northwest in which the rhythm is carried by the
dialogue. The rhythmic accents that provide the ‘beat’ are in italics. The rhythmic phrases are
enclosed in brackets and the nuclear accents, the key moments of each phrase, are capitalized
and italicized. Double brackets enclose larger rhythmic units which are also, and at the same
time, larger narrative moves. Note the increase in tempo and tension at the start of the second
of these units, where Eve says, ‘Wait a minute.’ Elements other than speech – the edits of
the film, the gestures of Thornhill and Eve – find their place within the temporal order of the
speech rhythm. The edits (indicated by a vertical line across all the rows) coincide with stressed
syllables, the gestures with the boundaries between rhythmic phrases. Even when there is no
speech, towards the end of the excerpt, the timing if the edits still follows the rhythm initiated
by the preceding speech. Everything is rhythmically ordered.
Rhythm not only integrates the different modes. It also frames and delineates the com-
municative moves of the unfolding text, here the moves of the narrative. The excerpt in Fig-
ure 25.3 immediately precedes the famous scene in which Thornhill (Cary Grant) is attacked
by a cropduster plane. Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint) has just told Thornhill when and where
to meet a mysterious man called Kaplan. What Eve knows, and what Thornhill does not know,
is that the meeting is a trap and that Thornhill will be attacked. After some perfunctory lines
of dialogue, during which the audience is left to wonder whether Eve will warn him, there is
a change of pace. Tension rises. At the last minute, Eve seems to have second thoughts. ‘Wait
a minute,’ she says. ‘Please.’ A tense silence follows. But the moment passes, and Thornhill
leaves to board his train.
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Theo van Leeuwen
Figure 25.3 Rhythmic analysis of an excerpt from North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock 1959)
The remainder of this chapter reviews some applications of the social semiotic approach to
multimodal analysis.
Educational applications
The social semiotic approach to multimodal analysis has been most widely applied to educa-
tion. To a large extent this was initiated by the New London Group, which, among others,
included Gunther Kress, James Gee, Allan Luke, and Mary Kalantzis (New London Group
1996). This led to three kinds of studies: studies of the development of multimodal literacy
328
in young children; studies of multimodal learning resources, including textbooks, toys, and
digital resources; and studies of multimodal classroom interaction.
Gunther Kress’ Before Writing (1997) initiated an influential approach to studying the early
development of multimodal literacy, investigating how very young children use the affor-
dances of whatever materials they have at hand or whatever techniques they have mastered on
the basis of interest, of what is of crucial importance to them at a given moment. In one of his
key examples, a three-year-old child draws a car as a series of circles (wheels). Having mas-
tered the drawing of circles, the child now uses circles as a means of expressing what, to him,
is a crucial characteristic of cars. As a semiotic resource the circle has many possible meanings,
but the one this child selects, at this particular moment, is motivated by his interest in thinking
about cars. Thus, learning to draw and learning to understand the world around him go hand in
hand. But as Kress also says, the social will soon make its impact (Kress 1997: 13):
As children are drawn into culture, ‘what is to hand’ becomes more and more that which
the culture values and therefore makes readily available. The child’s active, transformative
practice remains, but is more and more applied to materials which are already culturally
formed.
This approach has inspired studies of ‘situated literacies’ (Anderson 2013), based on observing
young children in the process of making meaning with multimodal resources (cf. Hackett 2014),
most recently, though still relatively rarely, with digital resources (e.g. Gilje 2011; Burn 2016).
Other applications focus on analyzing texts produced by children, rather than on the process
of producing them (e.g. Ormerod and Ivanič 2002), or on analyzing textbooks, which have
become increasingly multimodal over the years (Kress and Bezemer 2009), and other learning
resources. Sometimes this led to the development of explicit pedagogies for promoting multi-
modal literacy (cf. Mills and Unsworth 2017), at other times it foregrounded children’s agency.
Jewitt’s study of the way children use computer games to learn science (Jewitt 2006) combined
these two approaches, describing the games and showing how children struggle to match the
rules of the game with their everyday experience of the phenomena the game recontextualizes.
When learning to understand ‘bouncing’ through a game called Playground, for instance, they
could choose a particular kind of bounce (represented by icons of a spring, a ball, etc.) and
attach it to an object, such as a bullet, which could then bounce off bars. But this is confusing.
Isn’t ‘bouncing’ a quality of the bars rather than the bullets? Nevertheless, the game did allow
children to explore the rules of mechanics systematically, interactively, and multimodally and
practically without any verbal input.
Studies of classroom interaction, finally, have moved from the traditional emphasis on lin-
guistic exchange structures to strong contextualization and detailed attendance to non-verbal
communication and spatial settings. Kress et al. (2005), for instance, described the layout of
classrooms as realizing different pedagogies, such as a transmission pedagogy, with individual
tables lined up in rows or a ‘participatory/authoritarian’ pedagogy, with tables put together to
create teams of four or five students facing each other (‘participatory’) yet angled in a way
that allows the teacher total visual control from the front of the classroom (‘authoritarian’). To
mention some recent examples, Lim (2020) studied multimodal classroom interaction, Ravelli
(e.g. 2018) the role of spatial arrangements in changing practices of teaching and learning in
universities, and Diamantopoulou et al. (2012) museums as spaces for learning.
In all this work, multimodality is seen as a key towards better learning, including empower-
ing students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, such as in South Africa
(Archer 2014), with different modes and media enabling the representation of different aspects
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Theo van Leeuwen
of and perspectives on objects of learning. Kress (2010: 16–17) provides a telling example
from the teaching of science. Representing a cell linguistically requires naming its elements
and establishing logical relations between them, such as possessive relations (‘The cell has
a nucleus’). Representing a cell visually requires deciding just where the nucleus should be
positioned within the cell. More generally, different modes ask for different ‘epistemological
commitments’, and for this reason, it is important to understand their affordances and poten-
tials for learning.
Multimodality and critical discourse analysis

Critical discourse analysis has generally focused on verbal texts, such as political speeches and
newspaper reports and editorials, though interest in multimodal critical discourse analysis has
grown in recent years, with special journal issues and edited books (e.g. Machin 2013; Djonov
and Zhao 2014; Machin and Van Leeuwen 2016) showing that many of the issues on which criti-
cal discourse analysts have focused, such as racist discourse and the discourses of global corpora-
tions and far-right populist politicians, have also been analyzed from a multimodal point of view.
Van Leeuwen (2000) used his framework for analyzing the visual representation of social
actors to investigate visual racism in a corpus of images representing Africans and Afro-Amer-
icans in European popular culture, including postcards, tourist brochures, advertisements, and
so on. This brought out, among other things, that demeaning racial stereotypes continue to be
used and that Africans and Afro-Americans continue to be depicted as agentive in subservient
and deviant actions. He concluded (ibid.: 335),
Visually communicated racism can be much more easily denied, much more easily dis-
missed as ‘in the eye of the beholder’ than verbal racism . . . It is for this reason that
consideration of images should have pride of place in any enquiry into racist discourse.
Chouliaraki (e.g. 2006) developed a framework for the multimodal analysis of television news
with the explicit aim of integrating multimodal analysis with the critical analysis of television
news discourses. She applied this framework to the reporting of ‘distant suffering’, compar-
ing the reporting of a boat accident in a remote area of India in which 44 people died with the
reporting of 9/11, and showing how the victims of the boat accident were ‘othered’ in ways
which the victims of 9/11 were not.
To give some examples of the multimodal critical analysis of corporate discourses, Machin
(2004) has analyzed how the Internet image bank Getty Creative Images allows images to
be searched for abstract concepts rather than for concrete people, places, things, actions and
events. Such conceptual images are produced to fit into multimodal designs, using restricted
colour palettes that will easily harmonize with page layout and leave space for words, and they
are generic rather than specific, using a range of decontextualizing devices and a restricted
vocabulary of attributes to indicate the identity of people and places (e.g. hard hat and rolled-
up blueprint means ‘architect’, laptop means ‘office’, nondescript skyscraper means ‘city’).
Most importantly, from a critical point of view, the concepts included predominantly stress the
positive values of contemporary corporate discourse: freedom, creativity, innovation, determi-
nation, concentration, spirituality, well-being, and so on.
Roderick has applied a social semiotic approach to the analysis of ‘framing’ in contempo-
rary office design, showing how ‘the affordances of spatial layout and material form produce
rather than merely reflect neoliberal ideologies of work’ (Roderick 2016: 275) – ideologies,
such as flexibilization, deregulation, and obligation of workers to self-manage.
330
Multimodal analysis of political discourse has been less common, though Wodak and
Forchtner have analyzed the use of political cartoons in the election campaign of Austria’s far-
right Freedom Party (Wodak and Forchtner 2014), the representation of the political process
in the TV series West Wing (Wodak and Forchtner 2018), and the appearance and performance
of far-right politicians such as H. C. Strache (Wodak 2021), while Djonov and van Leeu-
wen (2014) have analyzed the ‘marketization’ of political discourse and Machin and Suleiman
(2006) the political content of two computer war games set in the Middle East, one produced by
the American company Novalogic, which works closely with the US Department of Defense,
and one by Hezbollah. The critical multimodal analysis of the speech and non-verbal commu-
nication of politicians, however, remains underdeveloped, despite Norman Fairclough’s early
call for its importance (Fairclough 2000: 4):
Communicative style is a matter of language in the broadest sense – certainly verbal lan-
guage (words), but also all other aspects of the complex bodily performance that constitute
political style (gestures, facial expressions, how people hold themselves and move, dress
and hairstyle, and so forth). A successful leader’s communicative style is not simply what
makes him attractive to voters in a general way, it conveys certain values which can pow-
erfully enhance the political message.
Multimodality and the analysis of everyday interaction

Ron and Suzie Scollon (e.g. 2003, 2004) integrated social semiotics in their ‘mediated dis-
course analysis’ approach to the multimodal analysis of everyday situated interactions. Many
of their studies started from simple everyday actions such as having a cup of coffee (Scollon
2001) and then made a physical object (e.g. a paper coffee cup and the printed messages on it)
into the centre of a set of converging lines of inquiry-interaction analysis, down to the micro-
level of conversational and non-verbal rhythms, semiotic analysis of the setting of the interac-
tion, and critical analysis of the broader social, cultural, and political environment.
Building on their work, Sigrid Norris (2005) analyzed one of her ethnographic interviews in
this vein, including in her analysis not just the interview itself but also the activity in which the
interviewee was engaged while talking to her (ironing clothes), the soap opera that was running
on television in the background, the game played by her daughter on the floor of the room, and
at a larger scale, the interviewee’s life story and the discourses she invoked to represent it –
discourses about women as professionals and housewives, about mothering, about the power
relations between men and women, and so on. The results of the analysis then led to theoretical
reflections on issues of social theory, such as agency, identity, and habitus. Norris makes the
complexities of analyses of this kind visible by means of detailed techniques of transcription
(cf. also Norris 2002), including elements of traditional conversation analysis and photographs
with superimposed dialogue, complete with intonation transcription, and relevant television or
computer screen images that would otherwise be invisible.
Multimodality and the analysis of digital media

Social semiotic approaches to the study of multimodality in digital media have been of two
kinds: studies of people’s use of digital media, often with special emphasis on the expression
and negotiation of individual or shared identities, and studies of digital media as semiotic
resources, investigating what kinds of meanings can be multimodally expressed on different
platforms and how.
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Theo van Leeuwen
Multimodal studies of the online expression of identity have often focused on the expres-
sion of identity (e.g. Bouvier 2012; Zappavigna 2016; Adami 2018). In a study of Instagram
images posted by mothers of young children, Zappavigna (2016) has explored the use of filters
and the visual expression of subjectivity, distinguishing between images that actually portray
the photographer (selfies), images that infer the photographer by showing part of her body
(e.g. the hand that holds the camera), and images that imply the photographer (e.g. by means
of a foreground object). Adami (2018) has analyzed a WordPress web blog titled The Diary
of a Frugal Family, which started as a personal blog sharing ‘the memories that we make as
a family’ but gradually became more like a business as the blogger’s tips on saving money
and food preparation found its followers, and elements such as ‘privacy policy’ and ‘why you
should work with me’ were added to the site. In the process, the blogger’s use of multimodal
semiotic resources (the colour palette, the fonts, the layout, the images, etc.) changed from
being ‘amateurish’ but also ‘joyous, chaotic, and authentic’ to being ‘professional, clean, and
minimalist’, blending the personal and the corporate.
Social semiotic studies of digital semiotic resources started by focusing on resources for
producing texts, such as PowerPoint and Word. Djonov and Van Leeuwen (e.g. 2011, 2013)
explored how PowerPoint structures the use of colour, background texture, layout, and so
on and the way people have used the medium in educational and commercial presentations.
Kvåle (2016) researched the history of Microsoft SmartArt, which began as an Office feature
for charting organizational reporting structures (‘insert organizational chart’), then broadened
into a resource for creating ‘relationship diagrams’ and finally became SmartArt, now used in a
wide range of practices, including education, but still based on the principles of organizational
charts and diagrams. She shows how linguistics students attempted to use SmartArt to create
‘morphological trees’, a kind of diagram which SmartArt does not provide for, and concluded
(ibid.: 269):
When students choose to represent their knowledge of language as SmartArt hierarchies,

they are in fact constructing their knowledge in the guise of organization charts. Ideologies
from organization management are thereby infused into higher education in general and
language studies in particular – not explicitly by verbal instruction, but by being buried
in the templatized formats for multimodal representation as part of the technologization
of discourse.
At present this approach is beginning to be applied, not only to text-producing software such as
PowerPoint and Word but also to social media, as in Zappavigna’s work on hashtags as tools for
categorizing information and creating communities of like-minded Internet users (Zappavigna
2018) and in the computer programs that regulate other kinds of social practices, such as online
shopping (Höllerer et al. 2019).
Future developments
Multimodal analysis is a relatively new enterprise. There is much room for further develop-
ment of the approaches discussed in this chapter and for new applications. It is nevertheless
possible to list a few desirables for the future development of multimodality as a branch of
applied linguistics. I will focus on three: the need for self-reflexivity, the need for attending to
cultural diversity, and the need for engaging with technology.
To start with self-reflexivity, as my examples have shown, multimodality is a multidisci-
plinary field. It needs to draw on different disciplines – for instance, in the case of the visual
332
mode, on functional linguistics and on art and design theory. To do justice to the crucial role
of context in making meaning, it needs ethnographic research or other forms of documenting
contexts. And to be able to not just describe but also explain multimodal practices, it needs
to attend to the broader cultural and historical context of the phenomena it investigates. As
interest in multimodality grows in other disciplines, such as in organization and management
studies (cf. Höllerer et al. 2019), mutual learning processes need to make explicit just what
different disciplines can learn from each other and contribute to each other’s work.
As for the need to focus on cultural diversity, to date multimodality has predominantly
looked at Western modes and media and Western ways of using them. But just as linguistics
has been immensely enriched by the study of languages which express radically different
meaning systems in radically different ways, multimodality would also be much enriched
by engaging with cultural diversity, such as by mining the rich resources of anthropological
literature, but also, and above all, by decolonizing the discipline and linking up with research-
ers across the globe.
Finally, there is a need to engage with technology. In the past, technology has often been
treated as a means for recording and/or distributing communicative artefacts and events which
does not affect them semiotically. However, today’s multimodal technologies come with pow-
erful built-in semiotic constraints and affordances that deeply influence what can be said with
them and how, and they have been instrumental in the development of new forms of speaking
(Zhao et al. 2014) and writing (Kress 2003; Van Leeuwen 2020) in many of the domains that
concern applied linguists.
With so much work to be done and so much still to learn, multimodality is certain to play an
increasingly important role in helping to build the applied linguistics of the future and enabling
it to face the task ahead.
Related topics
critical discourse analysis; discourse analysis; linguistic ethnography; media; systemic-func-
tional linguistics
Further reading
Jewitt, C. (ed.) (2014) The Routledge Handbook of Multimodality, 2nd ed., London: Routledge. (This is
a representative and up-to-date collection of approaches to and applications of multimodal analysis.)
Jewitt, C., Bezemer, J. and O’Halloran, K. (2016) Introducing Multimodality, London: Routledge. (This
book brings together a range of approaches to multimodal analysis and has detail on the design and
conduct of multimodal research.)
Kress, G. (2010) Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication, London:
Routledge. (This book brings together Kress’ influential work on the development of multimodal lit-
eracy in young children, multimodality in education, and the social semiotics that underlies his work.)
Kress, G. and Van Leeuwen, T. (2021) Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design, 3rd ed., London:
Routledge. (This is an extensive and widely used social semiotic account of the ‘language’ of visual
communication.)
Van Leeuwen, T. (2005) Introducing Social Semiotics, London: Routledge. (The third part of this book
deals extensively with the ways in which different semiotic modes can be integrated into multimodal
texts.)
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26
Linguistic landscapes
Introduction
Linguistic landscapes, or LLs, are established phenomena of interest across an increasing num-
ber of linguistic fields and disciplines. LL studies explore meaning in all kinds of public spaces,
whether they be metropolises, trains, buses, ferry terminals or airports, shops, restaurants and
tourist sites, live events, protests and pride marches, museums, galleries, and religious institu-
tions, human bodies and clothing, or online spaces. LL studies are primarily about interpreting
meaning through visibility (and sometimes invisibility), and therefore, they represent some-
thing of a departure from traditional (socio)linguistic areas of enquiry, which historically have
privileged spoken language as the object of study. As we explain further here, the LL is also
at the vanguard of the critical deconstruction of ‘language’ itself, as it provides a set of tools
for analyzing systems of meaning and interpretation that are both non-verbal and non-textual.
It could be argued that LL research has its deepest foundations in the study of multilingual-
ism, especially in terms of understanding the relationship between languages as attested in the
public spaces of towns and cities. As we outline in this chapter, the field has evolved consider-
ably over the past 15 years or so, both methodologically and thematically. These developments
can be mapped through discussions about the characteristics of signs and how to define and
categorize them, to debates about broader forms of meaning and interpretation and their mate-
rialization through diverse semiotic resources and stimuli, not all of which fit the mould of
‘language’ in the traditional sense. After a brief sketching of important foundational research,
we outline contemporary areas, methods, and issues of interest before making some recom-
mendations for practice, discussing potential future directions of the field, and noting some
related topics.
Compared with some of the more established sociolinguistic disciplines, LL research repre-
sents a relatively fledgling field. Its main period of growth has come in the last 15 years, in
part correlating with the rise of scholarly interest in globalization and linguistic pluralism,
themselves a product of the wider recognition that very few (if any) parts of the world can
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082637-29 337

nowadays be described as monolingual. Due to the growth of emerging markets, the mass
internationalization of global economies, and the pervasion of brands, products, and services
across borders, languages are spreading, evolving, and coming into contact at an exponential
rate. Research associated with the LL, in turn, has historically formed part of the scholarly
mission to understand this evolutionary step of multilingualism, as well as the many and varied
forms of language contact that it creates.
Landry and Bourhis (1997) use the term ‘linguistic landscape’ in a study of English-French
multilingualism in a series of Canadian schools. In their article, they refer to the LL as ‘the
visibility and salience of languages on public and commercial signs’ (p. 23) and proceed with
a description which has become the most cited piece of literature in the LL canon (p. 25):
The language of public road signs, advertising billboards, street names, place names, com-
mercial shop signs, and public signs on government buildings combines to form the lin-
guistic landscape of a given territory, region, or urban agglomeration.
Despite numerous early studies crediting the field’s origin to this article, a number of detailed
literature reviews – particularly those by Backhaus (2007) and Gorter (2013) – point out that
interest in signs dates back at least to the 1970s. Our overview cannot be comprehensive in
such a short space, but a number of pioneering studies are worth highlighting in order to trace
the foundational development of the field. The first, by Rosenbaum et al. (1977), relates to a
1973 survey of 50 names of shops, restaurants, and offices on a commercial street in central
Jerusalem. Part of a larger project about language distribution in the city, the authors trace cor-
relations between language and script choice and the private/public ownership of businesses,
describing a tendency for non-official actors to eschew the national language of Hebrew in
favour of the Roman script. In Tulp’s (1978) survey of advertising billboards in the suburbs
of Brussels, she argues that they contribute to a local shift in language practices and ideolo-
gies away from Flemish towards French. Among Tulp’s conclusions is the hypothesis – of
foundational importance to LL research – that the visibility of a language in the public space
is linked to people’s perceptions of that language and to its status relative to other languages.
Monnier’s (1989) investigation of Montreal makes the case for the paysage linguistique (‘lin-
guistic landscape’) to contribute to assessments of language hierarchies, particularly in settings
of language conflict. Another important work is Spolsky and Cooper’s (1991) monograph on
language distribution in Jerusalem. Building on the Rosenbaum et al. (1977) study, they pres-
ent a variety of matrices through which to explore language choice, including ‘types’ of signs
(e.g. street signs, warning notices, commemorative plaques, graffiti) and their origin (local,
national, international) and authorship status (official, private, commercial). In a study of great
theoretical importance for the LL field, Scollon and Scollon (2003) provide a framework to
account for the situatedness of meaning (‘discourses in place’), drawing attention to the socio-
cultural contexts through which signs are created in a system they term geosemiotics.
A significant recent foundation for the LL field was laid by a special issue of the Interna-
tional Journal of Multilingualism (Gorter 2006), which heralded the LL as ‘a new approach to
multilingualism’. As with other research belonging to what has been described as LL’s ‘first
wave’ (Woldemariam and Lanza 2015: 177), its four papers all include some degree of quanti-
tative surveying of mono- and multilingual signs, classified as either bottom-up (non-official)
or top-down (official), alongside a number of other variables, to explore what public signs can
tell us about the multilingual picture of the places, people, and ideologies which construct them.
Another fundamental development was presaged by Jaworski and Thurlow (2010), who
posit the concept of ‘semiotic landscapes’ as a critical expansion of the definitions of languages
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and the landscapes in which they are found. Building on a foundation of social semiotics,
they foreground the importance of multiple modes of meaning, including imagery, movement,
and spatial practices for the construction of the public space. This collection and numerous
subsequent studies emphasize how the discursive modalities of everyday life – texts, images,
non-verbal communication, the built environment, and global political, social, and economic
trends – merge to form contemporary landscapes and their structures of meaning. Such ‘semi-
otic assemblages’ (Pennycook 2017) vastly expand how we interpret both language systems
and the qualities and functions of the landscapes in which they are found and the many media
and modes through which they can be constructed and deconstructed.
This selection of important studies initiated many of the critical and methodological dis-
cussions that would follow in subsequent years, borne out in dedicated panels, colloquia, and
keynote talks at major international conferences and symposia, as well as in a dedicated series
of international LL workshops, beginning in Tel Aviv in 2008 and subsequently in Italy, Ethio-
pia, Belgium, South Africa, the USA, the UK, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Thailand, Sweden,
Germany, and most recently in Spain in 2023. A series of edited volumes has stemmed from
the workshops (Shohamy and Gorter 2009b; Shohamy et al. 2010; Hélot et al. 2012; Black-
wood et al. 2016; Malinowski and Tufi 2020), as well as dozens of standalone articles, and the
establishment of a dedicated journal, Linguistic Landscape, in 2015.

