“Multilingualism and Translanguaging in Australian Cities” Conference
Date: Monday, 24 November 2025 Location: Perth, The University of Western Australia (Crawley Campus) This is the first call for abstracts for a conference on multilingualism and the dynamics of language in Australian cities. Please, mark the dates on your calendars. This project aims to investigate the presence of writing in languages other than English (LOTEs) in Australian cities. Taking the ‘city’ and urban areas as a locus of communication, it looks at multilingualism and translingual writing in major urban centres. While research in LOTEs in Australia has focused on migrant and missionary writing, much extant literature that was not written in English has been largely ignored. These texts include works of literature but also materials such as personal letters, diaries, and newspapers. Using tools from digital humanities and archival and heritage studies, this project seeks to reveal the “hidden” multilingualism of different writers in and around Australian citie...