Dr. Ariane M. Borlongan

Researching on Migration and Language: Methodologies and Techniques in Migration Linguistics

Human mobility cannot be simply overlooked by the globalizing world, and one very crucial realm of this type of mobility is language. Needless to say, when people move from one place to another, language is always an important factor and it could either make the movement easy or difficult for the migrant. As such, policy and praxis must be sensitive enough to not only consider but, much more, to take into account language within the migratory experience of peoples. Furthermore, there must be sufficient theory and research which could inform academics specifically and the society at large in the critical role language plays in such a phenomenon. A new subfield of linguistics is called attention to in this workshop, a subfield which could very be aptly called as ‘migration linguistics’ — the multidimensional study of the various aspects of language(s) at use in the dynamic process of human mobility. And so, this workshop introduces migration linguistics as a new sub-field of linguistics, including its aims, concepts, and methodologies. It shall state the aims of this new sub-field being introduced, and what sets its apart from other related sub-fields of linguistics (e.g. anthropological linguistics, contact linguistics, sociology of language) and discuss the important concepts in doing migration linguistics as well as the theories and perspectives it shares with linguistics, its sub-fields, and also other academic fields, too. The central concern of this workshop is the methodological procedures and approaches which can be used in investigating language in the context of migration, how methodologies from related (sub-)fields come to be adapted to the aims of this sub-field being introduced. It will survey exemplary studies using these procedures and approaches and provide suggestions as to how they could be utilized in future inquiries on migration and language.