Multilingualism, Historical and Contemporary
The University of Westminster is one of the leading British institutions in the study of multilingualism, both from a historical and a contemporary perspective. Westminster’s commitment to this area of research dates back to 1994, when creole linguistics was introduced into the curriculum. In 1995 Anand Syea started, together with Philip Baker, the Creole Linguistics Research Group and launched the biennial Westminster Creolistics Workshop and the associated Westminster Creolistics publication series, which is today continued by Battlebridge Press. Syea’s work specializes in the collection and analysis of historical data, mostly centred on creoles based on English and French. With the appointment of Kelechukwu Ihemere in 2007, the range of creole linguistics research has been further expanded into the analysis of conversational code-switching in bilingual communities and corpus linguistics (especially problems of bilingual spoken corpora, bilingual education and cross-cultural pragmatics).
Syea’a and Ihemere’s work on contemporary cases of language contact creates an illuminating counterpart to the study of multilingualism in medieval Britain, which is the main research interest of Louise Sylvester, Mark Chambers and Sara Pons-Sanz. Sylvester and Chambers are currently working, together with Gale Owen-Crocker (University of Manchester), on two projects aiming to study, amongst other issues, the impact of multilingualism on medieval textile and clothing vocabulary: ‘Lexis of Cloth and Clothing in Britain c. 700-1450: Origins, Identification, Contexts and Change’ (link project to info on project provided below a five-year project funded by the AHRC) and ‘The Vocabulary of Medieval Dress and Textiles in Unpublished Sources’ (link project to info on project provided below a three-year project funded by the Leverhulme Trust). Pons-Sanz, who has published extensively on the influence of Old Norse on medieval English, is currently involved in the three-year international collaborative project ‘Reassessing the Historical Evidence: New Perspectives on the Lindisfarne Gloss’. This project, which is funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education, has as one of its main aims the study of the impact that the Anglo-Scandinavian linguistic contact had on the vocabulary and morphosyntax of this tenth-century text.
