News

On October 24-25 2019, the UK leg of Strand 5 organised a workshop for researchers and practitioners on issues of the teaching of foreign languages in the UK. What follows here is a little report on the workshop.

The MEITS project's Pop-Up World of Languages, the first museum of its kind in the UK, has opened its doors to the public. Learn more about our Pop-Up World of Languages and view a short film about it.

Researchers from all over the world made the journey to Cambridge to contribute to the MEITS conference on multilingual identity from 11-13^th September 2019.

The MEITS team is extremely delighted to announce that its very own Strand 2 PDRA Andreas Krogull is the winner of the Academic Year Prize (Academische Jaarprijs) by the Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde for the best PhD thesis in Dutch linguistics 2017-2018.

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?