Interdisciplinary Sociolinguistic Forays

Dear Colleagues,

As Guest Editors, we are pleased to announce for the launch of a Special Issue of the open access journal Languages on the topic of ‘Interdisciplinary Sociolinguistic Forays,’ which aims to present the current state of various research fields in which sociolinguistics interacts closely with other disciplines, including the social sciences, the medical sciences, and technology. We present therefore a series of specializations that operate on a range of issues, utilizing insights provided by sociolinguistics to advance other fields of knowledge, and enabling sociolinguistics to enter into an epistemological dialogue with demography, politics, social psychology, digital communication, economy, education, and clinical linguistics.

The presentation of these specialties highlights the expansion of research horizons that sociolinguistics has experienced over the past two decades. Conventional sociolinguistics continues to focus on the study of linguistic and discursive variation and diversity in relation to social, contextual, cultural, and sociocognitive factors; however, there exists an interdisciplinary sociolinguistics that applies this established knowledge to other realities experienced by societies and individuals.

Several approaches to the topic of this Special Issue are available as follows:

1. Digital Sociolinguistics;
2. Language Demography;
3. Sociolinguistics and Economy;
4. Sociolinguistics of Humor;
5. Citizen Sociolinguistics;
6. Language Awareness;
7. Clinic Sociolinguistics;
8. Glottopolitics;
9. Educational Sociolinguistics;
10. Interactional Sociolinguistics.

‘Interdisciplinary Sociolinguistic Forays’ presents ten articles addressing both theoretical and methodological aspects, although research methods and techniques in each of the analyzed fields take center stage. For the presentation of each specialty, this volume features internationally renowned specialists who have successfully applied their sociolinguistic expertise to diverse social situations and needs=, enabling the monograph to complement the existing literature by focusing on under-explored areas of knowledge.

The deadline for the submission of abstracts is June 25, 2026. Please send your proposals to the Guest Editors (nicolas.moreno@uah.es; jana.weckesser@uni-heidelberg.de; francisco.moreno@uni-heidelberg.de). Abstracts will be reviewed by the Guest Editors for the purposes of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the Special Issue, and decisions about the appropriateness of the topic will be made by July 15, 2026. The final deadline for manuscript submission will be January 10, 2027. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer review.

We look forward to producing a compelling and original collection on this exciting topic.

Tentative completion schedule:

• Abstract submission deadline: September 15, 2026
• Notification of abstract acceptance: October 15, 2026
• Full manuscript deadline: May 10, 2027

References:

Ball, M.J. (2005). Clinical Sociolinguistics. Oxford: Wiley.

Davies, C.E. (2017). “Sociolinguistic approaches to humor”. In S. Attardo (Ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Language and Humor (pp. 472-488). London: Routledge.

Kelly-Holmes, H. (2022). Sociolinguistics in an increasingly technologized reality. Sociolinguistica, 36, 99-110. doi.org/10.1515/soci-2022-0005.

Falck, O., Heblich, S., Lameli, A., & Südekum, J. (2012). Dialects, cultural identity, and economic exchange. Journal of urban economics, 72(2-3), 225-239.

Markl, N. (2022). Language variation and algorithmic bias: understanding algorithmic bias in British English automatic speech recognition. ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. FAccT ’22, 521-534. doi: 10.1145/3531146.3533117.

Moreno-Fernández, F. (2024). Language Demography. London: Routledge.

Narvaja de Arnoux, E. (2000). “La Glotopolítica: transformaciones de un campo disciplinario”. In Lenguajes: teorías y prácticas (pp. 95-109). Buenos Aires: Gobierno de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires.

O’Sullivan, J. Amador-Moreno, C., & Barron, A (eds.) (2025). Corpus Linguistics for Sociolinguistics. London: Routledge.

Preston, D. (2017). Folk Linguistics and Language Awareness. London: Routledge.

Rampton, B. (2019). “Interactional sociolinguistics”. In K. Tusting (Ed.) The Routledge handbook of linguistic ethnography (pp. 13-27). London: Routledge.

Rüdiger, S., & Dayter, D. (2020). Corpus Approaches to Social Media. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Rymes, B. (2020). How we talk about language. Exploring Citizen Sociolinguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Prof. Dr. Francisco Moreno-Fernández
Dr. Nicolás Moreno Martín de Nicolás
Guest Editors

Jana Weckesser
Guest Editor Assistant

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Languages is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• sociolinguistics
• applied linguistics
• sociology of language