News

In addition to its inclusion of researchers from multiple universities, MEITS has a number of external partners, which provide welcome perspectives on our work from a position outside academia. One such partner is HarperCollins Publishers, which is associated particularly with strand 2 of MEITS in that issues around language standardisation are especially relevant to the production of dictionaries: Collins is one of the UK’s best-known and longest-established dictionary publishers. As well as being able to provide insights on the challenges of creating dictionaries for numerous languages, particularly those where multiple norms or standards coexist, HarperCollins has also provided internship positions to MEITS researchers with the aim of offering experience of the dictionary creation process, focusing on issues around norms and variation

Discover the weird and wonderful world of languages!

The UK has a museum for dog collars and lawn mowers, but not for languages. This autumn we are launching our innovative Pop-Up World of Languages to fill this gap.
Join us on a journey through our three zones to uncover the hidden treasures of languages through our family-friendly, hands-on activities and games.

The international conference “Acquisition of Chinese: Bilingualism and Multilingualism” took place on 1-3 July, at Churchill College, University of Cambridge. The three-day conference was organised by the MEITS strand 5 research team (Boping Yuan and Yanyu Guo), aiming to bring together researchers in the fields of bilingual and multilingual research to discuss issues in L2, L3 or Ln acquisition of Chinese by adults, children and heritage speakers.

We nooses tous des bastardi elettronici che usano lingue globali’

Ours Lingages. The internet is my language mother. I speak with a voice that’s not my own, I speak in other voices, not my voice. We are all e-strangers, all nomads that use globish bastard languages. We are the alienated translated (wo)men in-between code and emotion, in-between our wish to be visible and our longing for intimacy. L’entre-deux = void. Can’t we be ‘with’ instead?

The results are in...

Monday 17^th June saw the launch of ‘We Are Multilingual’ (WAM), a website of free resources for languages teachers. Over 60 teachers and PGCE students attended the event which was held at the Faculty of Education, Cambridge.

Friday, 14^th June saw the launch of the latest of the MEITS projects with 12 Student Language Ambassadors (Cambridge undergraduates studying languages from all 4 years) attending a training session at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge.

On 17th November 2018 eleven multilingual Year 9 students from four Nottinghamshire schools visited the University of Nottingham for the fourth in a series of five workshops exploring what it means to be multilingual.