Impact Factor: 1.8

Journal

Multilingua

Journal of Cross-Cultural and Interlanguage Communication

Edited by: Eva Codó and Jürgen Jaspers

Language: English

First published: January 1, 1982

Publication Frequency: 6 issues per year

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About this journal

Objective

Multilingua is an international academic journal for interdisciplinary research on linguistic diversity in social life. It publishes original high-quality research for scholars, students and practitioners with an interest in sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, pragmatics, social psychology of language, conversation analysis and discourse analysis. The journal is particularly interested in analyses of hitherto neglected sociolinguistic contexts worldwide. Preferred topics of interest include:

Bi- and multilingual communication

Language policy

Language-in-education

Inter-, trans- and cross-cultural communication

Language, discourse and communication in relation to migration, mobility across time and space, transnationalism and diaspora.

Translation and interpreting as a social practice

Multilingua publishes six issues per year. Apart from research articles it encourages other publication formats, such as scholarly debates, theoretical reviews, methodological reflections and thematic issues of wide importance to the field.

Article formats

Research articles, debates, review articles and thematic issues

Your Benefits

Your benefits:

Provides an international forum for interdisciplinary research on linguistic diversity in social life
Facilitates exchange of information and experience between academics and practitioners
Focuses on neglected sociolinguistic contexts worldwide
Features special issues allowing in-depth exploration of specific topics

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Investigating language and inequality in a seemingly equal educational context

July 11, 2025

Anne Larsen, Lian Malai Madsen

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In this article, we reflect on criticality in contemporary inequality research through a discussion of the significance of marginalising class discourses in Denmark to the everyday schooling experience of a group of high school students. The article is based on an investigation of how language, class and educational success are linked in public as well as more local discourses among teachers and students in a provincial Danish high school. Based on three case studies of students whose parents do not have a gymnasium degree, it is argued that such discourses affect the students’ identification practices in the gymnasium. Our theoretically informed and class-focused analyses of the wider discourses and the situated classroom practices leads us to a final discussion of the consequences and fairness of our approach. We contemplate the risk of contributing to reaffirming class-related marginalisation against the quest for uncovering excluding social processes. Ultimately, we argue that the task for critical researchers may, in fact, be considered to be not to assume, but to embrace a knowledgeable position in order to fulfil this quest.
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Reverse ethnography and the prefiguration of expertise in sociolinguistics

July 9, 2025

Daniel N. Silva

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Linguistic ethnographers are invested in empirically studying, rather than presupposing, social problems that are produced in language. Their dialogue with subjects who experience these problems helps explain why fields such as sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology are considered critical. This article critiques the criticality in this field by problematizing the location of the expert. Drawing from dialogue with Rio de Janeiro peripheral activists, I focus on their reverse ways of describing the work of, largely, middle-class ethnographers who approach them in search of data. “Reverse ethnography” captures the critique of traditional ethnographic “informants” about hierarchies and extractivist practices in ethnography. Their refusal to being ethnographed responds to naturalized ways of studying minorities and indexes a shifting ground of expertise. I also discuss my own responses to prefigured models of expertise by drawing on editorial gatekeeping practices where I have been framed as not sufficiently an expert. I analyze anonymous peer reports that display power-laden presuppositions about what kinds of accounts, theoretical sources, and types of data are valid for providing a legitimate sociolinguistic account of the periphery. Ultimately, peripheral activists and scholars’ reversals of prefigured models of studying the periphery may strengthen ongoing efforts for democratizing sociolinguistics.
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Performing a linguistic muda in favour of Basque at University: choices, hopes and reality

June 27, 2025

Garbiñe Bereziartua, Miren Artetxe, Naroa Burreso

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In the context of minoritised languages, efforts to strengthen the use of these languages and to gain new speakers tend to offer interesting research topics. Linguistic mudas related to activating speakers are also located in this context. This study examines the linguistic mudas of university students. Participants in the study were pre-service primary school teachers at the Donostia/San Sebastián campus of the University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU, and both quantitative and qualitative methods were used to gather the data (292 questionnaires and 15 focus group discussions). The results show that the university setting can be an ideal context for linguistic mudas to take place. The participants said that they did not notice any significant muda, but did note a tendency to use Basque more than they had prior to entering university. The findings, thus, indicate that specific plans must be designed and implemented in order to foster mudas towards Basque.
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“Can you teach me some Pakistani?” – Ethnolinguistic cornering among Copenhagen youth

