Language, self, and society: Linguistic inequality and beyond

Language is said to be a uniquely human property which constitutes many aspects of our lives. It serves as a fundamental medium for interactions between people in the society. In addition, it plays a key role for individual language users to establish and update their identities in the society. Our highly interdisciplinary project attempts to address complex interwound relationships between language, individuals and societies. To address the question, one could explore situations in which individuals are prevented from using a language in a cognitively and/or socially optimal way (e.g., non-native international students, refugees, people with language-related disorders). In such settings, language users’ objective and/or self-perceived proficiency level of the target language could influence various critical domains of their lives (e.g., academic achievement, self-esteem, difficulty in assimilation). Another approach would be to focus on potential biases and inequalities derived from language-based variations: e.g., speakers’ accents of various types (e.g., socio-economic, regional, first-language based) could lead to implicit prejudices or societal inequalities. In the current globally connected, yet disparate world, it has been becoming more urgent to address these issues with multidisciplinary theoretical and methodological approaches.

We invite applications from strong and motivated candidates who are prepared to take the leading role in this project. We envisage students have a background in Psychology or a relevant subject (e.g., Linguistics, Psycholinguistics, Sociolinguistics, TEFL/TESOL). The specialisation in the PhD would be in Psychology (PhD in Psychology). Students without a sufficient Psychology background may be offered to undertake one of our MSc programmes, or some of our MSc training modules, in their 1st year.