Article series in Language Documentation and Description, edited by Peter K. Austin and Lauren Gawne
See all available Language Contexts articles
Language Contexts provides an avenue for publishing information about the contexts in which a language or variety is spoken, rather than about the structure of the language/variety itself. Articles include information about speaker demography, social organisation, culture, linguistic ecology, language vitality, and language use and transmission in the local community, its diaspora and the Internet. Articles also include discussion of the range of languages/varieties in use by speakers, including socio-cultural factors affecting language/variety choice. Articles aim to provide detailed social, cultural and ethnographic information to complement existing reference materials such as Glottolog or Ethnologue.
EL Publishing aims to increase recognition of this important research. Compiling information about language contexts is original research that should receive professional and academic acknowledgement. The Language Contexts series (a sub-series of our journal Language Documentation and Description) provides a platform for quality publications of this genre with accurate, up-to-date information on languages and their contexts that is not available elsewhere.
Contributors to the series are likely to be researchers, including community members, who have worked on language revitalisation, language documentation, text collection, a grammar, or an ethnography, typically for a project or academic study, and who have detailed knowledge of a community and its language use.
See the Language Contexts page for a listing of available articles.
The types of content that contributors can include is very flexible, Below we provide a ‘menu’ of possible information that might be included. The list is not meant to be prescriptive, and authors may include other topics relevant to the contexts of language use. Articles are generally around 5,000-7,000 words in length and we strongly encourage the inclusion of images, maps and other illustrative material, as well as links to online resources and materials in archives. If you wish to include media samples (audio, video) with your article please consult with the editors.
You can ensure your work reaches the widest possible audience in a number of ways, such as linking to your article (once published) or using the information in your article to update prominent language websites, including:
The editors of the Language Contexts series are Peter K. Austin and Lauren Gawne. Submitted articles are double-blind peer reviewed and published at no expense to authors as Open Access publications free to download under a Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC (Attribution-NonCommercial)..
Please see our Information for authors page for guides on style, submission etc..