The themes of hierarchy and contestation are threaded consistently through much of the historic
LL work discussed in the previous section. Signs within any given space are in a constant state
of competition as they vie for visibility and the attention of passers-by (Shohamy 2006: 110),
and significant critical attention has been paid to the (in)visibility of languages of communities
who share (or who are expected to share) common space. For this reason it has been argued,
since at least the first LL workshop in 2008, that the discipline shares a ‘natural link’ with the
field of language policy (Shohamy and Gorter 2009a: 6). Related parallels have been drawn
with theories surrounding symbolic power relations (Bourdieu 1990) and the presentation-of-
self (Goffman 1963, 1981). Consequently, early LL studies began to explore how far language
policies, attitudes, and practices may be directly represented by signs and could therefore be
assessed, and possibly predicted, according to the distribution of languages in the public space.
These early discussions around hierarchy and competition led to a spate of studies explor-
ing minority/majority relationships in LLs around the world. These have centred on ethnic and
immigrant groups and on autochthonous minority languages. The year 2012 saw the publica-
tion of a collection of 16 chapters devoted solely to this topic (Gorter et al. 2012). Tackling this
through the LL lens has led to different theorizations about the position and status of minority
languages. This has been rationalized in terms of physical space, such as a Slovene-Italian
language border in Trieste (Tufi 2013), the rural village of Cee in Galicia (Dunlevy 2012),
and the streets around the Cathedral in Strasbourg (Bogatto and Bothorel-Witz 2012). Equally,
genre has proved to be a useful perspective not only for assessing minority/majority language
relations, but multilingualism more widely. Totemic in early LL research, the street sign retains
its potency as a socially recognizable set of LL data (Busch 2013; Amos 2017; Järlehed 2017;
Tufi 2020a), whilst Androutsopoulos and Chowchong (2021) argue for the use of genre as an
entry point for multimodal analyses of signage. The extent to which ethnolinguistic communi-
ties achieve visibility in the LL is often inflected by social issues, including marginalization,
centre-periphery dynamics, and systemic injustice as a consequence of language policies. The
visibility/invisibility binary has been refracted through the prism of linguistic vitality, but it
339
now appears the settled conclusion of scholars working in this area that no correlation can be
drawn between the extent to which a language appears or does not appear in the public space
and its usage by the communities present.
Authorship emerges early on as an important consideration in LL analysis, in part as a
response to the generalist principles behind the top-down/bottom-up and dominant/dominated
binaries of early quantitative work. Malinowski (2009) provides the first LL survey dedicated
to the human agency behind signs, combining a systematic analysis of small business signs
with interviews of their owners. His findings are thought-provoking for designers of quantita-
tive LL methods, in that meanings of signs that might otherwise be assumed intentional and
deliberate can in fact remain hidden both to the observer ‘and to the writers [themselves]’
(p. 124). Subsequent studies have engaged with authorship in different ways, notably through
an approach which has been described as ethnographic (e.g. Blommaert 2013; Lou 2016;
Stroud and Mpendukana 2009), although in some cases this is limited to interviews of LL
actors rather than embedded, experience-based ethnography in the traditional sense.
Important parallel developments in the field have seen a critical examination of the terms
‘linguistic’ and ‘landscape’. For many, language is essentialized as named languages expressed
on written texts, and landscape as the public space of towns, cities, and villages and usually a
selection of streets or individual places therein. For others – particularly those following the
‘semiotic assemblages’ perspective described in the previous section – multimodal explora-
tions of LLs now frequently move beyond the scope of the prototypical ‘linguistic’ sign in the
prototypical ‘landscape’ street, analyzing diverse phenomena from smells (Pennycook and
Otsuji 2015) to urban regeneration (Baro 2020).

In this section, we identify some of the main issues under investigation in LL research, includ-
ing areas of scholarship discussed here (language teaching, second-language acquisition, and
activism). Several of these areas are, at the very least, cognate, and there is inevitably overlap
between the issues we outline here.
Mobility, migration, and ethnoscapes

The mobilities paradigm has proved to be particularly rich in terms of LL research, not least as
a methodological development (including the post-modern walking tour proposed by Garvin
(2010) and discussed in Section ‘Main research methods’). The notion of mobility as a key
factor in narratives of place, and in particular the social construction of space and place is
addressed in settings as diverse as the Stockholm metro system (Karlander 2018) and South
African townships (Stroud and Mpendukana 2009). Tufi (2020b) recognizes that mobility is
not merely voluntary but can often be forced and lead to the creation of local sociabilities
which deploy translocal literacies as well as rearranging ethnolinguistic boundaries. These
questions invite reconsiderations of migration, and – notably – what have been referred to as
ethnoscapes. There is a considerable body of research into Chinatowns (for example, Amos
2016; Leeman and Modan 2009; Lou 2016; Lee and Lou 2018; Wu et al. 2020), which has
done much to further our understanding of people, communities, and both the production and
consumption of multilingual signage as a cultural text (Lou 2016). Despite the salience of
Chinatowns in scholarship in this area, the phenomenon of commercial and residential ethnic
districts is not limited to one single ethnic group. Woldemariam and Lanza (2015) articulate
the connections between diaspora communities and transnationalism in their study of Little
340
Ethiopia in Washington, DC, and these ethnic districts can be found in many different parts of
the world, wherever groups of identifiable ethnicities gather.
The human dimension

It may seem surprising to identify the individual as an area of scholarship for a handbook
devoted to applied linguistics when humans (arranged in groups, communities, and societies)
are the defining characteristic of the field. Notwithstanding, bodies were initially absent from
earlier LL research – or, more accurately, they were implicit but invariably invisible. Peck and
Stroud (2015) are credited with bringing bodies to the fore, starting with the South African
context where skinscapes have particular resonance both during and post-apartheid. The focus
on bodies includes but is not limited to tattoos with Peck et al. (2019: 2) contending that ‘a
primary focus of study could well be on the person rather than on the place, and the field could
benefit from an even stronger emphasis on viewing place through person in commonality’.
Kitis and Milani (2015) are notable early adopters of the body as discursive practice, consider-
ing ‘platform events’ and ‘confrontational encounters’ using the example of Greek anarchists
in their discussion of the reconfiguration of space.
Protest
A clear thread exploring questions of protest runs through LL research, and the landmarks of
dissent over the past three decades have been analyzed using methodologies and approaches
refined by this field of study. Two early lines of enquiry opened up, focusing on the Occupy
movement and what has come to be referred to as the Arab Spring, but there have been other
interesting discussions on the transient nature of protest and the role of protest in collective
identity formation. From the work on both Occupy and the Arab Spring, we highlight the
spatial turn in LL research, where emphasis shifts from the named and countable languages of
early work on multilingualism to the spatialization practices and discursive formations acti-
vated by the occupation of public spaces (Martín Rojo 2016). The code choice of signage
in protests is evoked in research from the Arab Spring, as well as a strong current of critical
discourse analysis, reviewing the themes and frames of the messages displayed by protestors.
Much of this research has been underpinned by important early work by Hanauer, who has
drawn on scholarship from trauma studies (in his 2004 examination of graffiti at the site of the
assassination of Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin) and highlighted the transitory nature
of protests and their ephemeral meaning-making potential (Hanauer 2012). Nevertheless, the
impermanence of protest signage has been re-evaluated by Waksman and Shohamy (2016) who
analyzed the reappropriation of materials from social protests when the signage is transposed to
alternative sites (for posterity or commemoration) and concluded that there can be a disjuncture
between the original intention behind protest signage and their iteration in a new setting.
Memorialization
The analysis of monuments, statues, and museums has proved to be fertile terrain in LL research,
sometimes in conjunction with questions of multilingualism, and elsewhere in relation to lan-
guage policies, inter-group relations, and power dynamics (see, for example, Blackwood and
Macalister 2020). The privileging of ‘language’ both as bound, named languages and as an
increasingly wide range of meaning-making resources has highlighted the potential for LL
research to inform wider debates within the humanities and social sciences on memorialization.
341
The partiality of monuments and memory places is not in question, but LL research mean-
ingfully interrogates the easy binaries of remembering/forgetting, including/excluding within
sociohistorical contexts to probe the idea that language(s) can be used ‘symbolically’ within
memorialization projects. Equally, LL contributions to memory studies attend to questions
beyond multilingualism, considering the role of images and languages in counter-monuments,
such as Ben-Rafael and Ben-Rafael (2016), who trace the intensification of the persecution of
Jews in the Schöneberg district of Berlin.
Sexuality
Amongst the human characteristics that could possibly be explored in the LL, sexuality has
attracted the most scholarly attention, with gender as an allied research area. Many of the ques-
tions addressed consider the queering of LL studies, although Trinch and Snajdr (2018) inter-
rogate how gentrification and gender intersect in identity formation, based on their longitudinal
study of Brooklyn, New York. Milani has driven much of the research to rethink the LL as a
forum for investigating spatialization practices of sexuality, evoking protest (such as the Safe
Zones campaign in Johannesburg in Milani 2013), pinkwashing (Milani and Levon 2016), and
the spatial politics of sexuality (Milani et al. 2018).

While far-reaching in terms of research goals and contextual focus, the basic premise of any LL
methodology is to record and analyse examples of public meaning-making. In the discipline’s
formative years, meaning was understood as located in texts on signs visible in the streets; as
the field has evolved this has widened to other forms of semiosis, across numerous interpreta-
tions of public space. The beach-as-text metaphor discussed by Pennycook (2019) is useful in
understanding this expansion: having identified the sand, sea, sun, holidaymakers, parasols, ice
creams, and so on as signs with meaning potentials, an LL analysis proposes an organization of
these semiotic elements into particular forms of discourse and discursive practices. One may
reasonably describe such discourses as ‘languages’, given their systemic shaping of the space.
However, there is much debate about where lines can and should be drawn when con-
sidering units of analysis such as these. Indeed, this was identified as a key issue before the
first international workshop (Backhaus 2009; Spolsky 2009), but it is evidently a less central
concern in the qualitative studies which have since become more prominent. Methods for ana-
lyzing multilingual relationships of texts on signs quickly emerged, many taking a lead from
Backhaus’ (2006, 2007) large-scale surveys in Japan, themselves based on an earlier schema
developed by Reh (2004), which classifies multilingualism according to the degree to which
informational content between codes can be described as duplicating, overlapping, fragmen-
tary, or complementary. Building on earlier theories of social semiotics and systemic functional
grammar (Halliday 1978; Hodge and Kress 1988), visual design and design language (Kress
and Van Leeuwen 1996, 2001), and place semiotics (Scollon and Scollon 2003), the material-
ity of signs is an established consideration in quantitative surveying, permitting comparisons
of, for example, the resources available to different authors, the permanence of signs, and the
varying importance that passers-by might ascribe to signs etched into stone, scribbled on Post-
it notes, spray-painted on walls, or displayed using colourful fluorescent lighting. At the same
time, studies began to record the function of signs alongside these characteristics, in order to
explore how far these variables relate to the purpose and intended audience of signs in the LL.
Terms such as ‘areas of activity’ (Ben-Rafael et al. 2006) and ‘social realms’ (Reh 2004) were
342
introduced to categorize contexts, such as food, finance, fashion, transport, education, leisure,
health, religion, and beauty. Echoing the text-type method of Spolsky and Cooper (1991), a
number of surveys began to develop typologies of sign types, for example, street signs, estab-
lishment names, slogans, and instructions (Franco-Rodríguez 2009; Blackwood 2010; Amos
2016). Elsewhere, signs have been understood in the context of Goffman’s (1974) ‘frames’ of
social action and classified in domains such as commerce, civic administration, immigration,
and tourism (Coupland and Garrett 2010; Kallen 2010; Coupland 2012).
While many of these ideas have been developed qualitatively, a small number of studies
have proposed large-scale surveys of thousands of signs, for the purposes of inferential statisti-
cal analysis or variationist comparisons within and between corpora (Amos and Soukup 2020;
Lyons 2020). The recording of data itself has attracted methodological innovation, beyond the
counting and coding of items by a single researcher. This includes the ‘walking tour’ approach,
where interviews are conducted with participants (often local residents) as they pass through
the space with the aim of analyzing how individuals interpret and interact with the LL (Garvin
2010; Stroud and Jegels 2014; Szabó and Troyer 2017). Technology plays a growing role, too,
and studies now explore eye-tracking and perceptual psychological testing as further means to
interpret signs and reader reactions (Vingron et al. 2017; Mitschke 2019). Additional method-
ological innovations are represented by the smartphone applications LinguaSnapp (Gaiser and
Matras 2021) and Lingscape (Purschke 2021), which build on the data-triangulation approach
first employed by Barni and Bagna (2009), harnessing crowdsourcing to construct large-scale,
publicly accessible datasets.

The scope for LL to play a transformative role in language learning was identified when
researchers first coalesced around the concept of language in the public space, and momen-
tum continues to build in several kinds of initiatives. First, there are those who seek to use
languages (in the strict sense of bound, named languages) in second-language acquisition,
often involving practical application and on-the-street activities (e.g. Cenoz and Gorter
2008). This has been particularly fruitful for teachers of languages identified with ethnic
districts in cities, such as Chinatowns and Koreatowns. Where students are learning lan-
guages that saturate certain parts of a city, there is ample opportunity – on the basis of exten-
sive preparation by the teaching team – to use these districts as dynamic resources, with
recognition and comprehension exercises. As early as 2012, Malinowski (2016) designed a
module for students of East Asian languages, known as Reading the Multilingual City, which
signalled the capacity for Japantown, for example, to activate literacy skills in the target
language. Clearly, this is not limited to the acquisition of second languages by English
speakers; there is an equally long tradition of exploring the learning of English in the public
space, and here questions of globalese, varieties of English, and debates around prescriptiv-
ism can be invoked.
Malinowski’s (2016) study, presented as ‘a teaching account’, points to the second possi-
bility for the LL in practice, closely allied and often enmeshed with the first, which might be
described broadly as language awareness but includes ethnographical approaches, as well as
introducing concepts such as multilingualism, translanguaging, and transnationalism as lived
realities (see also Malinowski et al. 2021). This question of reflexivity can be fruitfully pursued
within the precincts of schools, colleges, and universities, and the exploration of schoolscapes
(Brown 2012; Seals 2021). Ease of access is a clear advantage, and text-focused activities
(including the range of resources deployed by school managers) serve not only to open up
343
discussions on language awareness but also bring a critical lens to bear on ideologies in edu-
cational establishments.
An allied perspective is the one that might best be described as activism, with a strong ele-
ment of social justice, where, as described by Shohamy and Waksman (2009: 314), LLs serve
as sites for ‘critical pedagogy, activism and language rights’. This, they contend, is a logical
next step after critical language awareness; a number of projects have invited students not
merely to reflect on their own language practices and beliefs but also examine examples of
developing attention to linguistic injustice. Shohamy and Pennycook (2021) discuss a study
which encouraged students to develop a sense of critical activism by proposing modifications
to signs they had identified in order to redress marginalization and inequalities.
Future directions
LL research is clearly burgeoning with developments in a range of different directions, includ-
ing in the areas outlined in the ‘Recommendations for practice’ section. There is clear momen-
tum behind the research and scholarship into maximizing the potential of language in the
public space for second-language acquisition, critical language awareness, and activism.
A number of developments in the social sciences and humanities are yet to be experienced
to their full effect within LL studies. The digital turn, embraced by many disciplines which
contribute to the work that informs and underpins much interpretation of meaning-making in
the public space, is yet to be fully considered in LL research. In one sense, the digital revolu-
tion was the midwife to the field of LL, given the fact that the invention and rapid evolution
of digital imaging (including the advancement of cameras in mobile telephones) expedited
the capture and processing of data from the streets. However, whilst engagement with digital
methods might be advanced within the field, the question of digital data is unresolved. Debates
centre on the extent to which the online constitutes the LL, especially for those for whom the
border between private and (semi-)public space demarcates what does and what does not con-
stitute acceptable data.
There have been tentative explorations of the LL within the arts, and the analysis of mean-
ing-making resources as they appear in literature, in film, and on television and in painting (as
well as other forms of art) is potentially a fruitful dynamic in terms of furthering our under-
standing. Engagement with reading and negotiating signage – returning to some of the earliest
data considered in LL research – has featured in literature for some time, and the question of
literary engagement with the field is ripe for a more profound consideration.
The medical humanities are already a domain for some pioneering work in LL studies, with
discussions of how persons with aphasia or dementia navigate healthcare provision presaging
the scope for engaging with the sociolinguistics of ageing. The cross-fertilization between
fields traditionally identified as the sciences and those which contribute to LL activities is
likely to prove highly productive in the realignment of research in the light of the COVID-
19 pandemic. Early work has already begun to investigate semiosis in public spaces during
the various waves of the pandemic and an obvious next stage is to bring in perspectives from
scholarship as diverse as social psychology, neurology, and microbiology in order to meet the
potential that LL promises in addressing linguistic prejudices and exclusion.
Related topics
conceptualizing language learning and language education; second and additional language
acquisition across the lifespan; language teaching methodology; language and culture;
344
literacy; multilingualism; language policy and planning; identity; language and politics;
social semiotics and multimodality; language and materiality; minority/Indigenous language
revitalization
Further reading
Blackwood, R., Tufi, S. and Amos, W. (forthcoming) The Bloomsbury Handbook of Linguistic Land-
scapes, London: Bloomsbury. (This forthcoming text constitutes the first comprehensive handbook
dedicated entirely to LLs. Providing a thorough synopsis of the methods and theories that have thus
far shaped the field, it analyzes diverse contexts ranging from graffiti and street signs to tattoos and
literature, visible in sites as diverse as city centres, rural settings, schools, protest marches, museums,
war-torn landscapes, and the Internet.)
Kress, G. and Van Leeuwen, T. (2020) Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. 3rd ed., London:
Routledge. (The third edition of this seminal textbook introduces new material on digital media and
multimodality. The authors explore numerous examples to unpick the multifarious ways by which
images communicate meaning, offering a comprehensive guide for reading non-textual objects in
real-world settings.)
Roux, S. D., Peck, A. and Banda, F. (2019) ‘Playful female skinscapes: Body narrations of multilingual
tattoos’, International Journal of Multilingualism, 16(1): 25–41. (This article forms part of the LL
interest in bodies as objects of linguistic interest. This study explores students’ tattoos at three univer-
sities in South Africa, asking important questions about identity, gender, and performativity and the
assembled semiotics of bodies and body art.)
Scollon, R. and Scollon, S. (2003) Discourses in Place: Language in the Material World, New York:
Routledge. (Of paramount importance for any LL scholar, this textbook provides a key guide to social
semiotics and the sociocultural interpretation of meaning in the built environment. The authors use a
steady flow of varied examples to explore the structures of meaning and discourse on physical objects,
thus providing a theoretical basis for many LL work that has followed.)
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signs in Toulouse’, International Journal of Multilingualism, 14(2): 93–108.
Amos, H. W. and Soukup, B. (2020) ‘Quantitative 2.0: The potential for a canon of variables in quan-
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Androutsopoulos, J. and Chowchong, A. (2021) ‘Sign-genres, authentication, and emplacement: The sig-
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27
Minoritized/Indigenous language
revitalization
Introduction
Indigenous and minoritized languages on every continent have been damaged for centuries due
to colonial, post-colonial, and ongoing globalizing forces, accompanied also by the rise of lan-
guages of wider communication such as English or Spanish. Language revitalization arose as
a scholarly and activist focus of concern for linguists primarily after the 1990s, in conjunction
with increasing alarm over endangerment of the world’s languages (see Sallabank and Austin,
this volume). Yet it has become clear that speakers and language activists from minoritized and
Indigenous language communities – whether tiny communities of the Amazon, island com-
munities such as Japan’s Ryuku-ko, localized regions such as Brittany in France, or relatively
large and dispersed communities like those of Andean Quechua, Scandinavian North Sámi,
South African Xhosa, or North American Navajo speakers – are not content to see their com-
municative practices fade away and have instead initiated strategies of language revitalization
and reclamation, oftentimes calling on the involvement and activism of (applied) linguists,
both Indigenous and ally (McIvor 2020). Acknowledging that not all ancestral language speak-
ers self-identify as Indigenous, we here refer to minoritized/Indigenous (M/I) languages and
communities, including, for example, the original languages of Africa spoken before European
colonization and up to the present, as well as the creoles developed by many formerly enslaved
peoples, but not including minoritized immigrant and diaspora languages around the world,
though they undergo many parallel issues and processes.
Applied linguists1 have been and continue to be productively involved with M/I scholars
and activists in initiatives ‘to increase the presence of an endangered or dormant language in
the speech community and/or the lives of individuals’ (italics in original, Hinton et al. 2018:
xxvi). These activities include basic linguistic research; educational policy, curriculum, mate-
rials, and teacher development; and language learning and teaching across multiple domains
including not only schools and preschools but also home, family, workplace, community, and
informal learning spaces. This is not to say that applied linguistic work has been uncritically
nor unproblematically taken up in revitalization initiatives: issues of authenticity, ownership,
and purpose regularly arise, demanding significant levels of reflection and dialogue among all
participants (Berryman et al. 2013). Among possible topics identified by Indigenous scholar
DOI: 10.4324/9781003082637-30 349

