CfP: Exploring Multilingualism in Migrant Contexts (Languages Special Issue)

Dear Colleagues,

The innovative aim of this Special Issue is to present key sociolinguistic and social psychological aspects of multilingual behaviour in migratory contexts from any region or community of the world, through a comparative examination of original academic scholarship that may encompass either empirical and/or theoretical approaches. First-generation migration research has often focused on return and essentialised, diasporic identities, but recent radical changes to the global infrastructure have facilitated an unprecedented escalation of cross-border human mobility, highlighting the dynamicity and fluidity of transnational and translocal interconnectedness. Migrant families’ lives may thus be conducted in more than one place and across more than one home, through mobilities and practices that transcend physical, social and symbolic borders and involve engagement with the receptor society within shared spaces (Watt and Llamas 2017; Auer, Hilpert, Stukenbrock and Szmrecsanyi 2013).

Recent scholarship has started to demonstrate how this has profound consequences for language use and for language structures, even though stereotypical attitudes and ideologies about immigrants may still be reinforced by macro-level citizenship legislation that foregrounds linguistic integration as a prima facie requirement. This volume aims to be a forum through which the actual linguistic behaviour of migrants and their families as social actors in situated contexts can be debated and analysed through a comparative perspective. Thus, it examines the potential for drawing on elements of speakers’ idiolects as one integrated linguistic system rather than two or more monolingualisms (García and Lin 2016), the creation of new social networks and communities of practice across borders and boundaries and the development of new identities as negotiated, indexical and situationally determined social practices.

To this end, we encourage contributions that interrogate the following themes and concepts:

  • The multilingual turn in migratory contexts, linguistic appropriation and shift; translanguaging;
  • Migrants as new speakers; linguistic authenticity, competency, legitimacy;
  • Transnational social spaces; in-group and out-group ideologies; embeddedness, anchoring;
  • Identity and linguistic repertoires; insider vernaculars as indexical markers. 

The tentative completion schedule is as follows:

  • Abstract submission deadline: 15 June 2020 (400–450 words including bibliography)
  • Notification of abstract acceptance: 30 June 2020
  • Full manuscript deadline: 15 December 2020

For more information, see: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/languages/special_issues/multilingualism_migrant

Deadline for abstract submission: 15 June 2020.