June 18, 2025

Janus Spindler Møller

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In this article I present the notion of ethnolinguistic cornering as an outcome of the Everyday Languaging project and argue for its relevance in ethnographic and interactional sociolinguistics. The Everyday Languaging project is a long-term cooperation with a Copenhagen school where a team of researchers from the University of Copenhagen has conducted language-centered ethnographic fieldwork involving different student groups. The school is situated in a linguistically heterogeneous area of Copenhagen and the students represent a high variety of different linguistic family backgrounds. The data presented in the paper involve a student group who were followed from their first year in the public school system in 2010 through nine years until 2019. Ethnolinguistic cornering denotes moments in interaction where people ascribe each other identities based on assumptions about language and social life, and these ascribed identities are rejected or in other ways treated as negatively charged. I argue that instances of ethnolinguistic cornering deserve particular attention in sociolinguistics because they provide a lens for investigating how the paradox of monolingual standard regimes within multilingual societies is constructed, reproduced and challenged in ongoing interaction.
Open Access
The ideation, naturalization, and invisibilization of Discourses in Italy’s tracked secondary education: a critical scalar account

April 23, 2025

Andrea R. Leone-Pizzighella

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The present paper analyzes the Discourses underpinning the tracked secondary education system in Italy through the lens of sociolinguistic scales (Blommaert 2007. Sociolinguistic scales. Intercultural Pragmatics 4(1). 1–19). Via an examination of education policy documents, historical accounts of policy discourse, classroom discourse data, ethnographic fieldnotes, ministerial websites, and literary texts, this paper considers how the Discourse of classism (with a capital D , á la Gee 1990. Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourses, critical perspectives on literacy and education . London & New York: Routledge) which underlies the foundations of the tracked school system in Italy has gradually become naturalized and then ‘invisible’ (that is, hegemonic) as it has traveled through scales of political and social speech and texts ( discourse with a lowercase d ). This paper considers an alternative view of scales not as spatiotemporal spaces, places, or settings, but as types of metadiscursive labor (Carr 2006. “Secrets keep you sick”: Metalinguistic labor in a drug treatment program for homeless women. Language in Society 35(05). 631–653). This paper also discusses the role of critique, drawing on Pietikäinen’s (2016. Critical debates: Discourse, boundaries and social change. Sociolinguistics: Theoretical Debates ) concepts of emancipatory, ethnographic, and carnivalesque critique, in rendering visible and available for re-scaling the Discourses which become invisible over time.

Special Issue: ‘Spaces of linguistic non-understanding’ when ‘researching multilingually’: analyses from a linguistic-ethnographic perspective; Guest Editors: Marie Jacobs & Ella van Hest

Special Issue: Learning, re-learning, and un-learning language(s) in the multilingual family during the COVID-19 lockdown; Guest Editors: Fatma F.S. Said and Kristin Vold Lexander

Issue 1

Issue 6

Special Issue: On-site processes of sociolinguistic differentiation; Guest Editors: Gilles Merminod and Raymund Vitorio

Special Issue: Multilingual family language policy in monolingual Australia: multilingual desires and monolingual realities; Guest Editors: Loy Lising and Hanna Torsh

Issue 4

Issue 3

Special Issue: Translanguaging in the age of mobility: European Perspectives; Guest Editors: BethAnne Paulsrud, Jenny Rosén and Boglárka Straszer

Issue 2

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Issue 6

Special Issue: Foreign language learning in multilingual Germany; Guest Editors: Ingrid Gogolin, Christoph Gabriel, Hanne Brandt and Nora Dünkel

Issue 5

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Special Issue: Non-human agencies, the environment, and the materiality of indigenous languages; Guest Editors: Laura Siragusa and Pirjo K. Virtanen

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Special Issue: Multilingualism, language education, and linguistic entrepreneurship: Critical perspectives; Guest Editors: Peter I. De Costa, Joseph Sung-Yul Park and Lionel Wee