McIvor (2020) for deepening collaborations and partnerships between applied linguists and
M/I language revitalization scholars in the area of language learning are (1) conditions as to
time, content, and opportunity; (2) strategies like land-based curriculum and programming;
(3) learner attributes, including anxieties, motivation, and identity; and (4) dimensions such as
pronunciation and assessment.
Before taking up historical, current, and future perspectives, we clarify our approach to the
role of applied linguists in M/I language revitalization. First, we use ‘language’ in the sense
of communicative repertoire, socially situated in communicative practice and often character-
ized by inequalities, as articulated early on by Hymes (1980) and now widely accepted by
applied linguists and language scholars. Second, we see language revitalization as a complex
social endeavour fundamentally about language use and language rights. We view the practices
and goals that make up language revitalization broadly, including efforts focused on language
vitality, political status, and educational, family, and social use. Finally, our stance is deeply
infused with a concern for social justice to flourish in and through this work. We write as allies
of Indigenous scholars and communities we have been honoured to work with.
Minoritized and Indigenous languages have lived histories dating back to time immemorial,
through eras of contact with other Indigenous and later non-Indigenous peoples, followed by
colonial policies leading to widespread destruction and demise, up to present-day, ongoing rec-
lamation and recovery (Smith 2012 [1999]; McIvor 2020; see also Sallabank and Austin, this
volume). Applied linguists’ scholarly concern with language revitalization movements or ini-
tiatives undertaken on behalf of Indigenous or otherwise minoritized languages to recuperate
and/or increase the uses and users of the language are closely related to earlier sociolinguistic
concerns with vitality (Stewart 1968) and revival (Haugen 1966) generally from a top-down or
outsider stance. More recent work by sociolinguists and applied linguists engages insider and
how-to perspectives on language renewal (Brandt and Ayoungman 1989), reversing language
shift (Fishman 1991), language planning from the bottom up (Hornberger 1997), and Indig-
enous language reclamation (Leonard 2017). Wyman (2012) uses Anishinaabe literary scholar
Vizenor’s term ‘survivance’ to characterize Indigenous people’s ‘linguistic survivance’ –
the ways that individuals and communities use specific languages, but also second lan-
guages, language varieties and linguistic features, as well as bilingualism and trans-
languaging . . . as they shape collective identities, practices and knowledge systems in
challenging or hostile circumstances, and through participation in translocal, as well as
local, spheres of influence.
(2012: 14)
Understandings of language revitalization, reclamation, and survivance have thus become

more nuanced and contextualized over time.
The ‘Small Languages and Language Communities’ column published by Dorian across
several decades in the International Journal of the Sociology of Language is perhaps the oldest,
continuous sociolinguistic scholarly space highlighting ancestral languages and exemplifying
perspectives from both top-down comparative analysis and bottom-up analysis of local cases.
Dorian’s book Small-language Fates and Prospects (2014) collects her essays from across four
decades, grounded in her long-term research on East Sutherland Gaelic in northeast Scotland
350
Minoritized/Indigenous language revitalization
and bringing together her many conceptual contributions to the field of language shift and
revitalization, including her proposed semi-speaker with some communicative competence;
the notion of tip or breakpoint in transmission processes of languages undergoing shift; and
ideologies of language loyalty and language purism.
Similarly prolific and ground-breaking scholarship across decades has been linguist Hin-
ton’s activism for Native American languages, beginning from her earliest collaborations with
Native California language activists in the 1970s up through her several authored and (co)
edited volumes documenting her well-known and widespread revitalization initiatives such
as mentor-apprentice programs and the Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous Lan-
guages combining revitalization and documentary linguistics (Baldwin et al. 2018). The Green
Book of Language Revitalization in Practice (Hinton and Hale 2001) and Bringing Our Lan-
guages Home (Hinton 2013) foreground the voices of Indigenous language activists and high-
light their resourcefulness and creativity.
Internationally, sociolinguists and applied linguists, across the last several decades, have
turned their attention to ideological and implementational spaces opened up by multilingual
language policies for language revitalization through education (Hornberger et al. 2018). Many
of these scholars have engaged in orthography, curriculum, and materials development for
Indigenous language education, as well as Indigenous language teacher professional educa-
tion, while also researching and documenting their ongoing efforts. In Latin America, since
the 1970s, Indigenous and ally applied linguists have collaborated and contributed alongside
Indigenous political and educational activists in the rise of intercultural bilingual education
initiatives enabled through constitutional and educational reforms acknowledging multieth-
nicity, multiculturalism, and multilingualism, in turn a response to Indigenous resurgence and
political mobilization (see López 2022; López and Sichra 2016 for reviews). Similarly, in the
Global Far North, where the Sámi experienced centuries of stigmatization and forced assimila-
tion through schooling under colonial policies of Finland, Norway, and Sweden, by the 1970s
the ethnopolitical Sámi movement had been gaining strength, and the ofﬁcial view started to
affirm protection and promotion of M/I languages, regarded as part of the national heritage of
these countries (Magga 1994). Maintenance and revitalization of Sámi language and culture
became the task of the compulsory school system in all three countries, and different models
were gradually developed, frequently with the collaboration and contributions of Indigenous
and ally applied linguists and language educators (see Huss 2017 for a review).
A well-known example of language revitalization through education is Māori preschool
immersion or the kohanga reo (‘language nest’) movement, a bottom-up initiative of Māori
communities beginning in the 1980s, since taken up by Indigenous communities in Hawai’i,
Mexico, and Finland and across the globe, accompanied by a significant interdisciplinary
research literature (e.g. Hill 2017; Pasanen 2010). Similarly, pathbreaking school-based initia-
tives in Native American bilingual education beginning in the 1960s have been documented
for both their innovation and the severe top-down constraints they have struggled against (e.g.
Crawley 2020 on Crow; McCarty 2002 on Navajo; McCarty 2018 on Native America). In
both the Māori and Navajo cases, actors in bottom-up community-based initiatives have taken
leadership roles in wedging open policy spaces, such as New Zealand’s eventual ministry-
level recognition and oversight of kohanga reo and Maori-immersion education at primary
(kura kaupapa), secondary, and tertiary education levels (Bishop et al. 2014), and Rough Rock
School actors’ role in advocating for the US Native American Languages Act (McCarty 2002;
Warhol 2012).
Education has been an important and enduring arena for M/I language revitalization initia-
tives and research, with recognition of both successes and challenges reflected in titles like
351
‘Why is this so hard? Ideologies of endangerment, passive language learning approaches, and
Ojibwe in the United States’ (King and Hermes 2014). Over the decades, answers to these ques-
tions and the involvement of applied linguists, both Indigenous and ally, have taken on more
critical recognition of the ways colonial histories and global socioeconomic, demographic, and
political forces shape M/I language revitalization and reclamation efforts in education.

There have been significant gains for Indigenous peoples’ basic human rights, notably the
2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, UNDRIP, including
language rights (a.k.a. linguistic human rights), long a focus of advocacy for M/I peoples (e.g.
Declaration of Recife 1988; Hamel 1997; May 2012 [2001]). There has also been critique
among applied (socio)linguists of strong claims for linguistic human rights and discourses of
language endangerment which may tend to essentialize Indigenous peoples, their languages,
and their relationships to nature and to displace a concern for speakers onto a concern for
languages as fixed entities (Duchêne and Heller 2007; see also the discussion of ideologies of
language-as-code and language-as-social-interaction in language reclamation work in Henne-
Ochoa et al. 2020).
Yet linguistic human rights – the rights to use one’s language and be free from discrimina-
tion in doing so (Macías 1979) – are very real when seen from the point of view not of the
language but of the speakers. Indigenous language reclamation strategies, or ‘place-specific
actions through which individuals or groups are countering forms of marginalization’ (De
Korne and Leonard 2017: 5) include (1) ways of framing/talking about language endanger-
ment; (2) methodological moves away from conservation oriented documentation toward use-
oriented reclamation; (3) educational initiatives to include and make spaces for Indigenous
languages resisting purist and hierarchical ideologies; and (4) political and personal forms of
advocacy. Indeed, negotiation and reclamation of Indigenous epistemologies, language ideolo-
gies, speakerhoods, identities, and investment (see Norton and Shank Lauwo, this volume)
in language learning continue to be complex and compelling topics in Indigenous language
revitalization practices and research.
How has the ‘multilingual turn’ in applied linguistics been taken up in M/I language revital-
ization? Purism-versus-compromise remains as compelling a paradox as when Dorian formu-
lated it (Dorian 1994). More recently, discussions of co-existing monoglossic and heteroglossic
language ideologies (see Li Wei, this volume) highlight points of real tension in Indigenous
speakers’ lived experience and in applied linguistics research and practice, such as the chal-
lenges of keeping space for Basque in Spain (Cenoz and Gorter, this volume) or the dilemma of
Indigenous leaders obliged to represent state-mandated monoglossic versions of their language
at odds with Indigenous speakers’ heteroglossic communicative practices (Limerick 2021). Not
least are the implications for language assessment, an understudied area in M/I language revi-
talization (McIvor 2020). Increased consideration of other critical – and unresolved – topics in
M/I language revitalization include the role of intergenerational transmission, perhaps not the
sine qua non originally proposed by Fishman (1991) but still needed (Romaine 2006), as well
as the roles of families and family language policy more generally (Hinton 2013; Patrick et al.
2013), youth and youth registers (Kvietok Dueñas 2019; Wyman et al. 2014), cultural activists
such as hip-hop artists (Williams 2017), new speakers (Jaffe 2015), and other non-education
and non-policy-maker actors.
Research and practice increasingly call for ecological approaches to language revitalization,
emphasizing not only all communicative varieties in a particular language ecology but also
352
actors and actions across family, school, community, societal, and supranational levels, as well
as across time scales in that ecology, and at every educational level, from the very youngest
learners (e.g. Anzures Tapia [2020] on Maya Indigenous preschoolers) to youth (e.g. Zavala
[2019] on youth repoliticization of Quechua in Peru) to higher education (e.g. Kamwendo et al.
[2013] on isiZulu at the University of KwaZulu-Natal) (see Cowley, this volume).
Language revitalization initiatives are fundamentally critical, anti-racist, and decolonizing
in their intent and their practice, rooted as they are in Indigenous resistance to centuries of
colonial pressures, enslavement, discrimination, and marginalization. They are about deco-
loniality understood not as ‘the absence or overcoming of coloniality, . . . but the postures,
positionings, horizons, projects, and practices of being, thinking, sensing, and doing that resist
and re-exist, that transgress and interrupt the colonial matrix of power’ (Walsh 2020: 606). In
her conceptualization of radical resurgence, Nishnaabeg Indigenous scholar Leanne Simpson
calls on Indigenous peoples
to regenerate the processes and ways of living of our ancestors, our practices, our grounded
normativity, within an Indigenous criticality . . . figuring out how to center this in our indi-
vidual lives and in the collectivities of which we are a part.
(Simpson 2016: 26–27)

Current research on language revitalization continues to expand the geographic and sociolin-
guistic scope of the field, bringing to light the unique circumstances of minoritized groups in
different parts of the world, including Asia (Hammine 2020), Siberia (Ferguson 2019), Africa
(Joseph and Ramani 2012), Europe (Smith-Christmas et al. 2017), and urban and diaspora
contexts (Patrick et al. 2013) (also Cocq and Sullivan 2019; Hinton et al. 2018; Sherris and
Peyton 2019). The circumstances that surround language revitalization movements are diverse,
as are the aims and ideologies of the people involved. In some cases, the language in ques-
tion is not officially recognized and speakers are working towards basic rights, while in other
cases there is legal support, but socioeconomic pressures and deep-seated prejudices impede
progress. Some language activists pursue homogenous or standardized language use, while
others may promote heterogenous, flexible communication (Lane et al. 2017). M/I language
revitalization research has continued to explore the range of language ideologies that inform
revitalization initiatives, highlighting that it is common for multiple ideologies and ideals of
language, or ‘language ideological assemblages’ (Kroskrity 2018), to be present in any one
revitalization initiative. Technologies in the lives of minoritized language speakers and learn-
ers is another area of growing exploration, including both consequences of increased presence
of globally circulating languages through mass media and opportunities to use, promote, and
teach minoritized languages through virtual channels (Galla 2016; Outakoski 2013). Different
geographic and ideological conditions across studies highlight that there is no ‘right’ way to
go about language revitalization. No one approach can fit the opportunities, constraints, and
priorities of the many contexts in which people are working to increase the status and use of
a marginalized way of speaking. Instead, language revitalization practitioners must carefully
consider the needs and possibilities of the context they are in.
There are a growing number of language revitalization scholars who are speakers or mem-
bers of a marginalized language community who have put forward arguments for the impor-
tance of considering the local particularities and priorities of minoritized language speakers.
Language revitalization scholarship produced by community insiders is thus another positive
353
trend in current research. Although there are several ground-breaking Indigenous scholars who
have been working in this area for decades (e.g. Bishop and Glynn 1999; Coronel-Molina
1999; Zepeda 1995), Indigenous and minority language scholars have increasingly taken cen-
tral roles in this field. Alongside calls from outsider, ally scholars to engage in more meaning-
ful collaboration with minoritized language community members (e.g. Rice 2009), Indigenous
scholars have set an agenda for language revitalization research where emic understandings
of language and local goals for revitalization are front and centre (e.g. Hermes et al. 2012).
Indigenous scholars have contributed nuanced insights into language revitalization dynamics
in specific communities over time (e.g. Davis 2019; Meek 2010) as well as exploring crucial
issues such as technology (Galla 2016), literacy (Outakoski 2021), pedagogy (Henne-Ochoa
et al. 2020), and linguistic analysis (Begay 2017). These scholars have also been instrumental
in making space for engaged forms of scholarship, such as action research and the integration
of language revitalization stakeholders into the research process (discussed further in the fol-
lowing section).
While minoritized scholars have become more visible in M/I language revitalization
research, the field of language revitalization has also become more integral to applied lin-
guistics2 (Cope and Penfield 2011) and to documentary linguistics (Sallabank and Austin, this
volume). Recent trends in applied linguistics converge with concerns that have long been at
the heart of language revitalization research and practice. Indigenous paradigms (southern
theories), the interdependence of humans with the natural world (posthumanism; see Toohey,
this volume), struggles for self-determination (decoloniality), and efforts towards equality for
minoritized speakers (social justice) have long been explicit areas of focus in language revi-
talization; all of these have recently been the focus of interest among applied linguists in other
contexts. The link between language and racism, another area attracting fresh attention in
applied linguistics (see Delfino and Alim, this volume), has not been explored as directly in
past revitalization research. However, some work has considered how racial stereotypes and
structures impact minoritized language users (Haque and Patrick 2015; Muehlmann 2009), and
this topic is gaining visibility (Leonard 2020). The trend towards applied linguistic research
that considers a wider range of language learners and aims to improve social justice for dis-
advantaged learners (King 2016; Ortega, this Handbook, Volume 1) has helped to make the
field of language revitalization more visible in broader discussions of language teaching and
multilingualism.
Teaching and learning minoritized languages in both formal and community-based set-
tings have been prominent topics in language revitalization research as discussed in the pre-
vious sections, and this trend continues. In addition to examining pedagogical approaches
at all levels, teacher education is an on-going challenge and area of investigation (Whitinui
et al. 2018; Czaykowska-Higgins et al. 2017). In many contexts, educators are working
to create learning resources and programs with minimal support, requiring creativity and
tenacity. Learners are often faced with harmful stereotypes and sometimes unrealistic ideals
(King and Hermes 2014; Walsh 2019). Language revitalization is inherently bilingual or
multilingual, often with multiple dialects in the mix to boot. The presence of a monolingual
bias in society, and often in education, can undermine the legitimacy of emergent multilin-
gual learners (De Korne and Hornberger 2017). With this in mind, taking an inclusive, par-
ticipatory, and meaning-focused pedagogical approach has been shown to be an effective
way to bring learners into the language community (Henne-Ochoa et al. 2020). Whether
in community-based settings, classrooms, or in virtual platforms, the issue of language
learning is likely to remain an area of active investigation in applied linguistic studies of
language revitalization.
354

