Multilinguistics

Multilinguistics

The technological transformations associated with the era of digital communication and information transfer are altering the way languages are written, spoken and brought into contact. Social media, large language models and machine translation are concrete examples of this process, whose pace appears to exceed the descriptive capacity of linguistic theory.

The Multilinguistics project is a multi-front research project devoted to the study of these transformations. In the immediate term, its scope covers Spanish and Portuguese, in contact with English, in the Ibero-American space; this scope may be widened or redefined according to the interests and participation of its academic collaborators. The project is maintained by Editora Argus Kepheus.

An integrative approach

Language change associated with digital technologies cuts across levels of analysis that linguistics usually treats separately. The Multilinguistics project therefore adopts six disciplinary domains as complementary lenses on a single phenomenon:

  1. Structural: which forms, constructions and meanings emerge or change in digital communication.
  2. Historical: how these innovations spread, stabilise or disappear, and how contact between languages intensifies.
  3. Cognitive: how technological mediation bears on the acquisition, processing and production of language.
  4. Sociocultural: how communities, identities, norms and power relations are reconfigured in digital environments.
  5. Mathematical-computational: how corpora, statistical models and language technologies make it possible to measure and model change, and how these same technologies contribute to producing it.
  6. Epistemological: what evidence warrants the claim that a language has changed, and where the limits of that inference lie.

A seventh domain is devoted to integrating the results obtained through the different lenses. Each research front applies these lenses to a delimited aspect of digital change.

Current state of the research

The research is in progress. The first expected result is a scoping review of the literature on how digital transformations affect Spanish, Portuguese and English, organised in three themes: language contact on digital platforms; artificial intelligence and language models; and digital writing and register.

The review follows the PRISMA-ScR guidelines for scoping reviews and provides for the selection of studies by two independent screeners. It aims to map the concepts, phenomena, data and methods used in the literature, and to identify the gaps that will guide more delimited studies in the different fronts.

Collaboration

The Multilinguistics project is seeking co-authors for its research. The Collaborate page describes the profiles sought, and the About page gives the editor's contact.

Where to go next