Chapter 6 aims to help readers understand how variation and change affect language, so that translation practices and decisions are not based on personal biases and lay views about language but, rather, on a principled understanding of how language interacts with society. Another goal is to create awareness of the impact of social and use-related (contextual) factors on language so that translated texts respond to the requirements of the translation instructions. Other sociolinguistic notions reviewed in this chapter, along with their implications for translation are register, dialectal variation, socioeconomic variation, the nature of language change and variation, prestigious varieties vs. stigmatized varieties, and translating in multilingual societies. The discussion of register includes field of activity, medium and level of formality, as well as the implications for translation of not considering these within the context of the translation brief and translation norms. The connection between register selection and linguistic and translation competence is explained. Illustrative examples are used throughout the chapter.

This chapter examines the essential role of research in the field of applied linguistics, outlining its nature, scope, and significance in addressing real-world language-related challenges. It begins by defining applied linguistics, providing a foundation for understanding its multifaceted applications in areas such as language teaching, learning, communication, and language use. The chapter also traces the historical development of applied linguistics as an independent research discipline, emphasizing the theoretical and practical relevance of research in advancing the field. You will explore key domains of applied linguistics research, identifying their importance and interconnections, as well as the central research questions that drive inquiry. By examining the benefits and values of applied linguistics research, you will gain an understanding of how research informs and enhances practices within the field. By the end of this chapter, you will comprehend the nature and scope of applied linguistics as a discipline and recognize the contributions of research to your understanding of language-related issues.

The chapter presents an overview of English Medium Instruction (EMI) at Swiss universities. It describes historical and political aspects relating to languages in Switzerland. This entails the implications for the multilingual policy, language law, federalism, and the role of English in higher education. The nation’s model of communication informed by the partner-language model has evolved into multilingualism with English. Many university courses in Switzerland are offered in English depending on the research done in a given area. The analysis focuses on the data collected from the websites of major Swiss universities with regard to the EMI trends.

Despite the fact that bilingual instruction in the United States of America pre-dates its nationhood, educational policy has undulated its allowance and support for dual language education, marked by both selective preferential treatment of certain (primarily European) languages and through broad opposition to the endeavour as a whole. This brief review of the history and scholarship of dual language education in the USA recaps the ebbs and flows of bilingual education over time and the accompanying shifts in discourses about the purposes and benefits of bilingual education with subsequent implications for how bilingual education is implemented.

More than 1,200 languages are spoken in Southeast Asia. The language policies have traditionally emphasised the official and national languages. Over the past two decades, a movement towards multilingual education has arisen in Southeast Asia. Increased use on non-dominant languages (NDL) in education can also be observed in several countries. Support for non-dominant languages in education ranges from the Philippines’ and Vietnam’s strongly supportive written language policies to Brunei and Laos, where the use of NDLs in education is currently impossible. Multilingual education which includes learners’ first languages is increasing in Cambodia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand, and Timor- Leste.

The purpose of this chapter is to elaborate on the theory, policy, and practice of English medium education (EME) – teaching academic subjects in English – in the multilingual contexts of fourteen former republics of the Soviet Union. We show that there is more space for multilingual education in secondary education, and limited use of EME and minority languages in higher education, depending on the country. Across contexts, empirical research demonstrates both opportunities and challenges of EME for institutional policy, social mobility, cultural exchange, multilingual pedagogy, and linguistic development.

The global ascent of English as a medium of instruction (EMI) has sparked concerns about the potential erosion of local languages, in a process of “Englishisation” (Kirkpatrick, 2011). In the UAE, EMI is a cornerstone of higher education; furthermore, English has emerged as the preferred lingua franca in a nation where 85 per cent of the population hails from 100+ countries. This chapter delves into the resulting tension between English and Arabic (the local and regional language) within EMI contexts, scrutinising its impact on UAE higher education, sociolinguistic formations, and language policy. It explores future trajectories for EMI and Arabic, proposing strategies to integrate the two in institutional culture.

The introduction provides an overview of the state-of-the-art and situates the diverse research experiences and theoretical perspectives discussed by the volume contributors. Moreover, it presents different ways to define language activism based on various theoretical perspectives, research experiences and socio-political contexts. In order to present a nuanced and comprehensive view of activism, the introduction includes a special focus on the different forms it takes, the various stakeholders who may be involved, the unpredictability of who is included and excluded, and the inescapably ideological nature of language and language research. The introduction also addresses the kinds of questions scholars ask depending on the nature of their scholarly and political agendas and lays out a rationale for the four-part organization of the volume. The volume contributions deal with varied social settings ranging from contexts marked by great socio-economic and political inequality with sharply defined power hierarchies, to more egalitarian contexts with more dispersed power and subtle and diverse power hierarchies. Language struggles, whether they involve endangered language revitalization, language standardization, spelling reform or other efforts, involve numerous stakeholders and lead to tensions and battles among as well as within groups.

Ethnographic and discursive approaches have become more common in Language Policy research, focusing on social actors and how their actions are embedded in and shape social structures. Implementations of LP research have been addressed by problematising the notion of research as a neutral endeavour, a process spurred by the increasing focus on multilingualism and a criticism of Eurocentric worldviews.Researchers in the field of multilingualism are often motivated by a concern with social issues, but often this is accounted for in an implicit manner or not addressed at all. I present a nexus analysis (Scollon and Scollon 2004) to show how my engagement as a researcher and activist shaped the standardisation process of Kven (a Finnic minoritized language in Northern Norway) and discuss some of the dilemmas I faced, as there were tensions concerning the standardisation process (Lane 2014).All ethnographic research will lead to change, both on immediate and longer time scales. When engaging in standardisation processes, researchers shape both such processes and the outcomes. However, this is not a unidirectional process, as such engagement will also become a part of the historical body of the researcher. We shape the field, but we are also shaped by the field.