While the linguistic response to language endangerment has been first and foremost to research
the languages themselves (including language documentation and analysis of language con-
tact effects), the response among scholars focusing on language revitalization has been more
diverse and has focused on speakers of endangered languages and the sociopolitical and ideo-
logical environments they inhabit. As such, a holistic, ethnographic approach has been preva-
lent in studies of language shift and maintenance (see Tusting, this volume), as well as action
or practitioner research. Other research approaches include comparative case studies, analysis
of language and education policy and curriculum documents, use of census and survey data,
and analysis of media discourses. This section provides a brief overview of these common
research methods.
Ethnographic studies of language revitalization have tended to include a broad focus on
factors influencing language shift, as well as some of the processes supporting or hindering
revitalization (Hornberger 1988; Meek 2010). Based on extended participant observation and
often interviews in minoritized language communities, this approach demands a long-term
commitment from the researcher, and the development of close, trusting relationships with
stakeholders. As part of an ethnographic study, researchers often collect photographs of the
linguistic landscape as well as documents or artefacts that may help to explain the context, such
as learning materials or publicity for events. Ethnographic approaches have also been used by
community insiders when studying their own language community (Coronel-Molina 2015;
Davis 2019; Hammine 2020).
Practitioner research or action research undertaken by community members and/or ally
scholars is also common and can be combined with ethnographic approaches. The ethnographic
monitoring approach, which fuses an ethnographic focus on emic perspectives with action
research, has been promoted in relation to minoritized language schooling (De Korne and
Hornberger 2017; Hymes 1980). This and other participatory approaches are in line with the
long-standing call for ‘decolonising methodologies’ (Smith 2012 [1999]) and, more recently,
‘culturally-responsive methodologies’ (Berryman et al. 2013) that aim to keep the perspectives
and goals of minoritized speakers and learners at the centre of the research endeavour. Con-
sidering that research on Indigenous peoples has historically occurred as a part of colonial and
nationalist processes, a shift of priorities is part of changing that legacy. Both Indigenous and
ally researchers have argued that increased collaboration and sharing of perspectives among
researchers, speakers, learners, and other stakeholders can increase the quality and validity of
research in this domain (Anthony-Stevens 2017; McIvor 2020). Increasing use of practitioner
and action research is of clear benefit in language revitalization scholarship, as researchers
often aim not only to understand sociolinguistic dynamics, but also to support increased equal-
ity for minoritized language speakers. Ethnographic and action research approaches take time
to develop and to carry out, however, and may not be possible in all contexts.
Analysis of language and education policy documents offers insight into the de jure policies
that may restrict or support minoritized languages. Such policies exist across scales, from a
single school to regional policies (e.g. recognition of Hawai’ian in the Hawai’i state consti-
tution), national policies (e.g. recognition of nine African languages alongside English and
Afrikaans in South Africa), and international policies (e.g. European Charter for Regional
and Minority Languages and the UNDRIP). Analysis of de jure policy allows for comparison
across contexts, and consideration of which policies are put into practice and which remain at
the rhetorical level only (Zavala 2013). Analysis of minoritized language curricula likewise
gives insight into the intended language practices in a school setting, which may or may not
355
align with actual practices (Weinberg 2021). The combination of policy document analysis
with ethnographic and/or interview methods can provide a wider lens on the sociolinguistic
reality. While interest in legal regulations remains, there is a relatively greater focus in recent
research on policy-in-practice (Davis and Phyak 2017) and ethnographic study of policies
across scales (Hornberger et al. 2018).
Census and survey data can illustrate broad trends in reported language use among a popula-
tion. Government-run censuses generally do not contain adequate linguistic information (e.g.
often not allowing participants to state the use of multiple home languages) and should therefore
be used cautiously. Researchers’ surveys can capture language use with a more fine-grained
lens and provide insights into broad trends (Pérez Báez et al. 2019). Self-reports from census
or surveys can be combined with in-depth discussion of participants’ perspectives through
interviews and/or focus groups and examination of actual practices through ethnography.
A final research method that has shed light on language revitalization is discourse analy-
sis, which has been employed in relation to the discourses produced by the popular media,
by researchers, and by language activists (Duchêne and Heller 2007; Hill 2002; Moore et al.
2010). The way that different social actors talk (or write) about language revitalization has an
effect on popular understandings and potentially on language practices. By analyzing rhetori-
cal patterns and tropes about language revitalization and endangerment, these studies point out
ways that key stakeholders are sometimes erased, and implied solutions do not line up with the
complexities of the problem. This method allows for insights into ideological and discursive
trends, although it is important to bear in mind that these trends may not be reflected in actual
social practices.

Given the bottom-up and activist stance of language revitalization work, the field offers a
proven array of practice-oriented recommendations, invariably undertaken and sustained with
tenacity and hope despite obstacles and roadblocks in implementation. Practice recommenda-
tions include experiences and suggestions for teaching Indigenous languages, such as Outa-
koski’s (2013) virtual Sámi language teaching course at Umeå University in Sweden, Antia and
Dyers’ (2019) decolonial pedagogy at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa, and
McIvor et al.’s (2020) experience of recreating an online version of the Cree way of life as they
adapted their language pedagogy to Native North American COVID-19 realities.
Further recommendations include how-tos for mentor-apprentice programs and family
revitalization efforts (Hinton 2013; Hinton and Hale 2001), as well as examples and discus-
sion of LOPI – learning by observing and pitching in to family and community endeavours,
an approach that situates Indigenous language learning within everyday Indigenous life (see
Henne-Ochoa et al.’s LOPI example from Kaska First Nations in the Yukon and responses,
in Bigelow and Engman 2020). Opening the scope beyond language teaching and family and
community endeavours, De Korne (2021) documents a repertoire of strategies used by edu-
cators, students, writers, scholars, and cultural activists on behalf of linguistic equality for
Isthmus Zapotec in Mexico.
A place-based initiative combining formal education and community involvement as well
as early childhood education and teacher preparation is Wakanyeja, ‘Sacred Little Ones’
(Lakota), an approach infusing language and culture into early childhood education for Native
American children. Conceptualized and led by Yazzi-Mintz and situated at tribal colleges in
Alaska, Wisconsin, Washington, and New Mexico, Wakanyeja has transformed the way early
education teachers are trained, while also generating new curricula, fostering partnerships on
356
and off reservations, and providing advocacy-oriented training and events for parents and com-
munities.3 This exemplifies what M/I language revitalization practitioners can achieve when
working tenaciously across scales to address language and learning holistically.
Future directions
Future language revitalization scholars and practitioners will continue to face changing politi-
cal, demographic, and social contexts that at times open doors for minoritized languages and
speakers and at times put new barriers in their way. Identifying opportunities for the promotion
and use of M/I languages as they appear remains an important area of focus – whether through
developing supportive policies, positive discourses, pedagogical techniques, or personal
strategies. Paralleling these initiatives, discourse, and practice within the language revitaliza-
tion research community itself has been and will likely continue to be a topic of discussion
and debate, with self-critiques and cautions against ‘expert rhetoric’ (Hill 2002) or linguistic
extractivism (Davis 2017) and calls for decolonizing ‘language’ itself (Leonard 2017). As the
sociolinguistic profile of speakers of M/I languages shifts towards a widespread bi-/multilin-
gualism and the idealized monolingual native speaker becomes less common in many commu-
nities, more attention will be needed to support and legitimate younger speakers and learners
who are the future of the M/I speech community. Likewise we anticipate – and hope – that the
identity categories of language revitalization scholars and practitioners will continue to shift,
with community insiders playing an increasingly central role and models for collaborative
research and scholar allyship becoming more established.
A broad approach to applied linguistics, encompassing language planning and policy, socio-
linguistics, linguistic anthropology, and language education, is necessary in order consider the
complex dynamics of language marginalization and revitalization, and future research is likely
to continue to draw from concepts and methods across these fields and others. In their recent
volume on the revitalization of Sámi and Ainu languages and cultures in this century, Roche
et al. (2018: 5–6) adopt the term efflorescence to capture the sense of ‘prosperity, human flour-
ishing, cultural creativity and surprise’ that accompanies the multimodal boom of language
revitalization we are witnessing worldwide, in direct contradiction to the language ‘crisis’
that has so often characterized conversations about Indigenous peoples, in the past and now.
Digital media in particular are increasingly present in the daily lives of M/I speakers, open-
ing new opportunities for remote learning and interaction, as well as new channels through
which dominating languages and ideologies may be imposed into local and personal spheres.
The efflorescence of bottom-up strategies will remain of central importance in a digitized and
transnational world.
Related topics
multilingualism; endangered language and language documentation; ecology of language and
language learning
Notes
1 Inclusive of all scholars involved in M/I language revitalization, ‘applied linguist’ here encompasses
the multiple affiliated identities such scholars may occupy as linguists, sociolinguists, anthropological
linguists, educational linguists, linguistic ethnographers, linguistic anthropologists of education, and
more broadly, language education researchers and practitioners. Some are also members of M/I com-
munities; some are not.
357
2 A strand for language revitalization and maintenance has been created at the American Association of
Applied Linguistics (AAAL) conference, a scholarship fund was established for Indigenous partici-
pants, several AAAL keynotes have addressed this topic, and the Modern Language Journal devoted
the 2020 Perspectives column to language revitalization (Bigelow and Engman 2020), among other
examples.
3 www.wkkf.org/what-we-do/featured-work/creating-stronger-connections-for-early-education-to-ele-
mentary-success-for-native-american-children
Further reading
Coronel-Molina, S. and McCarty, T. (eds.) (2016) Indigenous Language Revitalization in the Americas,
Abingdon, UK: Routledge. (Case studies of revitalization in North and South America)
Hinton, L., Huss, L. and Roche, G. (eds.) (2018) The Routledge Handbook of Language Revitalization,
Abingdon, UK: Routledge. (A global, up-to-date perspective on language revitalization research and
practice)
Hornberger, N. H. (ed.) (2008) Can Schools Save Indigenous Languages? Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave
Macmillan. (An in-depth examination of language revitalization in the crucial domain of education)
Whitinui, P., Rodríguez de France, C. and McIvor, O. (eds.) (2018) Promising Practices in Indigenous
Teacher Education, Singapore: Springer Nature. (A global exploration of Indigenous language teach-
ing and teacher education)
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361
28
Endangered languages
Introduction
This chapter is about language shift, language loss, and language endangerment: what it means,
why it is happening, and responses at individual and community levels, by policy-makers, and
from academia. See also Hornberger and De Korne (this volume) on language revitalization.
Previous research
The field of endangered languages study, which includes language documentation and
description (also known as documentary linguistics), emerged in the 1990s in response to
the prospective loss of a large proportion of world languages this century. According to one
frequently cited source, Ethnologue,1 ‘7,139 languages are spoken today’, of which 42%
are endangered – that is, ‘users begin to teach and speak a more dominant language to their
children’. The respective responses of academia, policy-makers, and communities to what
has been called a worldwide crisis (Krauss 1992; Roche 2022) reflect the different ways in
which it affects them.
Policy-makers may see linguistic diversity as an expensive or divisive impediment to
national unity; if governments support minority language maintenance, it is often through
bilingual education as a transition to a national language. Academic linguists decry loss of
linguistic diversity, and thus of data, especially for cross-language comparison, classifica-
tion, and history; they have responded by documenting and describing languages before they
disappear (language preservation), often focusing on rare or interesting features. Languages
are seen as a scientific resource or a treasure for all humankind (a view also promoted by
international organizations like UNESCO as ‘intangible cultural heritage’). For linguistic
communities, language shift and loss may be felt in a far more immediate and personal
manner as just one outcome of discriminatory policies, marginalization, and demographic
and sociopolitical changes. Responses need to take these into account. Communities have
undertaken language and cultural revitalization programmes, some long-standing, such as
Māori (New Zealand), Hawaiian, and Welsh, among many others. There are links between
language shift/maintenance and socioeconomic and political inequality, physical and mental
362 DOI: 10.4324/9781003082637-31

well-being, and political and cultural subjugation; language becomes a source of identity,
pride, and empowerment to overcome historical trauma from colonialism and social, political,
and cultural oppression of minorities (Roche 2022). This chapter discusses language docu-
mentation, showing how linguists can support communities in reclaiming and reappropriating
linguistic heritage.
Since the 1990s the rhetoric and public discussion around this topic has been dominated
by notions of ‘language death’, ‘loss’, ‘destruction’, and ‘linguicide’, often with a sense of
inevitability. Paradoxically, despite the rhetoric, the number of languages listed by Ethnologue
is actually increasing: up from 7,099 in 2017 and from 6,000 estimated by Krauss (1992), of
which he calculated that 90% were likely to be no longer in use by 2100 if trends continued.
This will be discussed further here.
In addition to counting, linguists have also sought to measure the endangerment level or
viability of individual languages. Thus, UNESCO (2003) proposed a language vitality scale
(strong → threatened → endangered → moribund → extinct), based on nine factors:
1 Use in the family (intergenerational transmission)

2 Absolute number of speakers
3 Proportion of speakers within the total population
4 Shifts in domains of language use
5 Response to new domains and media
6 Materials for language education and literacy
7 Governmental and institutional language attitudes and policies, including official status
and use
8 Community members’ attitudes towards their own language
9 Type and quality of documentation.
Despite the apparent comprehensiveness of this scale, there is little guidance on how to mea-
sure the factors or how to weigh each component against others, so intergenerational transmis-
sion remains the most widely used gauge of language vitality. Cessation of intergenerational
transmission is commonly cited as a cause of language shift, but it is actually part of the
process. It should also be noted that until Ethnologue adopted an alternative scale proposed by
Lewis and Simons (2010), language endangerment measures generally pointed downwards,
with no account taken of efforts to revitalize languages; this led to complaints to UNESCO
by communities whose languages were categorized as ‘extinct’ (see Section ‘Discourses of
endangerment’).
The number of languages counted has increased due to new and better data collection and
increased recognition of languages previously ‘unknown to science’ or grouped as ‘dialects’ of
a single language. Sign languages are now recognized, including ‘village sign languages’ used
in small communities, rightly accepted as equally valid as spoken ones; many are endangered,
often through shift to larger urban or national sign languages. The majority of the world’s
population is multilingual, and multilinguals utilize different elements of their linguistic rep-
ertoire at will, not necessarily differentiating between named languages (Luepke and Storch
2013; García and Li 2014). Linguistic differentiation is nevertheless important for identity
construction by groups and individuals, and reclaiming language(s) is a key part of rectifying
ongoing injustices.
Who counts as a speaker, and how good (or ‘fluent’) do you have to be? Measures of lan-
guage vitality are silent on this. Most of the world’s languages remain under-described, so there
are very few proficiency tests for minority and endangered languages or ways to identify who
363
counts as a ‘native speaker’. For many, ‘mother tongue’ does not necessarily mean ‘first lan-
guage’ or ‘regularly used language’ but rather the ancestral or heritage language. People who
grew up speaking a minority language may have lost fluency due to education policies, societal
or economic pressures, and discriminatory attitudes. Where intergenerational transmission has
been broken, first language speakers may be very old, with middle-aged or younger people
likely to be ‘semi’ or latent speakers (who heard the language when young but do not have
productive fluency) or second language or ‘new’ speakers. These new speakers, who may also
be core language revitalization advocates, are often not counted as legitimate speakers by oth-
ers or by linguists.
In the 1980s, linguists explored structural and functional changes due to contraction of
the speaker base, using terms like ‘language attrition’. Dorian (1989) identified ‘stylistic
shrinkage’ as an early change: speakers are unable to produce a wide range of genres and
are restricted to elementary conversational exchange or invariant simple sentences. This has
structural consequences on sentence organization (syntax), word formation (morphology) and
pronunciation, including loss of distinctive sounds not found in the dominant languages (Palo-
saari and Campbell 2011). Sociolinguists also researched language shift, with Fishman (1991)
influential in identifying non-linguistic factors, and how attention to them could assist with
‘reversing’ language shift.
Mainstream linguistics became interested in the early 1990s, especially because of Hale
et al. (1992) and Robins and Uhlenbeck (1991). The Comité International Permanent des Lin-
guistes (CIPL) promoted international discussion in arenas such as UNESCO, which compiled
its nine-factor vitality scale. Popular accounts appeared, such as Crystal (2000), Abley (2003)
and Dalby (2003). Funding for fieldwork and documentation of endangered languages became
available from Foundation for Endangered Languages (founded 1996), Endangered Lan-
guage Fund (founded 1997), Volkswagen Foundation (Dokumentation der bedrohte Sprachen
[DOBES] programme, founded 2000), and Arcadia Fund (ELDP, founded 2002). DOBES
also established a digital language archive, as did Arcadia (ELAR). The US National Science
Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities established the Documenting
Endangered Languages (DEL) programme. All the large funder initiatives limited projects to
documentation and description of highly endangered languages (i.e. excluding those which
are considered to be merely ‘threatened’) and disallowed applied work, including language
revitalization.
The early 21st century saw the establishment of specialist training courses in language
documentation and revitalization at academic institutions, such as SOAS, University of Lon-
don, and University of Hawai‘i, and an increase in related modules, such as field methods,
in many general linguistics departments.2 Fieldwork and documentation training became a
regular part of summer schools or training institutes. For overviews of specific developments
in the past 25 years, see Austin (2016) and Seifart et al. (2018); in the next Section we present
critical reflections on some of the methodological approaches and outcomes which evolved
over this period.
Discourses of endangerment
As mentioned, until relatively recently, rhetoric about endangered languages focused on
loss, decline, and negative consequences. Linguists commonly refer to languages as ‘dead’,
‘extinct’, ‘obsolescent’, or ‘moribund’; and use terms like ‘semi’, ‘partial’, or ‘passive’ to
364
describe speakers (Cameron 2007; Duchêne and Heller 2007). For example, Crystal (2000)
takes a somewhat fatalistic view:
To say that a language is dead is like saying that a person is dead. . . . If you are the last
speaker of a language, your language – viewed as a tool of communication – is already
dead.
(Crystal 2000: 1–2)
Many speakers and supporters of endangered languages dislike this rhetoric of finality, espe-
cially given the relative success of efforts to ‘revive’ so-called ‘dead’ and highly moribund
languages in recent years: such as Cornish and Manx in the British Isles; Miami, Mohegan,
and Mutsun in the USA; and Kaurna and Gamilaraay in Australia. Some feel that using the
term language death may in itself have a causative effect, hastening a language’s demise by
encouraging pessimism, or denying funding because the language is ‘too far gone’. Others
object to such casually derogatory terminology. Even the term endangered may be seen as
negative: for example, in the Isle of Man, Manx (whose last traditional native speaker died in
1974) is consciously promoted as a living language.
Less objectionable is describing a language as ‘sleeping’ or ‘archived’, or ‘which does
not have any speakers at present’, and describing speakers as ‘latent’ (see Section ‘Previ-
ous research’). This affirms that the process is reversible and that community members have
agency. Endangered languages were highlighted internationally by the 2019 International Year
of Indigenous Languages declared by UNESCO, where the focus shifted to ‘development,
peace building and reconciliation’.3 The rhetoric of the International Decade of Indigenous
Languages (IDIL 2022–2032)4 is in terms of ‘Indigenous language users’ human rights’,
‘empowerment of Indigenous language users’, and ‘making a decade of action for indigenous
languages’. This is much more positive and forward-looking, aimed at overcoming past injus-
tices and discrimination, and places Indigenous people and their voices at the centre of concern.
Hegemony
Terminology and discourses are important because they play a role in causing ideologies of
deficit to be naturalized by minorities: what Gramsci (1971) termed hegemony. Negative atti-
tudes towards minority language varieties are held not only by majority language speakers
but are also assimilated by speakers of minority languages themselves; they lead to ‘linguistic
insecurity’ and unwillingness to speak minority languages. Labov (1966: 489) claimed that
‘the term “linguistic self-hatred” may not be too extreme’. Ting (2021) uses a critical discourse
framework to look at how dominant government discourses have influenced Indigenous peo-
ple’s perception of their languages and suggests that it can resemble Stockholm-syndrome-like
behaviour. So parents might ‘choose’ to speak a ‘more useful’ language with their children,
when actually their choice is not free but is influenced by dominant discourses, such as denial
of multilingualism. Although the majority of the world’s population has a repertoire of lan-
guages at their disposal for different purposes, prevailing discourses insist that in order to speak
a dominant language properly, the home language has to be abandoned.
Ideologies
Ideologies are socioculturally shared belief systems, which are often unconscious (Van Dijk
2013: 177). They ‘are largely acquired, expressed, and reproduced by discourse, and that hence
365
a discourse analytical approach is crucial to understand the ways ideologies emerge, spread,
and are used by social groups’ (Van Dijk 2013: 176). Silverstein (1976, 2001) coined the term
‘metapragmatics’ to refer to ‘talk about talk, the socially constructed ways of expressing the
meaning of talk’ which can make ideologies visible, through metaphors, idioms, behavioural
rules, and judgements, for example, and even code choice itself. The last of these can be iconic
of ideological stances towards particular ways of speaking (e.g. a child refusing to reply in their
parent’s language but responding in the dominant language a community is shifting towards).
Vernacular language ideologies have been broadly defined as tacit or explicit ideas and
beliefs that members of a speech community have with respect to their linguistic repertoire
(Woolard and Schieffelin 1994). There is frequently a disjuncture between the beliefs of mem-
bers of speech communities and the ideologies of linguists, institutions, and governments
(whose language policies are frequently ideologically driven). As we note in Austin and Sal-
labank (2014: 1), ‘This book [or chapter] would not have been written without the ideologi-
cal shift over the last 10–30 years towards broadly positive attitudes in favour of “saving”
endangered languages.’ What ‘saving’ means, however, is open to interpretation and often to
misunderstandings (see the next sections).
Essentialism
Much of the discourse on endangered languages is essentialist and deterministic. The strong
version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis argues that our way of thinking, and thus our cultural
identity, are determined by the lexicon and syntax of our language. A corollary claim is that
when a language dies, a unique way of looking at the world also disappears and that loss of
a language means extinction of a unique creation of human beings that houses a treasure of
information and preserves a people’s identity (Grimes 2001). Seifart et al. (2018: e336) are
even more encompassing:
[W]e lose the traditional knowledge of an ethnic group, much of it bound up in language:
knowledge of food and water resources and local agricultural practices, ways of managing
ecologies for sustainability, kinship and social systems that embody variants of how to
live together to mutual benefit, how to rear self-confident and happy children (Diamond
2012), visions of humans’ place in nature, and so much else, both material and spiritual.
This kind of deterministic essentialism denies that socioculturally acquired knowledge can be
passed on even when languages are not, or when they change their form intergenerationally. It
presents a constricted view of the flexibility and dynamics of human creativity.
Language and culture are closely linked, although not necessarily in a deterministic way.
Kroskrity (2000: 13) observes that ‘even dominant ideologies are dynamically responsive to
ever-changing forms of oppositions’, such as moves from ‘generic he’ to ‘he or she’ and then
to ‘they’. Investigating metapragmatics and discourses about language attitudes, structures,
functions, and uses, and thereby uncovering ideologies, is therefore a key step in addressing
language endangerment, especially in support of campaigns for empowerment and recognition
of linguistic human rights.
Academics are also influenced by their own ideologies, by the research community’s own
discourses and by fashion in theories, valuation, and ranking. Thus, Dobrin et al. (2009: 41)
point out that the audit culture which dominates Western society, including academia, leads
to commodification and ‘reduction of languages to common exchange values . . . , particu-
larly in competitive and programmatic contexts such as grant-seeking and standard-setting
366
where languages are necessarily compared and ranked’. Speaker numbers (from Ethnologue)
and vitality ranking (from UNESCO) feed into this transformation of socioculturally dynamic
ways of speaking into objects and numbers. Commoditizing forces have also impacted how
linguists see their relationships to the individuals and communities with whom they work, with
moral or professional obligations to ‘give back’ being expressed as transacted objects, such as
dictionaries, subtitled videos, primers, or mobile apps, ‘rather than through knowledge sharing,
joint engagement in language maintenance activities, or other kinds of interactionally defined
achievements’ (Dobrin et al. 2009: 43). A consequence of objectification can be double endan-
germent, such as the endangerment of the language along with endangerment of the materials
once collected to document and/or support it.
Speaker community views can also be essentialist. Sallabank (2013) found that commu-
nity members tend to express strong overt associations between language and identity, often
accompanied by purism and hyper-valorization of the ‘ancestral code’ (Childs et al. 2014),
the imagined form of the language before shift began. The adaptive value of code-mixing and
code-switching, let alone borrowing of lexicon, especially for newly introduced technologies
or objects, is negated,5 and linguists and speakers seek ‘pure’ or ‘original’ expressions that
separate out codes into differentiated describable ideals.
Typologies
Typologies of language vitality may fail to take account of power relationships and ideolo-
gies, conflict situations, the effects of language planning activities, or changing relationships
between languages or in emerging attitudes. Indeed, Schiffman (2002: 141) claims that typolo-
gies are theoretically ‘passé’ and ‘guilty of the latter-day sin of essentialism’. Documentation
of endangered languages has also in large part been driven by a desire to establish structural
and functional typologies by cross-language comparison, giving rise to calls for standardiza-
tion,6 both in representations and in content. Thus, interlinear glossing (the annotation of word
morphological structure requiring alignment of language segments and glosses, typically in
a dominant academic language) is seen as the gold standard, blinding researchers to alterna-
tive representations and the inherent demands of interpretational literacy that such glossing
requires. To some extent the dominance of a few software tools, such as ELAN for transcrip-
tion and annotation7 and FLEx for glossing and dictionary-making,8 has led to homogeneity in
analyses and representations that obscure linguistic diversity.
Relationship of documentation and revitalization