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Issue 6

Issue 5

Special Issue: Linguistic diversity in a time of crisis: Language challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, Guest Editors: Jie Zhang and Jia Li

Issue 4

Issue 3

Special Issue: Entrepreneurial visions of the self: language teaching and learning under neoliberal conditions, Guest Editors: Martina Zimmermann and Sebastian Muth

Special Issue: Audiovisual Translation as intercultural mediation, Guest Editors: Marie-Noëlle Guillot, Maria Pavesi and Louisa Desilla

Issue 4

Special Issue: Society in Digital Contexts: New Modes of Identity and Community Construction, Guest Editor: Najma Al Zidjaly

Issue 3

Issue 2

Special issue: What do minority languages mean? European Perspectives, Guest-editors: Malika Pedley and Alain Viaut

Issue 1

Special Issue: Re-imagining Language Revitalization in Contemporary Europe Guest-editors: Sabina Perrino and Andrea Leone-Pizzighella

Issue 6

Issue 5

Issue 4

Special Issue: Professional discourse in multilingual settings: policies and practices, Guest Editors: Sofie Decock, July De Wilde, Sarah Van Hoof, Ellen Van Praet and Bernard De Clerck

Issue 3

Issue 2

Special Issue: Multilingual family language management: Efforts, measures and choices

Issue 1

Issue 6

Issue 5

Special Issue: In Honor of Joshua Fishman, Issue Editors: Sinfree Makoni and Marika K. Criss

Issue 4

Special Issue: Young children as language policy-makers: studies of interaction in preschools in Finland and Sweden, Guest-editor: Sally Boyd and Leena Huss

Special Issue: Discourses of Integration – Language, Skills, and the Politics of Difference, Guest editors: Mi-Cha Flubacher and Shirley Yeung

Issue 5

Issue 4

Special Issue: Languaging the worker – Globalized governmentalities in/of language in peripheral spaces, Guest Editors: Kati Dlaske and Mireille McLaughlin

Issue 3

Issue 2

Special Issue: Multilingual practices in contemporary and historical contexts: Interfaces between code-switching and translation, Guest Editors: Leena Kolehmainen and Janne Skaffari

Special Issue: Border Crossings in Language. Intercultural Encounters at the Crossroads of Disciplines, Guest Editor: Marie-Noëlle Guillot

Issue 5

Issue 4

Special Issue: A variational pragmatic approach to regional variation in language: Celebrating the work of Klaus P. Schneider, Guest Editor: Anne Barron

Issue 3

Issue 2

Special Issue: Insults or acts of identity? The role of styling, stylizing, and mocking in multilingual discourse, Guest Editor: Christina Higgins

Issue 1

Issue 5-6

Special Issue: Researching multilingualism and superdiversity: Grassroots actions and responsibilities

Issue 3-4

Special Issue: English in the language ecology of “high proficiency” European countries

Issue 1-2

Special Issue: Multilingualism at work

Issue 6

Issue 5

Issue 4

Special Issue: Multilingual communication in binational families: Negotiating languages, identities and everyday tasks

Issue 3

Issue 2

Volume 32, Issue 2 (2013) Multilingua, Pragmatic and metapragmatic issues in Japanese honorific usage

Issue 1

Issue 3-4

Discursive approaches to language and religion

Issue 2

Issue 1

Issue 3-4

Special Issue: Changing standards in sociolinguistic research: Celebrating the work of Roland Willemyns

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Multilingua publishes special and thematic issues focussed on important and emerging topics in the field of study. The journal has established a rigorous process to ensure that any special issue manuscripts follow the same high-quality standards and peer review processes as regular manuscripts. For further information on the journal’s peer review policy please see the "Instructions for Authors".

Recent Special Issues

Journal Impact Factor	1.8	2024, Journal Citation Reports (Clarivate, 2025)
5-year Journal Impact Factor	1.8	2024, Journal Citation Reports (Clarivate, 2025)
Journal Citation Indicator	1.29	2024, Journal Citation Reports (Clarivate, 2025)
CiteScore	3.9	2024, Scopus (Elsevier B.V., 2025)
SCImago Journal Rank	0.651	2024, SJR (Scimago Lab, 2025; Data Source: Scopus)
Source Normalized Impact per Paper	1.458	2024, CWTS Journal Indicators (CWTS B.V., 2025; Data Source: Scopus)

More information about journal rankings

Submission

You can easily submit your manuscript online. Simply go to http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/multi and you will be guided through the whole peer-reviewing and publishing process.

