News

Esther-Miriam Wagner is the Executive Director of the Woolf Institute and an Affiliate Lecturer at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge.Her main research interests include the Cairo Genizah, Judaeo-Arabic, historical linguistics of Arabic and Yiddish, sociolinguistics, scribal practise, and Jewish-Muslim relation…

How can people with diverging views be supported to successfully communicate and negotiate? This ‘moonshot’ question was the focus of Deliberation4Good, a workshop co-supported by the Language Sciences Workshop Fund and ‘Opening Up Minds’, and which took place on 14th October at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. The ‘moonshots’ are ambitious question…

How different could alien language and intelligence be from ours? How might we communicate with intelligent exo-beings?These were just two of the questions considered at the inaugural meeting of the Cambridge Institute of Exo-Language (CIEL) which took place on Saturday 22 October at the University of Cambridge’s Sidgwick site, in conjunction with …

Daniel Weston is Assistant Professor of English of at Hong Kong University (HKU).His research interests include bilingual pragmatics (code-switching), World Englishes (specifically English dialect development), and the discourse analysis of gatekeeping encounters.He is currently collaborating with the University of Cambridge on a project examining …

Laura Wright is a historical sociolinguist and Professor of English Language at the University of Cambridge.She works on the history of Standard English and the London dialect, including mixed-language texts written in Anglo-Norman, Medieval Latin and Middle English, as well as 17th, 18th and 19th century London English. She has published on histor…

Raymond Hickey is Adjunct Professor at the University of Limerick and former Professor of General Linguistics at the University of Duisburg and Essen. His research has centred around the sociolinguistics of varieties of English within the language variation and change paradigm and around issues in language contact and areal linguistics. He is also …

Arik Kershenbaum is a behavioural ecologist in the Department of Zoology, and Director of Studies at Girton College, University of Cambridge.He researches vocal communication in animals including wolves, dolphins, whales and hyraxes. He is particularly interested in the role of communication in the evolution of cooperation in intelligent and social…

A workshop on ultrasound tongue imaging (UTI), supported by Cambridge Language Sciences, brought together phoneticians, computer scientists, neuroscientists and speech & language therapists from across the University of Cambridge campus. The workshop, convened by Dr Calbert Graham, Senior Research Associate in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, t…

This summer sees the relaunch of Cambridge-based Languages, Society and Policy (LSP) journal, supported by a new consortium after five successful years of promoting engagement with policy makers, journalists and stakeholders in education, health and business. Previously part of the AHRC-funded project, Multilingualism: Empowering Individuals, Trans…

We are delighted to announce that two new projects have been awarded seed funding through the Language Sciences Incubator Fund.The successful applicants from the latest call were announced on 22 August 2022.We would like to congratulate all concerned and thank the reviewers for generously giving their time to evaluate the proposals. Many thanks als…

The following article by Julia Schwarz, PhD candidate in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, presents findings from the Language Sciences Incubator Fund project, 'PerMaSC: Speech Perception through Masks in School Contexts'. It was published in The Conversation in tandem with the full research paper in Frontiers.While mask-wearing is no longer req…

New Global Humanities video highlights the impact of Cambridge research into multilingualism.The short film features Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics Faculty members: Wendy Ayres-Bennett, Professor of French Philology and Linguistics; Ianthi M. Tsimpli, Professor of English and Applied Linguistics and former Cambridge Language Sciences…

Dr Matt Davis and Prof. Paula Buttery join Prof. Brechtje Post as co-Directors of Cambridge Language Sciences (CLS) from June 2022.We are delighted to welcome Matt Davis and Paula Buttery to the CLS leadership team. They are taking over from Prof. Ann Copestake, who is stepping down as co-Director after five years in the role. Brechtje Post said “I…

We are pleased to announce that two events have been awarded funding through the Language Sciences Workshop Fund, which launched in March 2022.The Cambridge Language Sciences Workshop Fund offers support for interdisciplinary workshops on ambitious questions of societal importance requiring further research. The workshops will contribute to the dev…

Parents influence children’s attitudes to languages far more than their teachers or friends, research finds. This implies that efforts to reverse the national decline in language-learning need to target families as well as schools, researchers say."Waning interest in these subjects is a public communication challenge; it’s not just about what happe…