Editorial

TY - JOUR

T1 - Editorial

AU - MacDonald, Malcolm N.

AU - Ladegaard, Hans J.

N1 - Funding Information: Like Catalonia, Scotland is a country which can lay historical claim to three languages: Gaelic, Scots and English. Gaelic is the autochthonous language mostly still spoken in the North-West of the country and, in the wake of legislation for the creation of a Scottish Parliament being passed in 1998, a number of both primary and secondary Gaelic-medium schools were opened across the country. The status of Scots as a language in its own right has also been bolstered across a range of studies (e.g. Anderson, ; Corbett, ). The final study in this issue was carried out in Glasgow, in the Central Region of Scotland, which also happens to be Malcolm’s own family hometown. Here English and Scots intermingle, coloured by a highly distinctive Glaswegian dialect which, as in many cities, is even localised to different areas of the city. Like Barcelona, Glasgow hosts a number of refugee and migrant communities which have originated from many countries around the world, including the Polish community which is the ‘most common non-British nationality’ in Scotland (National Records for Scotland, ). As part of the Creative Multilingualism project, The Moon in narrative, metaphor and reason, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, Sally Zacharias zooms in on two ‘transnational’ Polish families who have settled in the city. As the title of the project would suggest, the focus of this study is upon the ways in which children use language ‘to express their thoughts in family discourse and the effect it has on other family members’. Zacharias takes a finely grained, contextualised case study approach in order to adopt a contemporary ecological approach to metaphor research. The theoretical framework for the paper combines metaphor theory and cognitive linguistics, with aspects of critical sociolinguistic theory which are staples of these pages; in particular symbolic power (e.g. Bourdieu, ; see also Zhu Hua & Jaworska, ) and symbolic competence (Kramsch, , ; see also Hansen-Pauly in this issue). In her study, Zacharias analyses examples of the way in which children negotiate the complex metaphorical meanings associated with the moon in their families. In so doing, she traces the shifts that take place in the power dynamics of each conversation in order to bring about changes in the family interaction and in so doing illustrates the highly creative use of ‘symbolic competence’ displayed by these Polish-English transnational children. This paper therefore provides further evidence that, far from being a deficit, these modes of bilingualism can be assets ‘that should be valued both in schools and in the wider society’.

PY - 2022/7

Y1 - 2022/7

UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85134810536

U2 - 10.1080/14708477.2022.2096374

DO - 10.1080/14708477.2022.2096374

M3 - Editorial

AN - SCOPUS:85134810536

SN - 1470-8477

VL - 22

SP - 413

EP - 418

JO - Language and Intercultural Communication

JF - Language and Intercultural Communication

IS - 4

ER -