Your benefits of publishing with us

International and renowned Editorial Board
Significant Impact Factor
Ahead of print publication
Convenient online manuscript submission system
Every article easily discoverable because of SEO and comprehensive abstracting and indexing services
Convenient citation tracking via e-mail alert
Secure archiving by De Gruyter and the independent archiving service Portico
Professional sales and marketing activities

Submission process

Please format your manuscript according to the De Gruyter Mouton journal style sheet. Failure to do this may result in rejection of the manuscript
Submit your manuscript via our submission system
Multilingua uses a double-blind peer review procedure. This means that reviewers do not know the identity of author(s) and vice versa. The manuscript should be submitted in separate files: title page, main text file and figures/tables (if any). Self-identifying citations and references should be left blank when manuscripts are first submitted. Authors are responsible for reinserting self-identifying material when manuscripts are prepared for the final submission. The review will take on average 2-3 months. Submissions are sent to 2-3 reviewers. You will be informed by e-mail if your manuscript has been accepted or rejected or if it requires further attention.
Multilingua has an acceptance rate of ca. 15%. To maximize your chances of acceptance, it is essential that your article is within the scope of the journal. We are looking for theoretically and methodologically innovative research that has broader relevance. We particularly welcome research from marginalized and underexplored contexts.
If accepted: you have the option to publish it open access

Please note

Before submitting your article please have a look at our Publication Ethics Statement and our copyright agreement
Our repository policy allows you to distribute 30 PDF copies of your published article to colleagues (the PDF has to include the information that it is an author's copy). Please also feel free to distribute the link to the online abstract.
If you have any general questions please visit our FAQ page for authors

Additional information for manuscript formatting

Manuscripts for research articles must be between 8,000 and 10,000 words to be considered for publication.
Guest editors and contributors of special issues will receive complimentary print copies of the issue
If you wish to propose a special issue, please contact the editors.

Hybrid Open Access

Authors have the option to publish their article under an open access license. The standard article processing charge for a hybrid open access article is 2,000 Euro (plus VAT if applicable). Please note that corresponding authors from institutions with which we have a transformative agreement, can publish open access without paying the fee. More information on the eligible institutions and articles can be found here.

Editors

Eva Codó
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
08193 Bellaterra (Cerdanyola del Vallès)
Barcelona
Spain
E-mail: eva.codo@uab.cat

Jürgen Jaspers
Université libre de Bruxellles
1050 Brussels
Belgium
E-mail: jurgen.jaspers@ulb.be

Editorial Board
Philipp Angermeyer (York University, Canada)
Lydia Catedral (The Hong-Kong Polytechnic University)
James Costa (Université Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle, France)
Feliciano Chimbutane (Universidade Eduardo Mondlane, Mozambique)
Haley De Korne (University of Oslo, Norway)
Alexandre Duchêne (Université de Fribourg, Switzerland)
Nelson Flores (University of Pennsylvania, USA)
Adam Jaworski (University of Hong Kong, China)
Petteri Laihonen (University of Jyväskylä, Finland)
Matthieu LeBlanc (Université de Moncton, Canada)
Jia Li (Yunnan University, China)
Ikuko Nakane (University of Melbourne, Australia)
Adriana Patiño-Santos (University of Southampton, UK)
Uta Papen (Lancaster University, UK)
Laura Smith-Khan (University of Technology Sydney, Australia)
Joseph Sung-Yul Park (National University of Singapore, Singapore)
Fatma Said (Zayed University, United Arab Emirates)
Sarah Van Hoof (Universiteit Gent, Belgium)

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Journal information

Additional information

eISSN:

1613-3684

ISSN:

0167-8507

Language:

English

Publisher:

De Gruyter Mouton

Additional information

First published:

January 1, 1982

Publication Frequency:

6 issues per year

eISSN: 1613-3684

ISSN: 0167-8507

Audience(s) for this journal

scholars, students and practitioners

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Multilingua

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