Migration, among the most important sociocultural phenomena of contemporary global societies, is complex, dynamic, and multifaceted. At the heart of migration is language, the indispensable agent of migration. Hence, in this article, a new sub-discipline of linguistics is presented, and that is 'migration linguistics'. It is the interdisciplinary…

Any discussion of transdisciplinary applied linguistics needs to engage with three central questions. First, while "inter"disciplinarity may allow for disciplines to stay in place and engage with each other, "trans"disciplinarity implies a space beyond or above disciplines. As a result, we have to consider whether applied…

This article imagines a tussle between Multimodality, focused on "modes," and Applied Linguistics (AL), based on "language." A Social Semiotic approach to MM treats "speech" and "writing" as modes with distinct affordances, and, as all modes, treats them as "partial" means of communication. The…

Since its inception, the field of second language research has utilized methods from a number of areas, including general linguistics, psychology, education, sociology, anthropology and, recently, neuroscience and corpus linguistics. As the questions and objectives expand, researchers are increasingly pushing methodological boundaries to gain a…

As applied linguistics is mainly concerned with solving the language-related problems of laypeople, the examination of folk views constitutes an important research field and its relevance is illustrated in this issue of the AILA review. In this introductory article, we address some of the more general aspects that need to be considered in the…

Folk perceptions of language diversity often differ from the criteria laid out by linguists and have particular implications for applied/sociolinguists since the collective identification of language diversity largely determines the ways in which individuals regard the categorisation of their own (and others) linguistic uses as belonging to a…

This article consists of two sections: in the first one, I discuss one of the most prevalent lay myths in the Western world with respect to communication and understanding, namely, the view that meaning resides in words and that it is transmitted from one language user to another in a conduit, as it were. In the second section, I refer to my own…

This paper deals with data gathering and interpretation in folk linguistics, but, as the parenthetical title suggests, it is not limited to any prejudged notion of what approaches or techniques might be most relevant to the wide variety of concerns encompassed by applied linguistics. In this article, the author conceives of folk linguistics…

What do students and teachers believe about the second language learning process? What if these beliefs are in conflict with each other or with prevailing applied linguistic theories? These are the types of questions that are investigated within folk linguistic research. Some researchers have taken a quantitative approach that relied on…