Project team and researchers
Academic lead
Kristine Horner | Her key research areas are social approaches to multilingualism; the politics of language; language and migration and citizenship. Her current projects are focused on discursive approaches to policies on language, migration and citizenship in Luxembourg (LUXCITIZEN) and disjunctures between language policy at the level of the state and multilingual practices in Luxembourg (MULTILUX). |
Project members
Michelle Aguilera | Michelle Aguilera’s work focuses on language planning and policy and the anthropology of education. Her research deals with equitable education for minority students, specifically in how it relates to language. Some of her other research interests are multilingualism, language rights, language ideology, and education policy. |
Elaine Ballard | Elaine’s research interests encompass multilingualism in migrant contexts, language maintenance/shift, language attitudes, indigenous languages and child language. She is currently involved in projects in the areas of phonological acquisition in bilingual (Mandarin-English, Korean–English) children and language attitudes (NZ tertiary students, Chinese parents, 1.5 generation Koreans). |
Michael Baynham | |
John Bellamy | His research interests are interactional sociolinguistics, language attitudes, language ideologies, language variation, linguistic prescriptivism, multilingualism and perceptual dialectology. |
Andrew Bradley | A PhD candidate in the Department of Hispanic Studies at the University of Sheffield and his research interests include: (Catalan) language and literature pedagogy, textbook research, (Catalan) sociolinguistics, language and nationalism, language and identity, language politics, and language-in-education policy. |
Jessica Bradley | Jessica Bradley is a Doctoral Researcher on the TLang project. Her key research areas are translanguaging, translation and superdiversity in community arts: specifically within visual arts and street theatre. Her doctoral research takes a linguistic ethnographic approach and she is working alongside a Yorkshire-based arts group with their local and overseas projects. |
Louisa Buckingham | Louisa Buckingham has published or is working on research in the following areas: corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics, linguistic landscapes, second language academic writing, computer-mediated communication and applied linguistics. |
Frieda Coetzee | Her current research focus is on language socialization practices in socially-economically marginalized community. For her Master’s she analysed home literacy practices, including home-made commercial literacies (linguistic landscape) as well as mobile phone literacies. Her key interests are thus, language socialization, literacy practices, multilingualism, linguistic landscapes and ethnography. |
Jennifer Dailey-O’Cain | Her research focuses on the following areas: language and identity; language and globalization; interactional sociolinguistics, discourse/conversation analysis; linguistic variation and change; language attitudes, perceptual dialectology; multilingualism, code-switching; language ideology, authority and prescription in language, language planning; and contemporary German and Dutch culture and politics. |
Ana Deumert | |
Matias Gardin | Having a PhD in European studies, interdisciplinary perspectives have always been central to his academic research. He has mostly worked on political history in the twentieth-century European context, with a particular emphasis on welfare states, and more recently on multiculturalism/multilingualism as part of nation-state formation in Luxembourg. |
Ming-yue (Michelle) Gu | An Assistant Professor at Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research focuses on language and identity (in particular the linguistic and cultural identity in minority communities), multilingualism, skilled migration in the global context, discourse theory and analysis, and teacher professionalism. Her works have appeared in over 20 international referred journals. |
Xiaoyan (Grace) Guo | A PhD candidate in the Faculty of Education at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, whose research interests include identity and language, critical discourse analysis, and critical ethnographic sociolinguistics.. |
Lou Harvey | Her research focuses on the language learning and intercultural experiences of mobile university students, particularly in relation to their desire and motivation. She is also interested in the language ideologies, discourses and practices of internationalisation in UK higher education, and the extent to which these recognise/conceptualise internationalising UK universities as multilingual and intercultural spaces. |
James Hawkey | His research focuses on the following key areas: language policy, language contact theory, (variationist) sociolinguistics, language attitudes, Catalan linguistics, regional and minority languages, French linguistics, Spanish linguistics, language and nationalism, mechanisms of language contact. |
Robert Howell | |
Kasper Juffermans | An Africanist and sociolinguist at the Institute for Research on Multilingualism at the University of Luxembourg, Kasper Juffermans is interested in literacy and multilingualism in contexts of mobility, migration and globalisation. Together with Bernardino Tavares, Kasper investigates multilingual repertoires and migration/mobile trajectories between Lusophone West Africa (Cape Verde and Guinea Bissau) and Western Europe (Luxembourg). |
Jordan Lachler | An Assistant Professor in Endangered Language Sustainability at the University of Alberta, Jordan is Director of the Canadian Indigenous Languages and Literacy Development Institute (CILLDI). His research focuses on documentation of endangered languages in the Americas and the Pacific, training community members in language revitalization methods, and the impacts of technology and urbanization on the long-term sustainability of minority languages. |
