News

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.

On 13 October, the Language Show in London hosted the “Speaking to a Global Future” Symposium, organised by Speak to the Future in association with Rosetta Stone. In a series of keynote talks and discussion panels, the symposium brought together government officials, academics, and language learners. The programme of the day featured Prof Wendy Ayres-Bennet and Dr Thomas Bak, representing the MEITS project.

In this latest MEITS podcast, Wendy Ayres-Bennett discusses with Baroness Jean Coussins, Co-Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Modern Languages, the need for a national languages policy and a more holistic approach towards languages in the UK.