News

On 23 May MEITS celebrated the successful launch of its languages policy journal, Languages, Society & Policy (LSP), at an event generously hosted by the British Academy in London. Edited by a multidisciplinary team, LSP is a unique online resource which publishes the latest academic peer-reviewed research in jargon-free, short and accessible papers explaining language findings from the fields of linguistics, modern languages, cultural studies, neuroscience, psychology and education.

On 26 and 27 April 2017 a joint Strands 3 & 6 workshop on Sociolinguistic and cognitive perspectives on bilingualism took place in Edinburgh, where each strand made a presentation. We welcomed Professor Li Wei from UCL as the guest speaker and he provided new insights from the British Academy project on bilingualism and cognition. In addition, there were short reports from collaborators in the Basque Country and Sweden.

The Strand 2 workshop The Emergence of Standard English in Multilingual Britain, which took place in April 2017 at the University of Cambridge, served served as a valuable opportunity for a diverse group of academics to present and exchange their latest research on the history of English from a multilingual perspective.

The ten PDRAs currently employed on the MEITS project, together with the project PI, attended a meeting organised by the AHRC in London for all the Early Career Researchers across the four OWRI projects. Each PDRA gave a three-minute summary of their research, underlining how these projects will contribute to revitalising modern languages research and inspiring the next generation to study languages.

The Strand 1-led event, Multilingual (Con)figurations: Catalan and Ukrainian in Dialogue offered a rare opportunity for collaboration between leading international scholars in both Catalan and Ukrainian Studies.

Wednesday 22 March saw the first collaborative community event between the MEITS team and the Cambridge Ethnic Community Forum, bringing together the wide range of local communities to celebrate multilingualism in the City. As well as engaging conversations and a performance of Sudanese music over some delicious local food, the day comprised activities - including an interactive language map of Cambridge, a graffiti wall and multilingual Banagrams amongst others - centred around sharing ideas of what it means to be multilingual for those living in Cambridge today.

On Saturday 25 February 2017, Merryn Davies-Deacon gave a talk on "Breton and the ECRML ( European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages)" at the Cornish Language Festival in Penzance. She presented an overview of where Breton stands in relation to the provisions of the unratified ECRML and how this can be compared with the situation of Cornish, for which the charter has been ratified but few concrete steps have been taken by the British government.

In a new podcast, Wendy Ayres-Bennett discusses the role of languages in the integration of immigrants and the need for more investment in language learning.