Bilingualism: challenges and opportunities, with Yaron Matras

The second session of the Bilingualism series is the conversation between Professor Yaron Matras and Dr Julio Villa-Garcia about the circumstances, the effects and the language contact and bilingualism on individuals, languages and societies. They will discuss how languages influence one another, how we can study language contact phenomena, and what generalisations can be made about the impact of language contact and bilingualism on the shape of languages; and what the policy implications are for a multilingual society such as the UK, and how we can raise awareness of multilingualism and meet the needs of multilingual communities.

Yaron Matras is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at the University of Manchester and Honorary Professor at the Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics. He studied Linguistics, languages of the Near East, and Germanic linguistics in Jerusalem, Tübingen, and Hamburg, where he wrote his MA thesis on Kurdish and his PhD thesis on Romani. He is one of the leading authorities on the Romani language and on language contact. He has led numerous research projects at the university of Manchester and developed online digital resources for language contact, endangered languages, Romani, Kurdish, and Arabic, and he has published widely on those subjects. In 2009 he founded the Multilingual Manchester unit which became an international model for research and public engagement around urban multilingualism.

Julio Villa-García is a researcher and lecturer in syntax, grammar and Spanish Linguistics at the University of Manchester. He studied at several institutions in Spain, the UK and the USA, where he received his PhD in Theoretical and Experimental Linguistics from the University of Connecticut in 2012. Since then, he has held permanent academic positions in the USA and the UK. He has published a book on Spanish syntax as well as numerous professional articles on syntax and its acquisition, especially in bilingual contexts.