News

A one-day international conference provided scholars and practitioners with the opportunity to present research findings and to share their experiences of Polish communities worldwide and multilingualism in Poland.

Students from Parkside Community College in Cambridge have been sharing with the MEITS team their views on the value of multilingualism and how speaking more than one language at home can add to a greater understanding of cultural diversity.

On 19-20 January, Strand 1 of the MEITS team hosted the conference ‘(Dis)articulating Identities: Multilingualism in the Catalan Countries’ at King’s College, Cambridge. The event brought together international scholars and practitioners across a broad range of disciplines and career stages in order to discuss the case of multilingualism and its particular implications within Catalan culture and society.

The International Conference on Bilingualism: Language and Heritage was held at the Chinese University of Hong Kong on 18-19 December 2017. It was an inaugural conference that officially launched the newly established University of Cambridge-Chinese University of Hong Kong Joint Laboratory for Bilingualism (JLB). Dr Boping Yuan (co-investigator on strand 5), Dr Yongcan Liu (co-investigator on strand 4) and Dr Yanyu Guo (postdoc research fellow on strand 5) were invited to present their research and on-going MEITS projects at this event.

On 11-13 December 2017, the Strand 2 conference on Language Standardization and Linguistic Variation in Asia from Sociolinguistic Perspectives took place at University of Nottingham’s Ningbo campus (UNNC) in China. The international conference was organised by Prof Nicola McLelland and Hui (Annette) Zhao, with the assistance of Prof Anwei Feng and other colleagues at UNNC. Members from Strand 2, Prof Wendy Ayres-Bennett, John Bellamy and Jiaye (Jenny) Wu, also attended the conference and participated in the discussion.

On Sunday 19 November, the MEITS team took part in another collaborative community event, this time led by the Cambridge Ethnic Community Forum.

We are delighted to announce the outcome of our flexible funding competition. Beginning in early 2018 and running for two years, the projects will work alongside the MEITS team to help reinvigorate research in modern languages and change public attitudes towards multilingualism through providing material for our proposed pop-up museum of languages.

On Saturday, 28 October, the MEITS project took part in the Cambridge Festival of Ideas, an annual two-week celebration of the arts, humanities and social sciences organised by the University of Cambridge, in partnership with Anglia Ruskin University.