The forced imposition of a colonial and/or national language and assimilation to a majority cul-
ture has resulted in many people feeling a loss of self-worth and pride. These practices have left
deep and painful scars, often taking the form of multi-generational historical traumatization.
Too often, linguists have taken language data from communities without even acknowledging
their contribution to the scholarship, let alone making the research results accessible in terms
that the participants can understand, challenge, or use. Thus, there are barriers for access to
the terabytes of recordings and linguistic analysis stored in digital archives now (see Section
‘Transdisciplinarity’). It is therefore essential for non-community researchers to be culturally
sensitive and to attempt to rectify exploitative practices rather than prolonging them.
Austin and Sallabank (2018) argue that the relationship between documentation and revi-
talization is fraught, with the outcomes of documentation stored in archives frequently being
not useful for the creation of language support materials (inappropriate topics or genres,
367
difficult-to-hear recordings, lack of learner-directed or child-directed speech samples, lack of

interactional language for learners to scaffold) and in formats that are impossible to use with-
out technical training and fluency in the researcher’s language. In addition, language practices
evidenced by the archived corpus may not match the perceptions or preferences of speakers and
language activists, who may prefer purism and the ancestral code for learning materials. Sugita
(2007) and Amery (2009) have argued that to support language revitalization, documentary cor-
pora must include a variety of interactions, identity and relationship work, colloquialisms, swear
words and idiomatic expressions, intimate language, and commonly occurring speech formulas,
proverbs, and sayings, all of which applied linguists know are a shortcut to fluency and ‘native-
like’ usage. In addition, especially useful for learning are conversations about everyday life, par-
ticularly in non-traditional contexts like shopping, medical centres, or sporting events. Samples
are also needed of intergenerational interaction, including code-switching, and the language
practices of younger generations. Austin and Sallabank (2018) also argue that documentation
of revitalization can also be a means to enhance meta-discussion of learning outcomes, cur-
riculum and materials review, evaluation, and support for language programmes; as Nathan and
Fang (2009) point out, language classes can provide a locus for uncovering children’s language
attitudes, paths of acquisition, developmental stages, literacy, and new types of language use.

The data collection methods commonly used in fieldwork involve elicitation of decontextual-
ized key words and structures intended to facilitate inter-language comparability (see Section
‘Typologies’); standardized questionnaires or experimental tools,9 and grammaticality judge-
ments. This may be supplemented by narratives, songs, and rituals (not infrequently monologic
retellings divorced from their socio-cultural context); conversations tend to be avoided because
transcribing and annotating them is difficult and time consuming. The recording agenda is usu-
ally set by the linguist.
Observation can capture language practices in context, while elicitation and self-report
capture how people think they speak (i.e. perceptions and beliefs about language). Grammati-
cality judgements reflect how people think they or others should speak (i.e. language ideolo-
gies). Elicitation often results in formal, ‘correct’, citation forms, skewed towards an idealized
ancestral code (or in a diglossic context, a ‘high’ language). It has been argued that linguists
should document language ecologies, not just individual languages or varieties (e.g. Mühl-
häusler 2000; Grenoble 2011), with proper attention paid to multilingual repertoires, mixed
codes, translanguaging, contact effects, and language variation and change. Ethnographically-
informed participant observation and recording of natural(istic) interactions is the only way to
capture the full range of language use, how people employ language to establish and maintain
social relationships, and the social meanings of different ways of speaking and signing (Dobrin
and Schwartz 2016). An ethnographic understanding of a given community is a prerequisite to
culturally sensitive language planning and maintenance activities (Childs et al. 2014: 171; see
also Section ‘Relationship of documentation and revitalization’).
Future directions of practices
Diversity and the particular

Researchers and communities seeking to document and describe endangered languages
need to adopt a diverse array of data collection and analysis techniques, incorporating
368
participant observation, and reducing reliance on ‘standard’ questionnaires, experimental

protocols, and ready-to-hand tools. This means focusing instead on the particularities and
uniqueness of given endangered languages contexts (or ecologies) and involving true col-
laboration with community members. In the period from around 2000 to 2015, funders
and documenters aimed at wide but thin sampling to create corpora that could result in
grammars, dictionaries, and text collections (often presented as a revival of the ‘Boasian
trilogy’ [Woodbury 2011]). More recently, there is a focus on particular domains of lan-
guage use (especially endangered cultural practices, such as ritual speech or interactions
in now infrequently occurring contexts); multimodality (e.g. ‘whistled speech’ or ‘drum
language’), which varies widely between communities; and inter-speaker variation, draw-
ing on concepts and techniques from variationist sociolinguistics. The consequences are
richer, more specific, and more varied accounts of endangered languages and communities,
less subject to being typologized and more concerned with representing what is special and
unique about particular contexts.
The dominant ideology among researchers until recently has also been that ‘real’ lan-
guage and cultural documentation must take place in isolated, distant, difficult to get to, and
often dangerous locations, away from the influences of dominant communities, where ‘true’
knowledge would be preserved. Diaspora communities, even those where languages and
traditions are strongly maintained, were excluded as possible sites for research. However,
projects like the Endangered Language Alliance10 in New York City have demonstrated how
much can be done with immigrant and diaspora speakers, singers, and signers. As travel
became impossible in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers evolved innovative
ways to work ‘at a distance’, using technological developments, such as collaboration soft-
ware, and shifting data collection and analysis towards speakers and local experts, including
language activists. This adaptive and collaborative approach is likely to persist in some form
well into the future.
Transdisciplinarity
Language documentation has tended to be done by linguists only, and often by individuals,
perhaps with locally employed and trained research assistants who speak the endangered lan-
guage. There have been exceptions which involve cross-disciplinary collaborations, such as
Pande and Abbi (2011) on Andamanese languages and birds; the value of transdisciplinary
collaboration was clear from workshops run by the SOAS-based Plants, Animals, and Words
project that brought together biologists, ornithologists, botanists, and linguists for cross-fer-
tilization of data collection and analysis techniques and outcomes.11 Such collaborations are
demanding and involve learning about the methods and metalanguage of all participants, but
the results of multifaceted collaborations for documentation of ethnobiological knowledge in
particular can be impressive.
Community empowerment and decolonization

As mentioned in Section ‘Relationship of documentation and revitalization’, endangered
language communities have often experienced research as exploitative. Recently there has
been an ‘Indigenous efflorescence’ (Roche et al. 2018), with community members demanding
equitable research partnerships. There is growing interest in many communities in traditional
knowledge and Indigenous paradigms of knowing, which may clash with Western scientific
models which seek to quantify measurable entities and results. However, it is important not to
369
make essentialist assumptions about ‘what communities want’, nor to assume that there is one
‘Indigenous knowledge paradigm’.
There has been a progression of approaches towards linguistic fieldwork since the 1990s
(Grinevald 2003; Cameron et al. 1992): from research on a language to research for and with
the language community, which recognized the need for collaboration and reciprocity (Cza-
ykowska-Higgins 2009; Rice 2006, 2009, 2011). Grinevald (2003) and Leonard and Haynes
(2010) proposed a further stage, where projects are community-driven, and the role of a lin-
guist researcher is to train and mentor local researchers and to produce outputs requested by the
community, who are also in charge of publishing policy. Nevertheless, the researcher-centred
approach is still the predominant model for many funding bodies. Dobrin and Schwartz (2016:
255) argue for a more nuanced exploration of ‘complexity and diversity of what goes on in
particular researcher-community relationships’.
One major problem to be confronted is that most of the larger digital archives of endangered
languages, which now store terabytes of audio, video, and text recordings, plus linguistic anal-
ysis for some of them, are inaccessible to anyone who does not know English (or, in the case
of AILLA,12 Spanish, and for Pangloss,13 French – all ex-colonial languages). This is because
the archive interfaces and virtually all of their metadata (descriptions of what the deposits con-
tain) are in English, so locating information and accessing and understanding it are restricted.
Metadata also focuses on the standard categorizations set up by researchers (via the OLAC14
and CIMDI15 specifications) to enable sharing between archives and individuals rather than
descriptions that make sense to speakers and communities. The Mukurtu Project16 aims to
respond to these roadblocks to access and use, and to ‘empower communities to manage,
share, narrate, and exchange their digital heritage in culturally relevant and ethically-minded
ways’, but its impact has not yet been widely felt. Another problem with current archives is
that stored files are in formats which require knowledge and training in specialist software
for access, and the software interfaces are typically restricted to English or other ex-colonial
languages. Researchers rarely convert their materials into formats like PDF or plain text that
anyone can read.
Recently, some have begun to explore monolingual language documentation and revitaliza-
tion, studying endangered languages in the languages themselves, rather than the dominant,
typically colonial tongues. This involves the creation of new genres and metalanguage (e.g.
McDougall 2019 describes work in Luqa from the Solomon Islands). The University of the
South Pacific offers a module for MA students to research their own languages and to write
term papers in the language or the local lingua franca (e.g. Bislama for Vanuatu students). In
2020, the journal Language Documentation and Description began publishing abstracts of
papers in Indigenous languages and lingua francas, along with English, and in 2021, the first
paper with a section in an Indigenous language appeared (Harvey 2021 in Kala Kawaw Ya). In
future, we may see more of this kind of research and publication, shifting the status relation-
ship in research and academic discourse away from colonializing languages to the endangered
languages themselves.
Related topics
minority/Indigenous language revitalization; language learning; language education; corpus
linguistics; sociolinguistics for language education; multilingualism; ecology of language;
language policy and planning; family language policy; critical discourse analysis; identity;
language and politics; sign languages; language attrition; language and ageing; linguistic eth-
nography; linguistic anthropology; linguistic landscape
370
Notes
1 www.ethnologue.com/guides/, accessed 2021-06-21
2 Fieldwork-based language documentation and description, along with sociolinguistic study of shift
and revitalization, has been established in mainstream linguistics in Australia and New Zealand
since the 1970s.
3 https://en.iyil2019.org/. accessed 2021-07-02
4 https://en.unesco.org/news/upcoming-decade-indigenous-languages-2022-2032-focus-indi-
genous-language-users-human-rights, accessed 2021-07-02
5 Despite it being common in larger dominant languages, like English.
6 Such as the ‘Leipzig Glossing Rules’ (https://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/resources/glossing-rules.php)
or GOLD generalized ontology (http://linguistics-ontology.org/info/about), both accessed 2021-07-10
7 https://archive.mpi.nl/tla/elan, accessed 2021-07-02
8 https://software.sil.org/fieldworks/, accessed 2021-07-02
9 See the diverse range of such tools at www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/tools-at-lingboard/questionnaires.
php, accessed 2021-07-01
10 https://elalliance.org/, accessed 2021-07-01
11 www.soas.ac.uk/linguistics/events/plants-animals-words/, accessed 2021-07-02
12 https://ailla.utexas.org/, accessed 2021-07-01
13 https://pangloss.cnrs.fr/, accessed 2021-07-01
14 www.language-archives.org/OLAC/metadata.html, accessed 2021-07-01
15 www.clarin.eu/content/component-metadata, accessed 2021-07-01
16 https://mukurtu.org/about/, accessed 2021-07-01
Further reading
Austin, P. K. and Sallabank, J. (eds,) (2011) The Cambridge Handbook of Endangered Languages, Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press. (This introduces language endangerment from the perspectives of
language ecology, speakers and communities, contact and change, and society and culture. It includes
the essentials of language documentation and archiving, as well as hands-on views of advocacy and
support, development of writing systems for previously unwritten languages, education, training the
next generation of researchers and activists, dictionary-making, language policy, economic aspects,
and applying technology and new media in support of endangered languages.)
Bradley, D. and Bradley, M. (2019) Language Endangerment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
(This introduces endangerment as an academic field of study, exploring the causes of language shift
and the different pathways observed in communities. The approach is interdisciplinary and covers
linguistic, social, and other factors that contribute to shift. Examples are drawn from the authors’
research in Asia and elsewhere.)
Leonard, W. Y. and De Korne, H. (eds.) (2017) Language Documentation and Description, 14. Spe-
cial Issue on Reclaiming Languages. London: EL Publishing. https://lddjournal.org/issue/15 (This
examines language reclamation strategies to counter forms of marginalization of minority language
speakers and communities. The focus is on grassroots responses to the pressures and opportunities
of specific contexts, aiming to shift power imbalances. The volume critically examines revitalization
and associated discourses and the roles of researchers and communities and their actions from a social
justice perspective.)
Thomason, S. (2015) Endangered Languages: An Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press. (This is an introductory overview covering causes and processes of endangerment and the
consequences and outcomes for communities and academic research. It describes documentation and
revitalization methods, illustrated with case studies, some drawn from the author’s own long-term
work with the Montana Salish community.)
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29
Ecolinguistics in practice
Stephen Cowley
A mathematician confided
That a Mobius band is one-sided,
And you’ll get quite a laugh,
If you cut one in half,
For it stays in one piece when divided.
Introduction
Ecolinguists view ecological destruction as an oppressive force. In practice, the field unites
work opposing classism (Freire 2000 [1970]) with challenges to how an ideology of growthism
drives waste and consumption (Halliday 1990). However, in bringing the challenge to educa-
tion, the ecolinguist treats language, social practices, and human agency as akin to a Möbius
loop. As Raimondi (2019) suggests, not only do parts loop together but, in cutting them apart,
they give rise to new wholes. Although the ecolinguist treats languaging (or translanguag-
ing) as part of agency, as cut into sayings and doings, the results can alter practical action (Li
2018). One can attend to how persons and groups self-construct by linking practices, verbal
patterns, ways of attending, and, at once, use the results to manage and assess understanding.
While human communication has a role, whole body concerting unites the verbal with what
is thought, perceived, and implied. Languaging links bodies, materials, and institutions (e.g.
banks, languages, procedures) with knowing, attitudes, and beliefs. Even if nothing is said,
things come with meanings attached or, as Gahrn-Andersen (2021) notes, enlanguaged cogni-
tion permeates human experience.
Shapiro (2011: 1) opens an important book about life by declaring that ‘innovation, not
selection, is the critical issue in evolutionary change’. Cells self-modify and set off heritable
effects: just as organisms change, so do ecosystems, lineages, species, persons, and cultures.
In chimpanzees, individuals learn from what a group knows about, say, termite fishing (Lons-
dorf 2006). In humans, enlanguaged cognition channels experience and thus individual lives.
Like chimpanzees, we rely on simplex tricks such as inhibition and vicariance (Berthoz 2012)
– humans inhibit by staying silent, and as we listen, we use vicariance to adapt as we talk,
think, act, and choose what to say. Practices rely on what Pennycook (2020) calls semiotic
374 DOI: 10.4324/9781003082637-32