Nils Langer | His current research focuses on the historical sociolinguistics of the German-Danish borderlands. He has published on the effectiveness of prescriptive grammarians in shaping standard German, linguistic stigmatisation, most notably on a joint project with Winifred Davies (Aberystwyth), the cultural value and uses of language, and the role of schools and schooling in the history of German, including Low German. |
Xiaodong (Wes) Lin | A Lecturer in Sociology at the University of York, who has an ongoing research interest in the study of gender and migration, particularly on Chinese internal and transnational migration. A central theme of his research is to highlight the importance of culture in understanding identity formation in the context of changing work and family life, as a result of migration. |
Samantha Litty | Her PhD Dissertation focus is on a set of changes in phonetic and phonological features in Wisconsin Heritage German and Wisconsin English from the mid 19th century to the present. Other research interests include language contact & sound change and sociolinguistics. |
Friederike Lüpke | Friederike’s research focuses on the Mande and Atlantic languages of West Africa, where she has long experience of field-based language documentation and description. The very complex old and new patterns of multilingualism and mobility, in particular in the Upper Guinea Coast, a centre of the Atlantic slave trade, inspire her current research on the interplay of linguistic repertoires, identity construction and mobility in West African societies. |
Clare Mar-Molinero | Her key research areas include: language policy and language ideologies, especially in the Spanish-speaking world; language and globalisation; multilingual urban super diversity; language and return migration, especially in Mexico; language and the global city, especially Mexico City. |
Stephen May | Stephen’s research interests traverse language rights, bilingualism and multilingualism, language policy and critical sociolinguistics more broadly. His recent work explores the multilingual turn in applied linguistics but he has also had longstanding interest and involvement in issues of Indigenous language revitalisation and Indigenous language education. |
Darren Paffey | His key research areas are the ideologies and politics of language and migration in the Spanish-speaking world. His current research considers language practices among Hispanic migrants in London, and social media discourse in Chilean political protests. Previous projects examined migrants’ language learning in the UK and Spain, and linguistic capital among Mexican return migrants from the USA. |
Mi Yung Park | Her research focuses on language and migration, ethnic and linguistic identity, language attitudes, heritage language development, multilingualism, discourse analysis, and narrative inquiry. Her current project explores language practices and related identity experiences among Southeast Asian migrant brides in Korea. |
Adriana Patiño-Santos | Her research focuses on linguistic ethnography, conversational narrative analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, language socialisation, intercultural communication, and multilingualism. |
Mark Payne | Since January 2013, Mark has been investigating the educational, linguistic and social integration of migrant pupils in local schools, particularly newly-arrived children from Slovakian Roma backgrounds. He is currently running two research projects in this area funded by the Academies and Enterprise Trust, which aim to track progression, achievement and wider social, educational and linguistic developments to include individual and family migration stories and trajectories. |
Antonia Rubino | Her key research areas are multilingualism in migration contexts focusing on language maintenance/shift, language and identity, and language in education. Her current projects focus on transnational identities and linguistic practices of recent Italian migrants, comparisons between different migration waves, multilingual practices on ethnic media, and multilingualism and identity among second/third generation Italo-Australians (the latter is a new project). |
Christian Ruvalcaba | Christian Ruvalcaba’s research interests are applied linguistics, theoretical linguistics, historical linguistics, multilingualism, and rhetoric and composition. |
Joseph Salmons | His key research areas are language change, including structural and social issues in sound change, and language shift. His current projects involve bilingualism and heritage language linguistics and as well theoretical issues in speech sounds and sound change. |
James Simpson | His two main research interests are the teaching and learning of English for multilingual students in migration contexts, and language learning with new technology in the developing world. |
Audrey Small | |
Patrick Stevenson | His main research interests are in sociolinguistics, particularly in relation to Germany since 1945. In recent years, he has been engaged in individual and collaborative projects on language policy/politics of language and on multilingualism and migration, and he is currently working on language biographies of migrants in Berlin. |
Bernardino Tavares | His main research areas are in the field of language and migration include Cape Verde, West Africa, sociolinguistics, globalisation, africanism, trajectory and linguistic repertoire, multilingualism, transnationalism, diaspora, linguistics, contact languages, Creole, Portuguese, linguistic landscape, ethnography, language ideologies, identity, language and education, mobility, super-diversity, anthropology, inequalities, English and French language and culture. |
Lauren Wagner | Lauren Wagner is Assistant Professor in Globalisation and Development at Maastricht University. Her research focuses on issues of mobilities and belonging through microanalysis of everyday encounters, based both in naturally-occurring recorded data as well as in embodied environments for interaction. |
WUN partners
Chinese University of Hong Kong
University of Auckland
University of Alberta
University of Bristol
University of Cape Town
University of Leeds
University of Southampton
University of Sydney
University of York
WUN+ Partners
University of Luxembourg
University of Wisconsin-Madison