Aims, Scope and Readership
Most people in the world live in more than one language, yet much research on language in society still comes from largely monolingual settings. Language in Communities, Education and Public Life treats multilingualism as the normal human condition. It publishes studies of how languages are used, taught, ranked, and contested, and of how those choices shape people's access to education, jobs, public services, and justice.
Every paper must be about language. The journal welcomes work from sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, the sociology of language, applied linguistics, education, translation studies, and discourse analysis. It accepts qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods, as long as the question concerns language and the society around it.
The journal publishes in English. Manuscripts, titles and abstracts must be in English. Language examples from the study may be included with English translations or glosses.
Subject areas
- Multilingualism, language contact, and code-switching
- Language policy and planning, including mother-tongue and multilingual education
- Language in schools and universities: medium of instruction, access, and outcomes
- Language teaching and learning: multilingual classrooms, language assessment, teacher education, and educational technology for language learning
- Language, identity, and social difference, including caste, class, gender, religion, and region
- Minority, tribal, Indigenous, and endangered languages; language maintenance and revitalization
- Language attitudes and ideologies, including standard languages and prestige
- Translation and interpreting as social practice
- Language in law, health care, and public services, and linguistic access to rights
- Language and migration, including urban multilingualism
- Language in the media and in digital communication
- Sign languages and Deaf communities
Out of scope
To keep the journal focused, the journal does not consider:
- Literary criticism of individual texts that raises no question about language in society.
- Formal linguistics (syntax, phonology, semantics) with no social dimension.
- Educational studies in which language is not the subject, such as school leadership, organizational culture, or teaching in a single subject with no language question. Studies of language teaching and learning are in scope. A report that only tests whether one technique raised one group's scores, with no wider question about language, is not.
- Social science papers in which language is incidental to the argument.
- Clinical speech and language pathology.