assemblages that bundle together, say, group-based beliefs, working memory, and dispositions
with a person’s skills and expectations. Assemblages bind languaging with artefacts and skills
and, thus, serve praxis. As a cultural tool, languaging channels epistemic change.
History
Whereas the Greeks sought commonalities in mind and nature and the scholastics turned to
signs, modernism reduces intelligence to form and function. Sixty-five years ago, a mecha-
nistic view of linguistic novelty (Chomsky 1957) was greeted with acclaim. Yet since reason,
computation, and grammar produce no novelty, today’s emphasis falls on embodiment, spon-
taneity, and natural innovation. In an extended ecology (Steffensen 2013), humans use the
loops of languaging, agency, and practices. Life acts as its own designer (Markoš et al. 2009)
as people use practices to change the ecology. As first defined, the ecology consists in ‘inter-
relations between organisms and their living and non-living surroundings’ (Haeckel 1866:
286; cited in Fill 2017: 1). Since languaging arises just such interrelations, it reduces to nei-
ther mappings nor linguistic structure. In the Ecology of Language, Haugen (1972) attributes
the surplus to ‘interactions’ between languages and environments (for critique, see Cowley
2021). The idea inspired many to use linguistic analysis to transformatory ends. Faced by
climate catastrophe, proposals for social renewal include critique of Baconian science (Finke
2019), the use of discourse analysis (Alexander 2017), or exhortations to live by new stories
(Stibbe 2015). In the last 50 years, Haugen’s metaphorical view of the ecology (e.g. Fill 2001;
Pennycook 2004) has been largely superseded. Today, most focus on life sustaining relations
between living beings. Ecolinguists can ask how natural innovation contributes to the looping
of languaging, agency and practice.
In the ecosphere things happen somewhere: living systems are consortia of organisms or
bioecologies (Clements and Shelford 1939). Hence, human practices bind unrepeatable expe-
rience into culture, identities, and histories. In enlanguaged worlds, wordings re-evoke the
already lived as events that use emplacement (see Barron et al. (2020). The non-localized
shapes nonce events that arise as a person binds verbal patterns together with signs of culture,
developmental history, and how a lineage constrains changes in a phenotype changes. From a
god’s eye view, interactions amalgamate experiential and causal experience. As bioecological
beings (Cowley 2014a), humans – and only humans – use practices to connect place, percep-
tion, action, and languaging. Thus, emplacement brings epistemic value to voices, feeling,
looking, and above all, doing. Across settings, parties actualize practices whose outcomes have
variable effects on others, their doings, and in wider scales, the ecosphere.
Twentieth-century ecolinguistics linked the ecology of language (e.g. Mühlhäusler 2000) to
critique of social and ecological discourses (see Alexander 2017). By the turn of the millennium,
the social context was seen as an ‘ecology’ that affects practices and identity (e.g. Leather and
Van Dam 2003). One group of applied linguists tried to close a ‘gap’ between fields of language
acquisition and language socialization (Kramsch and Steffensen 2008). In Van Lier’s (2004)
work, appeal to the ecology brought social and material resources to the attention of applied
linguists. Classrooms became places where sociocultural and semiotic means brought Gibson’s
(2015 [1979]) affordances to actions, skills, and learning. Formerly dominant linguistic and
cognitive models gave way to the view that, somehow, linguistic knowing uses ‘socialization’
(Douglas Fir Group 2016). Computer games, for example, act as distributed systems where
skills and language co-develop: media can favour values realizing and, thus, human becoming
(Zheng et al. 2018). In cognitive-social meshworks, people link artefacts, dynamics, and how
language and cognition are distributed (Blair and Cowley 2003; Thibault 2011; Hellerman and
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Stephen Cowley
Thorne 2020). Emplacement allows persons to connect practices and artefacts as they align
perceiving (Hutchins 2014). In such a world, a history of coupling social dynamics with mate-
rial entities enables self-constructing. Far from needing to learn, acquire, construct, internalize,
embody, or use ‘language’, learners use whole body activity to concert action, perceiving and
languaging. As organizationally open systems, persons use place to display and speak as they
routinely understand more than is said. Languaging has epistemic effects that enable people to
cooperate, coordinate, and of course, compete. Before pursuing how such powers arise, I stress
that emplacement is much richer than ‘social context’. As ecological contact, languaging is part
of living. Without such a view, as Pennycook (2004: 222) warns, there are political dangers;
even if ‘singing the song of diversity and the environment’, ecolinguists may unwittingly echo
the ‘discourses of the natural that have long served the dominant culture of the world’.
When ecolinguists turn to the actual ecology, Steffensen and Kramsch (2017: 12) argue,
they challenge the ‘epistemic categories we use to construct our object of inquiry’. Hence, lin-
guistic constructs (e.g. utterance, language use, text, discourse, conversation) are seen to lack
causal powers. Models of language systems, parts and modes of operation are wholly descrip-
tive. Bioecologies are affected by language only when humans actualize practices (that may
also use, say, machines, money, and institutions). Rejecting mentalism, cognition is traced to
a history of environment-agent dynamics (Chemero 2011; Steffensen and Cowley 2021), what
people do, and thus, how happenings unfold. As Steffensen and Fill (2014) stress, one avoids
compartmentalizing of natural, symbolic, sociocultural, and cognitive ecologies. Accordingly,
they link Gibsonian ideas with Maturana’s work (see Section ‘Critical issues and topics’) and
Kravchenko’s (2007; 2016) view of languaging. In replacing the individual by environment-
agent systems, they reconnect the epistemic, the embodied and the cultural. Steffensen and
Kramsch (2017) propose four principles: (1) language learning and use are emergent; (2) much
depends on an environment and its affordances; (3) in education, language has a mediating
function; and (4) language learning experience unites the historical, the subjective, and the
conflictual (Steffensen and Kramsch 2017). Learning emerges in a reciprocal play of identity
and human powers, and as a result, no explanatory power falls to linguistic objects:
‘[A] language’ is a theoretical construct. It is not an entity that we can know or use; it is
not a competence that precedes actual utterance behavior. Rather language is an act of
languaging; it is a whole-bodied achievement (Thibault 2011), and what we come to rec-
ognize as words, grammar, lexicon, etc. are second-order constructs (Love 1990).
Steffensen and Kramsch (2017: 7)
Acts of languaging (see Section ‘Critical issues and topics’) mesh bodies, perception, and
action. Objectifications like language, utterances, discourse, and text describe what people
treat as valued constraints. In an enlanguaged world, human powers change the ecosphere.
Turning from links of socialization with acquisition, the ecolinguist can ask how persons
actualize practices as varies as, say, grandmothering, talking, or making pottery. Socialization
arises as people set off dialogical appropriation (Dufva 2012) and, while using practices, mesh
doing with knowledge-getting. As for Halliday (1997), meaning potential requires semogen-
esis. When moved to think or speak, people act subjectively and, at times, resist power: as
they speak, they are moved to use epistemic tools. Later, (in Section ‘Current contributions’),
I trace how verbal patterns can affect intelligent activity as people draw on simplex principles
in, say, teamwork, flexibility, emotional intelligence, and so on. People extend familiarization
(and statistical learning) by attending, acting and using ‘effort after meaning’ (Reed 1996:
102). Contra the Douglas Fir Group (2016), learning relies on neither ‘moment to moment’
376
use of language, nor ‘neurobiological mechanisms and cognitive capacities’. Indeed, appeal
to language use masks how humans construct both knowing and as selves. In tracing how
people happen in language, one turns to complex social behaviour that has no need for men-
tal gymnastics – what Chemero (2011) terms radical embodied cognition. Languaging and
practices unite living with ways of reusing material, cultural, and epistemic resources (see
Steffensen and Cowley 2021).
Eco-cultural heritage influences how an individual develops powers. In illustration, one can
ask how traces (e.g. icons, alphabets, digits) serve as symbolizations (Kravchenko 2007). In
literacy practices, they bind individual understanding into culture in ways that affect practical
action, languaging, and human action. As part of social entanglements (Pennycook 2020), writ-
ten traces are embedded with acting, awareness, computation, and across groups, signage, dis-
course, work, and media. For sociopolitical reasons, the displays often serve powerful groups.
In a world where algorithms control text, anonymous forces gain new power. Critical voices
can ask how they link practices, automaticity, and skilled linguistic action. Accordingly, in
Section ‘Recommendations: the case of reading’, I turn to reading and, above all, its role in
understanding; we use reading to actualize practices. It is based in not codes and processing
but, rather, how we have come to use textual resources to make constructive use of other
peoples’ powers.

In denying that people ‘know’ linguistic objects, one turns to empirically discoverable features
of individuals. By definition, a person’s powers ‘account for the causal work those individuals
do’ (Lassiter and Vukov 2021: 1). In this way, 20th-century appeal to learning, representation,
and dynamics is replaced by attention to the multiscalarity of human behaviour. Ethnogra-
phy and modelling can be used to examine events, errors, happenings, and crucially, how
systems shape acting, judging, and ‘what happens’. Rather than reify socialization, one asks
how, together and alone, people build powers as they intertwine practices, acting, and ways of
languaging.
Spontaneous processes link languaging to semiotic resources. People use chronotopes,
timescales and complexity (Blommaert 2013), semiotic landscapes (Eckert 2018), and thus,
distributed cognitive systems (Hutchins 1995). Persons perform as part of wider systems (i.e.
in a role) and, at once, as responsible living agents with beliefs. Human agency is, in a precise
sense, distributed: within organized activity, emplacement can channel languaging, action,
and semiotic construal. In orienting to (and as) semiotic assemblages, we link observing to the
evoked, and discernible and the possible. Whilst Pennycook shows how semiotic infrastruc-
tures serve the dominant groups, the ecolinguist turns to how action draws on ideation. In prac-
tice, signs do things to us and we do things with signs: slowly, we adopt and develop ways of
knowing. In Elizabethan terms, understanding informs languaging: as Mulcaster (1582) notes,
schoolboys grasp Greek or Latin by using the vernacular to render text aloud. In such as case,
natural innovation links ancient memories, classroom activity, understanding, and languaging.
As the living voice (and body) challenges appeal to reason, the academy suppresses such views
(and turns to linguistic knowledge). Yet the power of languaging is such that, for 500 years, the
concept kept returning (see Cowley 2019). In most parts of the world, of course, the human
was never reduced to a source of reason. In China, for example, wisdom allows that 续 (xù),
or ‘aligning’, enables people to continue, create and complete (Wang and Wang 2015). Like
xù, languaging is personal and particular. Echoing Heidegger and Maturana, Becker brought
a related idea back to the academy by arguing that human activity defies linguistic categories:
377
Stephen Cowley
‘There is no such thing as Language, only continual languaging, an activity of human beings
in the world’ (Becker 1991: 34).
As language lacks any ‘real’ correlate, linguistic theory uses objectifications. Just as some
communities believe in spirits, ancestors, or atoms, those who draw on English invoke fictions
known as ‘words’. Even in an age where socialization highlights digital traces, infants begin by
learning to talk. They use natural innovation as they draw on expression, engage in practices,
and by sensitizing to the normative, self-construct as speakers. While reliant on emplacement,
a child gradually learns to hear repeatable, second-order constructs (‘words’). However, she
begins with wordings (i.e. physical events) that transform action opportunities. Later, she dis-
covers gains in meshing action and perception while taking a language stance (Cowley 2011)
or using utterances as ‘utterances of something’ (Love 2004). Given a history of entrenchment,
skilled linguistic action gradually reshapes talk and activity such that, in time, a child learns
to avow beliefs and offer reasons. As Becker (1991: 34) says, languages exist as an activity of
‘human beings in the world’ (my italics). Languaging enacts activities such as: ‘speaking, hear-
ing (listening), writing, reading, “signing” and interpreting sign language . . . activities that can
be united by a specific superordinate verb’ (Love 2017: 115). For Cowley (2014b), languaging
is defined as activity in which (physical) wordings play a part – for a perceiver, the results have
a verbal aspect and, thus, use wordings.
One can investigate how languaging contributes to practices. However, to pursue (what the
folk call) language learning, humans must draw on normative practices, institutions, and equip-
ment. Crucially, given how people draw on habitus (Bourdieu 1977), practices are multiply
actualized. They adapt to a place, a meaning and how, as a living person, one uses simplex
tricks. With Maturana (1978), languaging arises as structural coupling, enabling infants to
self-construct as observers who say things (see Kravchenko 2007). Within an environment
(medium), practices enable people to discern. In an enlanguaged world, acting is channelled
by patterns of usage (Schmid’s [2020], ‘language-systems’). Over a history of recursive action,
languaging permeates believing, voicing, and knowing. In an enlanguaged world, a person
appropriates ways of acting, perceiving, and speaking. With emplaced experience, sign-per-
fused perception emerges and, as Sellars argues, sets off ‘languagings’. In Love’s (2004) terms,
bodies use first-order activity that, given later entrenchment, wordings come to echo phrasings
(viz. second-order constructs). As observers act – and are perceived to act – practices gradu-
ally align with norms of usage. People are socialized as they actualize practices by drawing
on bodies that orient to the orientations of others. Powers arise as one is moved, observes,
responds with feeling, and at once, anticipates. Languaging uses constraints as practices favour
epistemic resources that include beliefs about, say, languages, minds, spirits, and so on.
By appeal to autopoiesis, Maturana treats living as already intentional. In what Raimondi
(2019) calls a bio-logic, his view treats directedness as given. A similar but more carefully
grounded view arises Sellars’ (1960) account of how languagings arise (see Seiberth 2021).
On this view, a verbal aspect comes to activity as wordings and thoughts draw on immersion
or non-relational intentionality. For Sellars, perceiving is partly isomorphic with the world (or,
as above, uses emplacement): thus, in biting into a biscuit, I may think or covertly language
coconut. The languaging re-enacts individual history: in my enlanguaged world coconut is part
of a biscuit and, at once, of feeling, tasting, and doing. Such picturings are often covert and,
yet, can be inferred or reported (see Seiberth 2021). They inform a common realm that unites
people across domains of culture, natural innovation, and practices. The transcendental view
(Seiberth 2021) both parallels Halliday’s (1997) appeal to semogenesis and reaches beyond the
verbal. For Sellars, languagings bring emplacement to future action: they are often silent. They
allow inhibition and favour vicariance. We learn to say what we do not think – languagings are
378
modified by practices. Although wider than Halliday’s semogenesis, like use of text, Sellars’
languagings link living, praxis, and experience of verbal (or lexico-grammatical) resources. In
simple cases (coconut), they are more basic than association or logic. As isomorphisms, they
are ‘engineered’ by nature. In ecological terms, natural innovation triggers languaging and
thoughts: within practices, they enact understanding.
Current contributions
Ecolinguists can aim to build a sense of living, develop theories of practice, reshape learn-
ing, and inspire practical action. While seeking awareness of destructive social, political, and
economic contradictions (Freire 2000 [1970]), new weight falls on how the pre-reflective can
be used to change attitudes and invite action. Hence, investigative methods turn to how whole-
body expertise and experience play out as people act and orient to what, as selves and others,
they say, feel, think, and do.
As part of human agency, languaging extends how experience and practices draw on the
pre-reflective. In what Malafouris (2020) calls material engagement theory, the power of the
pre-reflective appears in a paradigm case of pottery making. In creating an artefact, a potter
relies on (1) acting with clay (and other resources), (2) fashioning a final product, and (3) mod-
ulating how he works by using enactive signification. Eye, brain, and hands evoke personal
experience as responsive feeling unites with a potter’s use of social norms. In what Malafouris
(ibid.) also calls thinging, materials prompt pre-reflective sensitivity and an impulse (akin to
续, or xù). In parallel, the ecolinguist traces languaging to bodies and natural innovation. As
with pottery-making, perceiving sets off acting, shapes products, and in flux, triggers how the
pre-reflective serves to modulate action and thinking (thoughts). Practices prompt people to
use expertise and novelties as they draw on wordings that unite feelings, attitudes, and actions.
The results bear on local standards and, invariably, carry an individual mark.
Ethnography can track innovation, change and individual understanding. By starting with
languaging, one can reveal effective and idiosyncratic ways of acting-by-writing (see Juffer-
mans 2015). Elsewhere, self-taught techniques are shown to aid advanced learners in meaning-
making (Swain and Lapkin 2011) or in making the effort to learn a Chinese character (Ho and
Li 2019). Methods like cognitive event analysis show how insight uses felt pico-dynamics and
interactivity (Steffensen et al. 2016) or, indeed, how problem avoidance uses the pre-reflective
(Trasmundi and Linell 2017). One can also reverse the logic by tracing learning to pre-reflec-
tive practice and languaging (Hellerman and Thorne 2020). Just as in making pottery, learners
rely on activity based in ‘cultural ecosystems’ (Hutchins 2014). In languaging, we use norms
as we tackle tasks, work materials, feel the mood, and engage with others who treat wordings
as physical aspects of activity (at times, using ‘belief’ in words).
A person can manage causal powers while interpreting with an image from space or act-
ing as a teacher. Performance adjusts to the norms of a cognitive ecosystem (e.g. a group of
astronomers) such that semiotic resources (e.g. images from the Hubble) change perspectives
and engender know-how. Organized activity can thus be shown as three dimensions of change
(Secchi and Cowley 2021). As people concert, they use (1) the infrastructural, normative, and
material dynamics of practices (e.g. note-making, keyboards); (2) experience-based in practi-
cal action and enactive signification (listening, thoughts); and (3) how experience and expertise
trigger emplaced semiotic resonances. In such activity, whether automatic or voluntary, par-
ties re-evoke the once lived and/or said as they orient to things and people. For bioecological
beings, the feeling of what happens binds emplacement, decorum, and languaging. At times, we
track events, and at others, we pick out social, political, or ideational gaps and contradictions.
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Stephen Cowley
Material engagement and languaging unites phenomena, such as (1) slow creativity, (2)
flexibility, (3) teamwork, and (4) emotional intelligence. Often these are seen as ‘soft skills’
that elude definition. Indeed, as Kechagias (2011: 31) notes, they manifest ‘appropriate per-
formance in particular contextual/situational conditions’ and do so ‘despite the fact that this
performance is only carried out thanks to the prior existence and combination of personal
and contextual resources’. However, since the skills are not traits, they are better seen as
powers. What Lassiter and Vukov (2021) call ‘individual causal work’ is performed within
distributed systems. One person shapes the orientings of another and, in an enlanguaged
world, each can bring forth understanding. In language teaching, soft powers are crucial:
for Coroamă-Dorneau and Urlica (2018), a ‘mistake-friendly environment’ helps learners in
‘forging a community and purpose’. Given emplacement, soft powers inform learning and,
at times, grant pleasure (Coroamă-Dorneanu and Urlica 2018). There is more at stake. Soft
powers also enable human ‘becoming’ as epistemic results derive from co-perceiving and
awareness. As shown in a study of American and Chinese children, they can find learning
language enjoyable and relatively effortless (Zheng et al. 2018). Yet much learning requires
effort after meaning. In video ethnographic study of an Oxford tutorial, Grzegorczyk (2019)
examines how two students use the same ‘learning space’. While one tries to manage the
tutorial by being friendly as rehearsing what she ‘knows’, the other attempts spontaneous,
genre specific meaning generation. For the tutor, the latter’s performance is superior: she
uses soft powers in knowledge construction. Her talk is (1) critical, (2) emplaced, and (3)
future-directed. At the risk of oversimplifying, if the one party uses social awareness, the
successful student uses more person-centred powers that bring a constructive attitude to
anticipation and practical action.
Recommendations: the case of reading

Once demystified as abstracta, linguistic categories become integral to how an observer per-
ceives patterned aggregates that can function as symbolizations. A reader can use the ‘traces’
as visible patterns and, as one adjusts attending, orient to text. Acts of reading prompt activ-
ity that leads to epistemic outcomes. Readers skim, scan, sub-vocalize and, like Mulcaster’s
school boys, render wordings aloud. For Benne (2021: 2), like actors in a scene, readers rely on,
‘customs, apparatuses, contextual constraints phantasmagoric realities, embodied engagement
with surroundings and technologies’. At times, resources trigger explicit ‘thoughts’. However,
this constructive power carries a corollary: Benne (2021: 3) also notes that ‘the concept of read-
ing covers such a vast spectrum of possible scenes of reading that trying to find out anything
about reading in general seems futile’. Reading is ecologically embedded experience across a
distributed system of person, text, and beyond. Hence, a person uses both languaging and the
flux of animated embodiment.
A special issue of Language Sciences brings a distributed view to reading (Trasmundi and
Cobley 2021). In surveying how ‘close reading’ is perceived in British higher education, little
or no weight falls on construction or the reading ecology. For many respondents, reading is a
skill or, for the authors, invites a ‘gift or package to be taken away’ (Cobley and Siebers (2021:
17). The view fits a ‘simple view of reading’ (Hoover and Tunmer 2018) where ‘decoding’ is
seen as enabling brain-based comprehension. For Cobley and Siebers (2021: 18), skill views
fit a ‘transactional, instrumental, information-based approach’ and the (neo)liberal view of
education as a business opportunity that trains young people in ‘transferable skills’. They also
use poor science: even if eye-based movement occurs (Braille is not considered), there is no
reason to posit decoding. There is no evidence that ‘reading’ uses either a (specific) ‘process of
380
visual perception’ or a signature behavioural pattern. In fact, an eye-based reading skill could
be foundational only if the following conditions were met:
1 Reading occurred in the head.

2 The eye-based behaviour linked a kind of neural activity (visual perception) to ‘process-
ing’ that generates comprehension.
3 Comprehension was determined by linguistic features of written language.
Neither machines, brains, nor persons work this way. Thus, if computers ‘read’, they use not
eyes but probabilities and a vector space. While brains, it seems, use probabilities, these index
aggregated letter shapes (Dehaene 2009). Finally, persons use emplacement as part of prac-
tices. People vary how they bind changing, anticipative experience with the intelligent use of
frequency information. Many read faster than a body can vocalize or sub-vocalize (Nation
2009). Attending matters: people skim, scan, attend, inhibit, and act vicariously. In effortful
activity, a reader may reread or render aloud while changing strategy choice, jumping passages,
and altering focus. Tactility (Mangen 2016), empathy (Kuzmičová et al. 2017), and imagining
immersion (Singer and Alexander 2017) shape a reader’s world. Reading differs demographi-
cally (Tveit and Mangen 2014) and affects the inner ear (Trasmundi et al. 2021). It makes use
of vicariance and the not said (why this wording?). As meta-analysis (e.g. Clinton et al. 2019)
shows, use of paper correlates with measures of deeper reading. In a distributed system, an
emplaced person selects some text that is imbued with enactive signification. Reading is textu-
ally constrained practice within a given reading ecology: people actualize expertise as bodies
bring soft powers to the use of materials.
Inspired by Trasmundi and Cobley, I therefore sketch broad recommendations.
• Teach quality reading as practical action (Trasmundi et al. 2021).

