The Centre for Language Education Research in the School of Social Sciences, Education and Social Work invites you to a research seminar on 29 June at 12pm via MS Teams.

Title: An emerging research agenda for multilingual cities

Speaker: Professor Lorna Carson, Trinity College Dublin

Facilitator: Dr Aisling O'Boyle (SSESW)

For more information and to register see https://tinyurl.com/4jtrnzds

This talk examines some recent studies which focus on the multilingual character of contemporary cities and contribute to our understanding of urban multilingualism. We live in an increasingly urbanised world: current UN estimates are that more than half of us live in cities, and it is predicted that this will rise to more than two thirds of the world’s population by 2050. The most rapid population growth is not in mega-cities, but in small urban settlements with fewer than 500,000 inhabitants. Cities have long been a topic of academic discourse, with scholars examining urban life through their own particular lens – as architects, urban geographers, sociologists or historians. Language matters sometimes pop up under the headings of migration or diversity, but usually only rather cursorily and mostly as a problem to be addressed– a deficit or a challenge. 

Lorna Carson is Head of the School of Linguistic, Speech and Communication Sciences and Professor in Applied Linguistics at Trinity College Dublin. Her research on language learning addresses issues located at the interface between individual and societal multilingualism, looking at the experience of individual language users within specific policy contexts.