The Papers
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WP356 Interaction & memory in empirical sociolinguistic approaches to the spectral
2026
Sociolinguistics needs to take violence and its lasting, intense and/or unpredictable effects very seriously, but is a new and specialised hauntological sociolinguistics of the spectre needed to address them? This paper argues (i) that theories and …
Key words: conflict, insecuritisation, interaction, memory studies, methodology, sociolinguistics, spectres
WP338 Rhetorics of reinventing
2025
In applied and sociolinguistics at present, there are quite frequent calls to reinvent or rethink a particular tradition, paradigm or indeed the field itself. Sometimes this looks like a branding ploy, but at other times it is very weighty, and …
Key words: applied linguistics, methodology, sociolinguistics
WP313 Jerusalem and the limits and affordances of sociolinguistics
2023
The 2018 Israeli Nationality Law defined Israel as a state for Jewish people. What are the implications of this for Jerusalem and its population of roughly 500,000 Jews and 300,000 Palestinian Arabs, and more particularly, what are the …
Key words: language & politics, methodology, Palestinian Arabic, sociolinguistics
WP310 Advanced Linguistic Ethnography?
2023
Can we really talk about advanced linguistic ethnography, and if so, what does it look like? This paper offers quite a personal view of training programmes, PhDs, interdisciplinary relationships and academic career structures, covering …
Key words: applied linguistics, interactional sociolinguistics, linguistic ethnography, methodology
WP287 Communicative situations as a basis for linguistic systems: Integrating linguistic multi-competence with grammatical structure
2021
This paper brings together two research strands that rarely interact and might even seem in-commensurable, namely sociolinguistic approaches to linguistic fluidity and multi-competence on the one hand, and structural approaches to linguistic …
Key words: methodology
WP264 Dialogue: Sociolinguistics and everyday (in)securitisation
2019
This dialogue starts from the perception that existential threats to national security has become an increasingly pervasive concern in daily life, spreading fear and suspicion through civil society. Communicative practices play a central role in …
Key words: linguistic theory, methodology
WP257 Interactional sociolinguistics, crossing and North/South research relations
2019
Taking interactional sociolinguistics and my own research on crossing as focal cases, this paper responds to Masters & Makoni who ask ?what happens to epistemologies that originate in the Global North when they are used in the Global South to …
Key words: methodology
WP236 The language portrait in multilingualism research: Theoretical and methodological considerations
2018
Language portraits, in which participants visualize their linguistic repertoire using the outline of a body silhouette, were originally developed as a language awareness exercise in education, and they are now increasingly employed as a research tool …
Key words: linguistic theory, methodology
WP232 Founding concepts: Sapir and Simmel on 'communication'
2017
Building on lecture notes from a course on the ?Ethnography of Communication?, this paper uses a close reading of two classic texts to establish some fundamental principles for the study of communicative practices in their social context(s), …
Key words: linguistic theory, methodology
WP224 Light communities?: Implications for research on diversity & activism
2017
This paper engages with Blommaert?s (2017) call to refocus the target of attention in the mainstream social sciences, from ?thick communities?, understood as stable systems of collectivity in which individuals share a set of permanent features …
Key words: methodology
WP223 Self-containment & contamination: Two competing circuits of adaptability
2017
This paper explores two competing models of adaptation of discourses in society. The first model is contradictorily a non-adaptable framework or matrix that scales the social circulation of text and talk as expandable, i.e. scalable, yet seemingly …
Key words: methodology
WP221 Research in modern languages education: Notes on new directions
2017
The teaching and learning of foreign languages represents a major site of multilingualism that is ripe for critical discussion by scholars from different perspectives.
Key words: methodology
WP212 Superdiversity and linguistic ethnography: Researching people and language in motion
2017
This paper discusses a linguistic ethnographic (LE) approach to superdiversity in three steps. First, it lays out some basic assumptions of LE. Secondly, it demonstrates how superdiversity pairs with LE methods and perspectives and describes some …
Key words: methodology
WP210 Crossing 30 years later
2017
The fieldwork for Crossing: Language & Ethnicity among Adolescents took place over 30 years ago.? In this preface to a 3rd edition, I review three subsequent projects that have led beyond the book?s original findings and conclusions. These …
Key words: methodology
WP207 Society through the lens of language: A new look at social groups and integration
2017
There are forms of scientific activity that are rarely practiced by sociolinguists, and one of them is the self-conscious construction of theory. Sociolinguists appear to share a self-perception of staunchly empirical analysts devoted to the rigorous …
Key words: linguistic theory, methodology
WP204 Durkheim and the internet: On sociolinguistics and the sociological imagination
2017
Sociolinguists have rarely attempted to draw the social-theoretical implications from their findings, and in spite of the tremendous theoretical relevance of sociolinguistic insights, most sociolinguists themselves continue to rely on established, …
Key words: language theory, methodology
WP195 Fieldwork rapport and the positioning of sociolinguist(ic)s
2016
?Rapport? in fieldwork involves the temporary interactional suspension of stranger-hood and distance, and in traditional ethnography, it has positive value as a fieldwork ideal sketched in advisory rules of thumb. But in reflexive contemporary …
Key words: methodology
WP189 Categorizing languages and speakers: Why linguists should mistrust census data and statistics
2016
This article concentrates on how census data are processed by statistical offices. It first investigates how the language categories displayed in language statistics are actually formed. After that, it considers the mechanisms by which speakers are …
Key words: methodology
WP187 Methodology in biographical approaches in applied linguistics
2016
In multilingualism research a shift of paradigm can be observed: the idea of languages as distinct categories is being abandoned in favour of the notion of linguistic repertoire, which seems more apt to grasp the complexity of heteroglossic …
Key words: methodology