• View reading as learning to relish effort after meaning.
• Make use of critical, emplaced, and bioecological awareness: reading needs feelings,
covert languagings, and above all, skill in gauging and monitoring felt responding.
• Build pedagogy that attends to emplacement and lived experience.
• Distinguish reading from online knowledge-gleaning.
• Read aloud: stress slow creativity and semogenetic powers.
• Challenge the politics of treating young people as consumer-workers who need the skill
of reading (and functional literacy).
• Stress the transformative and how, even today, reading can challenge (neo)liberal doc-
trines within and beyond the academy.
Future directions
Having rejected loose use of ‘ecology’, ecolinguistics blossomed. Attention to sustaining
vital relations between living systems increasingly replaces discussion based on discourse
and verbal categories. In practice, semiotic assemblages co-function with the causal and thus
also natural innovation. Indeed, people exercise powers by bringing languaging together with
action – they reach epistemic ends while also changing themselves. Far from relying on skill
or ‘processing’, readers link pre-reflective semiotic flux with so-called effort after meaning.
Bodies and probabilities work together with how symbolizations are perceived. The view chal-
lenges any appeal to an ideal reader who relies on skills. As with appeal to a standard language
or high prestige accent, a simple view of reading reifies forms and processing. In ignoring how
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a reader acts, it too inadvertently serves class interests. Models of processing or code mask how
semiotic flux contributes to becoming.
Quality reading takes effort, motivation, and practice – and the will to resist. At a time of
ecological collapse, positive social action cannot rely on values like individualism, free choice,
and universalism (Cobley 2016). To bring about ecosocial change, we may need new kinds of
education. In China, hundreds of thousands of teachers use ecolinguistics to link reading to
a desideratum of harmonious living (Huang and Zhao 2021). While some take a distributed
view (Li et al. 2020), most link Chinese philosophy, ecological issues, and discourse analysis.
Outside China, education is still dominated by the ideal learner. On an organism-centred view,
one too often replaces natural innovation with appeal to skills, knowledge, and competencies.
Learning is separated from persons, emplacement, and how we draw on semiotic resonances.
Of course, we are unlike information processors. Where puzzled, we may reread, render aloud,
and in a suitable setting, link experience with modes of discussion. When we understand, soft
powers, imagining, and effort can inform our thinking – and that of others. As with a Möbius
loop, when agency, practices, and languaging are cut apart, new wholes appear. Nascent ideas
may challenge classism and growthism or, perhaps, trigger framings, new attitudes, and bio-
ecological awareness. Yet all knowing is fragile – we grasp ideas as we actualize practices.
When thoughts dawn, we can change our languaging.
Related topics
language socialization; second language acquisition; social semiotics and multimodality;
translanguaging
Further reading
Steffensen, S. V. and Cowley, S. J. (2021) ‘Thinking on behalf of the world: Radical embodied ecolinguis-
tics’, in Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, London: Routledge. (Unlike the current contribution, the
focus falls on presenting an ecological view of cognition that challenges all varieties of cognitivism.
The paper is complementary to how ecolinguistics can be used in practical action in that it argues
against all forms of representationalism.)
Steffensen, S. V. and Kramsch, C. (2017) ‘The ecology of second language acquisition and socialization’,
in Encyclopedia of Language and Education, London: Springer. (Both authors have had a major role
in bringing ecolinguistics to applied linguistics – first, by using ‘ecology’ loosely and, later, in build-
ing a transformational view. The paper thus marks a crucial turning point from which a great deal of
new work has arisen.)
Stibbe, A. (2015) Ecolinguistics: Language, Ecology and the Stories We Live By, London: Routledge.
(This classic text by the world’s best-known ecolinguist is aimed at students and a wide public. It
illustrates how ecolinguists can use traditional structuralist methods in giving attention to the actual
ecology. While still built on linguistics, it is an excellent introduction to the aims of the field, is popular
with students and comes with a free, online course.)
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30
Translanguaging
Li Wei
Introduction
Ever since Colin Baker coined the word translanguaging in 2001, it has caught the imagination
of researchers and practitioners in the fields of education, language, cognitive science, com-
munication, media and cultural studies, and beyond. Yet there is still considerable confusion
over what translanguaging is about, why it is necessary amongst a plethora of similar new
terms as well as the traditional concepts, what it means for language teaching and learning,
linguistic change, and human communication and cognition, and how to overcome many of the
challenges in policy and practice that translanguaging poses. This chapter reviews the origins
and developments of the concept of translanguaging and discusses its added values. It will also
review the research evidence for the theoretical claims behind translanguaging as an approach
to language and cognition and impact of the translanguaging pedagogy on language learning
and language education. Future directions of translanguaging research will be explored.
The current conceptualization of translanguaging originated from four related but different
fields of enquiry: minority language revitalization, bilingual education, second language acqui-
sition, and distributed cognition and language. Cen Williams observed in the Welsh revitaliza-
tion programmes in the 1990s a classroom practice where the teacher tried to teach in Welsh
but the students tended to respond in English. The students were expected to do their assign-
ments in Welsh but often they referred to English language sources. The policy of the Welsh
revitalization programmes was, as it is to this day, that only Welsh should be used, whereas
the reality was that all the teachers and learners knew English and used it in many different
contexts. Rather than seeing the alternation between the languages in a negative way, Williams
argued, against the stated policy, that it could be used to the benefits of both the student and
the teacher, as it helped to maximize the learner’s bilingual capacity in learning. Williams’
doctoral thesis (1994) was on this practice which he described as trawsieithu in Welsh. Baker,
who was Williams’ supervisor, introduced his work to the English-speaking world in the text-
book Foundations of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (Baker 2001; latest edition: Baker
386 DOI: 10.4324/9781003082637-33

Translanguaging
and Wright 2017), initially with the term ‘translingualfying’ and later by adding the ‘trans’ to
‘languaging’ as ‘translanguaging’.
The term became widely known across the world largely due to Ofelia García’s work on
bilingual education policy and practice in the United States, especially the education of minori-
tized children of Hispanic background who were labelled ‘bilingual’. These children were
often assumed to be in need of remedial education because they had incomplete exposure to
English, and therefore, their English proficiency was lower. Their Spanish was assumed to be
interfering with their English, which impacted negatively on their content learning and gen-
eral school attainment. García argued that there was no evidence that the Hispanic children’s
apparent under-achievement was caused by their English language skills. Rather, it was the
linguistic and educational ideologies that favoured one-language-only (English in this case) or
one-language-at-a-time, and the policy that no home language was allowed in the classroom,
that discriminated against those children and disadvantaged their learning. Translanguaging –
‘multiple discursive practices in which bilinguals engage in order to make sense of their bilin-
gual worlds’ (García 2009: 45) – would empower the learner and maximize their potential for
learning. It would also empower the instructor and transform the way we teach and support our
students in the process of knowledge construction.
When Baker added the ‘trans’ prefix to ‘languaging’, he also alluded to the sociocultural
theories of second language acquisition where the idea of languaging had existed for some
time. In particular, Merrill Swain (2006) used the term to describe the cognitive process of
negotiating and producing meaningful, comprehensible output as part of language learning
as a ‘means to mediate cognition’ – that is, to understand and to problem-solve (2006: 97) –
and ‘a process of making meaning and shaping knowledge and experience through language’
(p. 97). She gave specific examples of advanced second language learners’ cognitive and affec-
tive engagements through languaging, whereby ‘language serves as a vehicle through which
thinking is articulated and transformed into an artefactual form’ (Swain 2006: 97). She also
mentioned Hall’s work on languaging in psychotherapy (Hall 1999) where ‘talking-it-through’
meant ‘coming-to-know-while-speaking’ (Swain and Lapkin 2002). The connection Swain and
the others made between languaging and thinking is a particularly useful one when it comes
to understanding the cognitive capacities of bilingual and multilingual language users. By
adding ‘trans’ to ‘languaging’, it captures their ‘talking-it-through’ in multiple languages, but
emphasizes the entirety of the learner’s linguistic repertoire, rather than knowledge of specific
structures of specific named languages separately as other prefixes such as ‘multi-’ or ‘poly-’
might do.
Another field where the concept of languaging has been developing for some time is that
of distributed cognition and language, sometimes known as ‘ecological psychology’. The key
argument here is that ‘human languaging activity is radically heterogeneous and involves the
interaction of processes on many different time-scales, including neural, bodily, situational,
social, and cultural processes and events’ (Thibault 2017: 76). Language as we ordinarily
know it in the form of conventionalized speech and writing is a second-order product of this
continuous activity of languaging. Fundamentally, this particular perspective on cognition and
language invites us to rethink language not as an organism-centred entity with corresponding
formalism, such as phonemes, words, sentences, and so on, but as ‘a multi-scalar organization
of processes that enables the bodily and the situated to interact with situation, transcending
cultural-historical dynamics and practices’ (Thibault 2017: 78). It sees the traditional divides
between the linguistic, the paralinguistic, and the extralinguistic dimensions of human com-
munication as nonsensical and emphasizes what the researchers call the orchestration of
the neural-bodily-worldly skills of languaging. In particular, it highlights the importance of
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feeling, experience, history, memory, subjectivity, and culture. Although they do not talk about
ideology and power, it is entirely conceivable that these too play important roles in languag-
ing. On language learning, it advocates a radically different view that the novice does not
‘acquire’ language, but rather ‘they adapt their bodies and brains to the languaging activity
that surrounds them’. And in doing so, ‘they participate in cultural worlds and learn that they
can get things done with others in accordance with the culturally promoted norms and values’
(Thibault 2017: 77).
The work of both the sociocultural theorists of second language learning and the distributed
cognition and language researchers is connected with Michael Halliday’s argument that lan-
guage is a ‘meaning potential’, and linguistics is the study of how people exchange meanings
by ‘languaging’ (1985). By adding the ‘trans’ to ‘languaging’, the concept of translanguaging
highlights what Vivian Cook calls the ‘multi-competence’ of language learners and users, not
only in multiple languages but also in coordinating multiple linguistic, cognitive, and semiotic
resources in language learning and language use (see Cook and Li 2016).

One of the most frequently asked questions regarding translanguaging is: how is it different
from code-switching or other newer terms such as polylanguaging, metrolingualism, and the
like? All terminologies have their theoretical and conceptual rationales. Code-switching, for
example, pays more attention to the structural differences between named languages, and a
code-switching analysis would start by identifying how many languages are involved and
what they are. Polylanguaging and other similar terms emphasize the involvement of multiple
languages. Translanguaging, on the other hand, regards the concept of named languages such
as English, German, Dutch, and so on as primarily sociopolitical and highlights the human
capacity to transcend the boundaries between named languages in meaning-making. In fact,
it emphasizes human beings’ ability to deliberately break the boundaries of named languages
to create novel ways of expression and communication, in bilingual puns, literacy and artistic
works, and everyday social interaction. There are three senses of the ‘trans’ prefix that are
particularly important:
• Transcending boundaries between named languages and between language and other cog-
nitive and semiotic systems
• Transformative potential of the act of translanguaging for the language user not only with
regard to their linguistic capacity but also their identities and worldviews
• Transdisciplinary approach to human communication and learning, breaking the tradi-
tional boundaries between linguistics, psychology, sociology, education, and so on
It is important to emphasize that translanguaging does not deny the existence of named lan-
guages as sociopolitical entities, but challenges the assumption that named languages reflect
social or psychological realities. Research on language evolution and in historical linguistics
show that all human languages evolved from fairly simple combinations of sounds, gestures,
icons, symbols, etc. Social groups form speech communities by sharing a common set of com-
municative practices and beliefs. But language contact, borrowing and mixing, have always
been an important part of evolution and the survival process. What is more, the naming of
languages is a relatively recent phenomenon. It was the invention of the nation-state that
triggered the invention of the notion of monolingualism and the association between one lan-
guage and one nation. In the meantime, there is ample research evidence from neuroscience
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that differently named languages are not represented or controlled by different parts of the
brain. The mixing and switching between named languages by bilingual and multilingual
speakers in everyday social interaction is fluid and dynamic. Efforts to identify and locate
a ‘language switch’ in the brain have proved to be futile. We also fully accept that there
are many language users whose environment and experience have led them to a heightened
awareness of the differences between named languages, who consequently keep their lan-
guages separate. Their language awareness, however, is not purely of linguistic structures but
includes the sociocultural and political histories and values of the named languages. They
will therefore exercise different cognitive control in ‘selective language use’ (one language
at a time) versus fluid language use (as in translanguaging). Their cognitive representation
includes this awareness. It is at least in part a result of experience and environment, and is
subject to change over time.
Translanguaging stresses that human languaging practices are socioculturally evolved and
are a product of socialization within the community; therefore, it is not only the structural
features that differentiate named languages but also the historical, political, and ideological
meanings that have become associated with them. A multilingual is then someone who is aware
of the existence of the political entities and the sociocultural meanings of differently named
languages and has an ability to make use of the structural features of some of them that they
have acquired in context from specific communities.
From the very beginning, translanguaging was not conceived as an object to identify and
analyze, but a practice and a process: a practice that involves different named languages and
language varieties but more importantly a process of knowledge construction that makes use
of but goes beyond named language(s). It concerns effective communication, function rather
than form, cognitive and sociocultural activities, and language production. The prefix ‘trans’
and the suffix ‘ing’ together aim to transform our understanding of the nature of language from
a set of codes to a dynamic process of meaning-making (Li 2018). Translanguaging highlights
multilingual language users’ creativity and criticality:
[C]reativity can be defined as the ability to choose between following and flouting the
rules and norms of behaviour, including the use of language. It is about pushing and
breaking the boundaries between the old and the new, the conventional and the original,
and the acceptable and the challenging. Criticality refers to the ability to use available
evidence appropriately, systematically and insightfully to inform considered views of cul-
tural, social and linguistic phenomena, to question and problematize received wisdom, and
to express views adequately through reasoned responses to situations. These two concepts
are intrinsically linked: one cannot push or break boundaries without being critical; and
the best expression of one’s criticality is one’s creativity. Multilingualism by the very
nature of the phenomenon is a rich source of creativity and criticality, as it entails tension,
conflict, competition, difference, change in a number of spheres, ranging from ideologies,
policies and practices to historical and current contexts. Whilst rapid globalization has
made everyday life in late modernity look increasingly routinized, repetitive and monoto-
nous, or in the words of the sociologist Ritzer’s, The McDonaldization of Society (1993),
the enhanced contacts between people of diverse backgrounds and traditions provide new
opportunities for innovation, entrepreneurship, and creativity. Individuals are capable of
responding to the historical and present conditions critically. They consciously construct
and constantly modify their socio-cultural identities and values through social practices
such as Translanguaging.
(Li Wei 2011: 1223–1224)
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Whilst translanguaging has expanded as a theoretical concept and an analytical framework that
has been applied in a number of related fields, its primary concerns remain in language-related
education, particularly the education of learners who have multiple languages in their repertoire
and who may also be socioeconomically and culturally minoritized or disadvantaged. Follow-
ing García’s work with Hispanic communities in the US, researchers and practitioners all over
the world have explored the use of translanguaging as a pedagogy in the education of bilingual
and multilingual learners where the medium of instruction is officially in English or some other
dominant international or national language (e.g. Mazak and Carroll 2016; García and Kleyn
2016; García et al. 2017). Most of the studies use linguistic ethnography and focus on the degree
of participation and engagement in learning by bilingual and multilingual learners. The key issue
that these studies aim to address is the role of the so-called ‘home’ or ‘community’ language in
children’s learning. Researchers argue that if we regard education as a process of knowledge
construction rather than simply transmission of information, facts, and skills, then the language
in which knowledge is constructed becomes highly significant. Language is not simply a set of
abstract codes; it carries a specific history and cultural heritage. Knowledge constructed through
a specific named language evokes history and culture in particular ways. Restricting or denying
access to knowledge in particular languages would amount to discrimination. It is a moral and
ethical issue that all educators must consider. Such issues aside, there is no scientific evidence
to suggest that the use of home or community language has any detrimental effect on children’s
learning. In fact, all available evidence points to the contrary, and that is, home or community
languages can be a useful facilitator in learning as it maximizes the learner’s opportunities to
access information and understand concepts. As such, they can contribute positively to knowl-
edge construction as well as to building confidence and identity.
Research evidence further supports the use of multiple languages simultaneously as in
Translanguaging because it maximizes the opportunities for the bilingual and multilingual lan-
guage user to exercise their executive control and manage their linguistic repertoire for effec-
tive communication and learning (e.g. Bialystok et al. 2014; Prior and Gollan 2011). Barac
et al. (2014) carried out a systematic review of studies, showing consistent findings that active
engagement with two named languages, no matter how short and regardless of the language
pairs involved, contributed positively to non-verbal executive control and theory of mind. In
a series of studies of social cognition of bilinguals and multilinguals who habitually mix and
switch their languages, Dewaele and Li (2012, 2013) and Kharkhurin and Li (2015) found lan-
guage mixing and switching correlated with their test scores in standardized empathy, tolerance
of ambiguity, and creativity (as assessed by the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking). More
evidence is emerging that the positive effects of language mixing and switching on executive
control and other cognitive capacities occur not only in early bilinguals but also in later learners
of additional languages. The reported effects of dynamic multilingual practices apply not only
to the use of home or community languages by minoritized learners but also to second, foreign,
and additional language learning in general. That includes, of course, English L1 users learn-
ing modern foreign languages. We must not forget that the purpose of language learning is to
become bilingual or multilingual, not to become another monolingual in a different language.
And most bilingual and multilingual language users mix and switch between named languages
for communicative purposes. Yet in modern foreign language education, we rarely consider
using the bilingual and multilingual who mixes and switches their languages as the model for
learning, and instead, we use the idealized monolingual native-speaker as the model and regard
language mixing and switching as examples of incomplete or deficient learning.
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Language educators sometimes find it easier to understand and accept the moral, ethical, and
scientific arguments than to tackle the practical and pedagogical challenges posed by policy
and the school and classroom environment. In most parts of the world, the school curricula
are designed to serve the interests of the assumed majority and tend to be associated with the
dominant national language. Monolingual ideologies of one-language-only or one-language-
at-a-time dominate the language-in-education policies. Students get categorized by national-
ity and ethnicity, with a corresponding language. It is very rare for multiple ownership of
multiple languages to be recognized in the school curriculum. Assessment regimes further
exacerbate the situation with insistence on monolingual practice. Rarely do we see school
examinations conducted in multiple languages simultaneously. Language tests do not test the
learners’ ability to coordinate their linguistic repertoire in the form of language mixing and
switching, nor the higher-level executive controls, but to focus on monolingual standards
and completeness-based models of linguistic competence. The latter are those that assume
that native speakers have the complete knowledge of their native language and can produce
error-free forms and structure, and that is the model for second language learners to aim
to achieve. The idea of complete knowledge of a language is a fallacy. Nobody can claim
complete knowledge of a language, whether one is classified as a native speaker or not. And
a completeness-based model for teaching and assessing language can only result in learning
deficits. A competent language user is one who makes the best of what they know of a lan-
guage for effective communication, and for a competent bilingual and multilingual language
user, that includes the ability to mix and switch between languages and the ability to make the
appropriate assessment of which language to speak to whom, when, why, and how. We need
to devise assessment regimes that best demonstrate this multi-competence of the bilingual and
multilingual by assessing their abilities to integrate, rather than to separate, features from dif-
ferent named languages into meaningful wholes. There are many psychometric and cognitive
tests for combined abilities. It is entirely conceivable to design a test with different parts of
speech in different languages (say, nouns and adverbs in English and verbs and adjectives in
Spanish) and ask the test takers to make up grammatical sentences with elements from both
named languages and see what structural adaptation (e.g. gender and number agreements)
they make in order to do so. We also need to challenge the monolingual education policies
that neglect or even discriminate against multiple ownerships of multiple named languages to
provide the learners with opportunities to maximize their linguistic and cultural potential in
schools and in the classroom.
The practical challenges for implementing a translanguaging pedagogy are usually more
serious to the teacher rather than the learner. Although teachers agree in principle that it is ben-
eficial to bring more languages into the school and the classroom, they find it hard to manage
so many different languages that the teachers themselves do not know. In many parts of the
world and in inner-city schools in industrialized countries, this is often the reality. The teachers
are concerned that not all languages could be given equal opportunities to be used. Moreover,
teachers are given limited class time but challenging targets, often in the form of exam results
and league tables. Again, these are realities that teachers have to face on a daily basis. The
key here is how we see the roles and responsibilities of the teacher. If we continue to see the
teacher as the main, if not the sole, source of knowledge in the classroom and their role as the
transmitter of knowledge, we would then expect the class time to be mostly spent on teacher-
centred teaching. But if we regard the teacher as what Brantmeier (2013) calls ‘joint sojourners
on the quest for knowledge’, the teacher would become a learning facilitator, a scaffolder, and
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a critical reflection enhancer, while the learner becomes an empowered explorer, a meaning-
maker, and a responsible knowledge constructor. As Brantmeier points out,
a facilitator doesn’t get in the way of learning by imposing information. A facilitator

