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Acknowledgements

This volume is an output of the MEITS project (‘Multilingualism: Empowering Individuals, Transforming Societies’, www.meits.org), a flagship interdisciplinary project in Modern Languages which is part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s ‘Open World Research Initiative’ (OWRI): AH/N004671/1. The Principal Investigator is Professor Wendy Ayres-Bennett, University of Cambridge. The editor and contributors wish to acknowledge the generous support from the MEITS project which funded both the volume and the conference that underpinned it. The conference was held at the University of Southampton in June 2017.

The MEITS project brings together a substantial team of researchers working in six strands across a range of disciplines (including literary studies, history of ideas, sociolinguistics, education, language acquisition and cognitive neuroscience) and a large number of languages, including major world languages and minoritised languages. The project’s research questions centre on multilingualism, exploring its relationship with identity, culture, politics, history, education, health and wellbeing. More broadly, the project seeks to demonstrate the value of speaking more than one language to individuals, communities and society. The project involves researchers in the University of Cambridge, with partners in Queen’s University Belfast, the University of Edinburgh and the University of Nottingham. This volume and the conference from which is has emerged form part of the work of the sociolinguistic strand of MEITS which is based in Queen’s University Belfast (‘Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Multilingualism: Identity, Diversity and Social Cohesion’) and is led by Professor Janice Carruthers, to whom I would like to express special thanks for having invited me to lead on an aspect of the project. The strand explores linguistic and sociolinguistic questions relating to minoritised languages (notably Irish and Breton) as well as issues around variation and non-standard varieties. A particular focus is contemporary urban vernacular French (see Chapter 7 in this volume). This focus on language in the city in a French context was the original springboard for both this volume and the associated conference.

I would also like to thank particular colleagues for their assistance in bringing this edited volume to fruition: for their support in running the related conference, I would like to thank my former PhD student Daniel Morales, as well as colleagues Adriana Patiño Santos and Dick Vigers for their valuable insights as discussants which have informed ideas in the book. Thanks too to Darren Paffey for his meticulous eye in helping prepare the final manuscript of the volume. My fellow contributors have been extraordinarily cooperative with deadlines and requests from me; without them obviously this book would not have been possible. As ever I am particularly grateful to my former colleague and continuing friend, Patrick Stevenson, for his critical appraisal of early drafts of the book, and his thought-provoking contributions to the conference.

Clare Mar-Molinero

Southampton, 2019