SOAS Working Papers in Linguistics

SOAS Working Papers in Linguistics  (WPL) is an outlet for research in progress conducted by graduate students, faculty, alumni and research associates in the Department of Linguistics at the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics, and SOAS.

Latest edition

The seven papers in this volume engage with a broad set of linguistic, educational, and social questions. Together they cover various topics within linguistics, including education, identity, language variation and change, language documentation and diasporic experiences. The fact that only one of the contributions is set in the UK, reflects SOAS’s position as a global research institute. The volume covers a range of languages and regions, spanning multiple continents. Austin’s paper is situated in Australia, Quasem’s in Bangladesh, Ayoade’s in Nigeria, and Huq and Amir’s in Türkiye. Omar and Haga’s and Jiang’s focus on diaspora contexts in Sweden and the UK respectively, highlighting the deterritorialization of language resources through processes of migration and mobility. Finally, Summer’s examination of Swahili in online contexts transcends numerous geographical boundaries.

Editors

Alia Amir is an Associate Professor of Language and Communication in the Department of Sciences and Human Studies at Prince Mohammed bin Fahd University, Al Khobar (KSA). She is Reviews Editor for Discourse & Communication, and a Research Associate at SOAS University of London. Dr. Alia holds a PhD in language policy and language policing from Linköping University, and her research sits at the intersection of language policy, applied linguistics, and postcolonial sociolinguistics, with a particular focus on how language policies are enacted, negotiated, and resisted in everyday classroom interaction. Her monograph Language Policing is forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan.

Becky Winstanley is an ESRC-funded postdoc working on the project, Voices of a place: everyday multilingualism, resistance and language activism in East London, at Goldsmiths, University of London. Becky completed her collaborative PhD (SOAS/Goldsmiths/Osmani Trust) in 2024. During this time, she developed participatory ethnographic walking methods to explore multilingual language practices in London’s East End, especially among Sylheti speakers. She is interested in affordances of embodied research methods to explore the links between language and place.