On 28 September 2024, the Geolingual Studies team held a workshop entitled “Language and Urban Space: Exploring the Use and Function of English in Highly Diverse and Dynamic Multilingual Settings” at the 10th Biennial International Conference on the Linguistics of Contemporary English (BICLCE), which took place from 26 to 28 September at the University of Alicante (Spain). To set the scene, our cooperation partners Ninja Schulz and Lisa Lehnen opened the workshop by presenting the Geolingual Studies framework and case studies on New York City and Edinburgh. Four talks by invited speakers followed. These papers convincingly illustrated diverse (socio)linguistic situations and complex discourses that emerge even in smaller urban and city-like spaces, such as cities in Cyprus and Norwegian cruise ships. Furthermore, the conventions to address each other among diasporan Sri Lankan Tamil speakers living all around the world, as well as the names of WiFi-SSIDs in Brooklyn, New York, revealed discursive practices to construct communal networks within and across city boundaries. In a fruitful concluding discussion, thoughts and ideas were exchanged on how established and new methodologies and frameworks can be integrated and further developed to advance research in linguistics that seeks to address ongoing social transformations and the complexities of human interaction in and with space. The organisers would again like to thank all workshop participants and the audience for their input and engagement.

Read more about Geolingual studies here: https://www.phil.uni-wuerzburg.de/gls/