guides the process of student learning. A scaffolder assesses the learner’s knowledge and
builds scaffolding to extend that knowledge to a broader and deeper understanding. And
a critical reflection enhancer asks the learner to reflect on what is being learned and the
process of learning (meta-reflection about process).
In the meantime, an empowered explorer is ‘an independent or collective explorer of knowl-

edge through disciplined means. And a meaning-maker and responsible knowledge constructor
is one who engages in meaningful knowledge construction that promotes relevancy to her/his
own life’. Adopting such an education philosophy would then open up spaces for the teacher to
explore pedagogical alternatives together with the learners, a crucial part of which involves the
use of multiple languages in the classroom. A translanguaging pedagogy requires not the same
linguistic and cultural knowledge as the learners but an open mindset and willingness to be a
co-learner who believes that they can learn just as much, if not more, from the other learners.
Again, it should be pointed out that a translanguaging pedagogy does not assume that all the
named languages that the learners bring into the classroom are the same or of equal status in
society. It in fact encourages the development of critical language awareness, which includes
not only awareness of the structural features and pragmatics of specific named languages but
also the sociopolitical histories of the differently named languages and their symbolic values.
Translanguaging was never coined with the intention to replace terms such as code-switching.
It has clearly caught the imagination of lots of people, not least language teachers, with an
unintended consequence that more and more people have started using translanguaging instead
of the other terms. Translanguaging is not a thing in itself! As a descriptive label, it refers to
communicative practices that transcend the boundaries between named languages and between
languages and other cognitive and semiotic systems. From an analytical perspective, it ques-
tions the notion of language as systems of discrete structures (García and Li 2014).
CUNY-NYS Initiative on Emergent Bilinguals (www.cuny-nysieb.org/translanguaging-
resources/translanguaging-guides/) is a project of the Research Institute for the Study of
Language in Urban Society (RISLUS) and the PhD Program in Urban Education at the City
University of New York’s Graduate Centre. The website contains rich resources for teachers,
including practical guides to translanguaging pedagogies in the classroom, resources for work-
ing with particular learner groups, culturally relevant books and other resources, and guides to
developing leadership programmes.
Future directions
There is a great deal of interest in translanguaging both as a conceptual and analytical concept
for the study of human language, communication, and cognition, and as a pedagogical princi-
ple. Broadly speaking, the following areas can be explored from a translanguaging perspective.
Translanguaging creativity in multilingual and multimodal interaction

Social media and other new information technologies provide a unique space for translan-
guaging and enable creative use of languages and other signs in everyday interaction at very
high speed. There already have been numerous studies of new forms of mixing of letters,
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Translanguaging
numerals, symbols, emojis, memes, and so on on digital platforms and mobile devices.
Social media communication is highly multimodal. For users of non-alphabetic languages in
particular, social media affords new opportunities for them to be creative by mixing scripts,
emojis, other signs and pictures, video, voice, for example. The speed of the interaction is
extremely fast and can reach people across the globe instantly. What is most significant is the
capacity to allow the media users to create their own signs and scripts. It raises many new
questions not only in terms of how and why people create new expressions, but also how
people infer the meaning of new expressions when they see them for the first time. Many
of the new words and scripts seem to be created in a way that goes against conventional
principles of writing systems because the creations do not have standard pronunciations.
Implications of translanguaging for language evolution are potentially huge and need to be
studied systematically.
Linguistic landscaping and language management

Since translanguaging involves a lot of language play, it is often used in advertising and other
commodified language practices. In addition to the description of creative and clever uses of
translanguaging, especially the new inventions, we should pay attention to the exploitation of
translanguaging for commercial gains. Many translanguaging researchers notice creative mul-
tilingual practices in the linguistic landscape. Combining translanguaging research with lin-
guistic landscape research can generate very interesting results, not only about the creativity of
multilingual language users but also about the history of the community and the sociocultural
changes in the place. Public uses of translanguaging raises questions about language policy and
language management. How should such uses be managed?
Language education
With enhanced awareness of the importance of linguistic diversity and language rights,
language education has become a central issue for policy and practice. Globalization has
also contributed to phenomenal growth in the teaching and learning of foreign languages,
but especially English. On the whole, though, additional language education programmes
have remained largely monolingual in their pedagogical approach: there is still a strong
belief amongst language instructors, students, and parents that the most effective way to
learn a new language, whether it is the standard national language for ethnic minority com-
munities or a foreign language such as English, is to use the target language alone. Total
immersion is assumed to be the best way. Translanguaging fundamentally challenges such
monolingual ideologies and practices. Can the translanguaging principle be accepted and
practised more widely in language education, especially in foreign language education?
Can the language assessment regime accept translanguaging practices? Can the ability to
translanguage be regarded as an indication of higher communicative and pragmatic com-
petence? These are tough questions for professional practitioners as well as policy-makers
in language education.
Related topics
conceptualizing language education; second and additional language acquisition; language
teaching and methodology; bilingual and multilingual education; multilingualism; minori-
tized/Indigenous language revitalization; ecolinguistics in practice
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Li Wei
Further reading
García, O., Flores, N., Seltzer, K., Li, W., Otheguy, R. and Rosa, J. (2021) ‘Rejecting abyssal thinking in
the language and education of racialized bilinguals: A manifesto’, Critical Inquiry in Language Stud-
ies, 18(3): 203–228. (This is a landmark article that represents the latest thinking of the concept and
its radical ideas for language education.)
García, O. and Li, W. (2014) Translanguaing: Language, Bilingualism and Education, Houndsmill,
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. (This award-winning volume is one of the most authoritative and
comprehensive accounts of the development and rationale of the concept. It contains examples of how
the concept applies to bilingual education.)
Li, W. (2018) ‘Translanguaging as a practical theory of language’, Applied Linguistics, 39(1): 9–30. (This
is a position paper that outlines translanguaging as a practical theory of language that raises fundamen-
tal questions beyond language education, in fields such as of human cognition and communication.)
Li, W. (2022) ‘Translanguaging as method’, Research Methods in Applied Linguistics, 1(3): 100026. (This
article outlines significant methodological shifts that the concept of translanguaging aims to facilitate.)
Li, W. and García, O. (2022) ‘Not a first language but one repertoire: Translanguaging as a decolonizing
project’, RELC Journal, 00336882221092841. (This article clarifies some of the misunderstandings
of the concept of translanguaging and responds to practical questions regarding translanguaging in
education.)
References
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Matters.
Baker, C. and Wright, W. (2017) Foundations of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 6th ed., Bristol:
Barac, R., Bialystok, E., Castro, D. C. and Sanchez, M. (2014) ‘The cognitive development of young dual
language learners: A critical review’, Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 29(4): 699–714.
Bialystok, E., Poarch, G., Luo, L. and Craik, F. I. M. (2014) ‘Effects of bilingualism and aging on execu-
tive function and working memory’, Psychology and Aging, 29: 696–705.
Brantmeier, E. J. (2013) ‘Pedagogy of vulnerability: Definitions, assumptions, and applications’, in J.
Lin and E. Brantmeier (eds.), Re-Envisioning Higher Education: Embodied Pathways to Wisdom and
Transformation, Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, pp. 95–106.
Cook, V. and Li, W. (eds.) (2016) The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Multi-Competence, Cambridge:
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nal of Multilingualism, 9(4): 352–366.
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Kharkhurin, A. V. and Li, W. (2015) ‘The role of code-switching in bilingual creativity’, International
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Li, W. (2011) ‘Moment analysis and translanguaging space: Discursive construction of identities by mul-
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Mazak, C. M. and Carroll, K. S. (eds.) (2016) Translanguaging in Higher Education: Beyond Monolin-
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395
Index
Note: Page numbers in italic indicate a figure and page numbers in bold indicate a table on the
corresponding page.
affect 308–311, 313 critical discourse studies (CDS) 57–59, 61,

ageing 267–276, 271; see also cognitive ageing 63–65
agency 22–27, 39–40, 47–49, 86–87, 137–139, critical ethnography 97, 100
143–145, 374–379 critical genre analysis 128–129, 132
anthropology see linguistic anthropology critical pedagogy 137, 344
applications 153–154, 156–157 critical realism (CR) 57, 64
archiving 364–365, 367–368, 370 critical sociolinguistics 96–97, 99–101, 105–106,
attrition 243–250 163–166, 169–170
crosslinguistic interaction (CLIN) 246
big data 73–74 cultural differences 83–86, 88
bilingual dictionaries 216, 226–227 culture 81–89, 141, 145, 163, 167, 351, 356–357
bilingualism 8–13 cybercrime 286
bi/multilingual education 286–287, 351–357
business communication 123, 125, 127–128 decolonizing 2–3, 184, 312, 314, 353–357,
369–370
capital 140–141, 143; bilingual 13; cultural 105, dementia 267–268, 270–275
143, 234; human 21, 25; linguistic 141; desiring 308–309, 311
racial 165; social 143 diaspora 21, 23–24
child language acquisition 45–53 digital language and communication 68–76
clinical linguistics 254–263, 267–276 digital media 324, 331–332
cognition 374–377, 386–388, 390, 392 digital storytelling 143, 145
cognitive ageing 267–269, 274–275 discourse 57–65, 254, 256, 258–260; critical
collocations 218, 220–223, 225–227 discourse analysis (CDA) 57–61, 63–65,
colonial language 32, 370 324, 330–331; critical discourse studies
communication 254–255, 257, 259–263; see also (CDS) 57–59, 61, 63–65
ethnography of communication disinformation 176–185
context 68–75, 321–322, 324, 326, 329–330, 333 distributed cognition 374–377, 386–388
corpus-based discourse analysis 101 distributed language 374–378, 380–381
corpus linguistics 208, 220–224, 231 doctor-patient relationship 109–110, 112
critical applied linguistics (CALx) 57–50, 64–65 documentation 362–364, 367–370
critical discourse analysis (CDA) 57–61, 63–65, dynamic model 247
324, 330–331 dynamic systems theory 246
396
Index
ecolinguistics 374–382 intersectionality 138, 140–141

education 321, 324, 328, 332; see also bi/multilingual investment 138–145, 142
education; ethnography in education
effective communication 109, 112, 114 justice, social 280–284, 288
ELF corpora 192; see also English as a lingua
franca kinship 44–53
embodiment 308–309, 311–312
empathy 111, 114, 117
endangered languages 349, 352, 355–356, 362–370; language activism 349, 351–353, 356
see also Indigenous languages; language language and ethnicity 163–170
revitalization language and race 163–171
English as a lingua franca (ELF) 187–196 language as evidence 280–285
English for specific purposes (ESP) 187–196 language development 243–244, 246–250
ethnicity see language and ethnicity language endangerment 349, 352, 355–356, 362–370
ethnocentrism 83, 88–89 language ideology/-ies: family language policy
ethnography 73–75, 377, 379–380; of 44–49, 51–52; language and migration
communication 292–293, 295–298, 300; 19–22, 26; language policy and planning
in education 292–293, 296–299; see also 36, 38, 40–41; minoritized/Indigenous
linguistic ethnography language revitalization 351–353, 356–357;
evidence see language as evidence translanguaging 387–389, 391, 393
exclusion 19–22 language in clinical linguistics 254–258, 260–263,
Expanding Circle English 187–188; see also English 337–344
as a lingua franca; World Englishes language planning 44, 47–48
experiential metaphor 324–325 language policy 19–22, 25–26, 362–364, 366, 370
language revitalization 349–357, 362–364,
family language policy 44–53 367–370
forensic linguistics 283–288 language rights 37–38
language shift 350–351, 355, 357, 362–367, 369–370
language teacher identity 137–146
gender 53, 115–117, 137–140, 151–160, 170–171,
languaging 310, 315, 374–382; see also
285, 310–312, 342
translanguaging
gerontolinguistics 267–268, 275–276
learners’ dictionaries 217–220, 221, 223, 225
Global Englishes see World Englishes
learning and ecolinguistics 375–382
globalization 20, 27, 230, 232, 236–238
legal texts 281–282
lexicography 216–227; advent of learners’ dictionaries
healthcare linguistics 109–113, 115–118 217–220; bilingual dictionaries 226–227;
hegemony 180–181, 365 definitions 225–226; lexicography and corpus
linguistics 221–224; lumping versus splitting
identity/-ies 68–72, 74–75, 137–146, 235, 341–342 220–221; role of examples 224–225
ideology 58–64, 137, 140–143, 177–180, 184, lexis 218, 281
365–366, 369 lingua franca see English as a lingua franca
Indigenous language 349–357; see also endangered linguistic anthropology 292–293, 296
languages; linguistic human rights linguistic change 49, 189, 267, 386
Indigenous scholarship 306–307, 309, 314–315 linguistic ethnography 292–301; see also ethnography
inequality 47, 84–87, 96, 100–101, 180, 234–235, linguistic human rights 352; see also endangered
296–300 languages; Indigenous languages; language
Inner Circle English 187–195 revitalization; minoritized languages
institutional discourse 94–106, 234; critical issues linguistic imperialism 236
and topics 96–97; current contributions linguistic innovation 187, 193
and research 97–105; future directions and linguistic landscapes 10, 12–13, 337–344
recommendations for practice 105–106; linguistic performance 268–269, 272–276
historical perspectives 95–96 literacy studies 293
interactional sociolinguistics 84–85, 157, 166, lumping versus splitting 220–221
170, 293
interculturality 84–86, 89 media 320–325, 327, 329, 331–333
interdiscursivity 123, 129–133, 133 medical communication 109–118, 232–233
interpreting 230–238 medication 113
397
Index
metafunctions 322–324 psycholinguistics 243–250

metalinguistic awareness 9, 12 public spaces 337–344; see also linguistic landscapes
metaphor 96–99, 105
migration 19–27, 45–50, 232, 244–247, 297–298, qualitative 342–343
340–343 quantitative 340, 342
minoritized language 349–357; minoritized learners
386, 390, 393; minority languages 7, 9–14 race see language and race
mobility 19, 21, 23, 26–27 raciolinguistics 163–165, 167, 169–170
mode 320–327, 329–330, 333 reclamation 349–350, 352
multilingualism 7–14, 19–20, 23–26, 45–51, reflexivity 293, 295–296
337–343, 387–393 relational ontologies 306, 308–309, 312, 316
multilingual narratives 243–250 relativism 57, 59, 61, 63–64
multimodal corpus 272, 275–276 revitalization 349–357
multimodality 69–72, 74–76, 230, 237, 320–321; revival 369
and analysis of digital media 331–332;
and analysis of everyday interaction 331; semantics 255–256, 258
and critical discourse analysis 330–331; semiosis 342, 344
educational applications 328–330; future sex 155–156
developments 332–333; and social sexuality 151–160
semiotic analysis 323–328, 323, 325, 328 sign language grammar 203, 205, 208
multi-perspective approach 125–129, 131 sign language literature 207
sign languages 203–212
narrative(s) 182–183, 232, 236; see also multilingual social constructionism 293
narratives social constructivism 63–64
neurodegenerative disease 270 social semiotics 321–322; educational
applications 328–330; future
onto-epistemologies 306–307, 309–310, 314 developments 332–333; modes and media
Outer Circle English 187–188, 191, 194; see also 323–325, 323; multimodal integration
English as a lingua franca; World Englishes 325–328, 325, 328
sociolinguistics 243–250; see also interactional
participant observation 294, 300 sociolinguistics
patient-centred care 110–111, 117–118; see also speech 254–257, 259–262
doctor-patient relationship speech-language pathology 270, 274–275
phonetics 254–257, 259–260, 262 splitting versus lumping 220–221
phonology 254–260, 262 spoken interaction 282–284
politics 176–184 stereotypes 82, 88
post-colonial era 32 superdiversity 19
post-digital 75–76 system networks 323, 323
posthumanism 306–315
post-qualitative inquiry 313–314 three circles model 187–188
poststructuralism 57, 59, 63–64, 137–139, 144, 146 translanguaging 10–14, 386–393; critical issues
power 137–139, 141–145 and topics 388–389; current contributions
power relationship 9, 86, 176–182, 184, 293, and research 390; future directions
296, 367 392–393; historical perspectives
practical action 374, 377, 379–381 386–388; recommendations for practice
practice: ecolinguistics 374–382; translanguaging 391–392
11, 386–393 translation 230–238
pragmatics 254, 256, 258–260 transnational 19, 26–27
preservation 362, 366, 369 trust 109, 111, 114
professional communication 123–133, 123; truth 57–64
critical issues 127–128; historical typology 244, 247–249
perspective 124–127; implications for
English 131–133, 133; insights from vocabulary control 217–218
current research 128–131
professional practice 126, 128–133 workplace discourse 96
propaganda 183 workplace ethnography 292–293, 298–299
provenance 309, 324 World Englishes (Global Englishes) 187–196
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The Routledge Handbook

Routledge Handbooks in Applied Linguistics provide comprehensive overviews of the key

The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics

The Routledge Handbook of Materials Development for Language Teaching

The Routledge Handbook of Language and the Global South

The Routledge Handbook of Discourse Analysis

The Routledge Handbook of Content and Language Integrated Learning

The Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics

The Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics

The Routledge Handbook of Language Policy and Planning

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/Routledge-Handbooks-in-

Edited by Li Wei, Zhu Hua, and James Simpson

List of tables and figures viii

2 Language and migration 19

3 Language policy and planning 31

4 Family language policy 44

5 Critical discourse analysis, critical discourse studies, and critical

6 Digital language and communication 68

9 Medical communication 109

10 English for professional communication: a critical genre analytical

12 Gender and sexuality 151

13 Language and race 163

14 Politics and applied linguistics 176

15 World Englishes and English as a lingua franca 187

16 Sign languages 203

18 Translation and interpreting 230

19 First language attrition: bridging sociolinguistic narratives and

20 Clinical linguistics 254

21 Language and ageing 267

22 Forensic linguistics 280

23 Linguistic ethnography 292

24 Posthumanism and applied linguistics 306

25 Social semiotics and multimodality 320

26 Linguistic landscapes 337

27 Minoritized/Indigenous language revitalization 349

28 Endangered languages 362

29 Ecolinguistics in practice 374

Peter K. Austin (Emeritus Professor in Field Linguistics, SOAS, University of London)

Mike Baynham, Emeritus Professor of TESOL in the School of Education, University of

Robert Blackwood is Professor of French Sociolinguistics at the University of Liverpool,

Sarah Collins is Senior Lecturer in Clinical Communication at the University of Edinburgh.

Haley De Korne is Associate Professor of Multilingualism at the Department of Linguistics

Nancy H. Hornberger, Professor Emerita at the University of Pennsylvania, researches mul-

at Tongji University, utilizing multifaceted disciplinary approaches to studying the linguistic

Kendall A. King is Professor of Multilingual Education at the University of Minnesota. Her

Luis Pérez-González is Professor of Translation Studies at the Department of Foreign Lan-

Miguel Pérez-Milans is Associate Professor at University College London. He is the author

Sarah Peters, a chartered health psychologist, is Professor of Psychology at the University of

Julia Sallabank is Professor of Language Policy and Revitalization at SOAS, University of

Karin Zotzmann works as Associate Professor in Applied Linguistics at the University of

Applied linguistics as a transdisciplinary field

The scope and structure of the Handbook

Part I: Language learning and language education

Part II: Key areas and approaches in applied linguistics

15 Grammar – Michael Swan

27 Neurolinguistics in language learning and teaching – John W. Schwieter and

Critical issues and topics

The outcomes of bilingualism and multilingualism

Multilingualism, language planning, and education

Current contributions and research

The multilingual turn

Recommendations for practice

encounters, typically characterized by asymmetries of power between participants, are the