Topic: Multilingualism

Researchers from Hamburg discuss the FSL Digital project, which annotates multilingual language textbooks from the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries. Their analysis connects historical teaching practices to everyday communication, multilingualism and attitudes towards languages, showing what instructional manuals reveal about expectations of language learners in early modern Europe.

Ingrid Piller discusses intercultural communication through discourse analysis and multilingualism research. The conversation examines how cultural identities are constructed, how languages acquire different prestige and how access to linguistic resources is distributed. Examples extend to migration, crisis communication and online interaction, drawing on the third edition of her textbook.

Research has identified structural differences between monolinguals and bilinguals in brain regions underlying language, and memory. This is consistent with the Declarative/Procedural language model, which proposes that hippocampal-based and basal ganglia-based networks subserve language learning and processing.Whole-brain resting-state functional connectivity (FC) of bilateral hippocampi and caudate nuclei was analyzed in 117 participants with diverse multilingual language experience, to assess relationships of FC with performance on verbal declarative memory and procedural memory tasks, and