The aim of this cross-Council IAA project is to develop digital tools (including an app) that enable social networks of sparse communities of interest (such as the Gaelic community in Glasgow) to form and grow. Working in partnership with Glasgow City Council (GCC), the app will be used to support the ambition of GCC’s new Gaelic Language Plan to make Gaelic more accessible, more widely spoken, more visible and more celebrated in Glasgow than in any other city in the world. The digital hub proposed through this IAA will help make that a reality. 
 
The long-term ambition is to scale-up the project so that the prototype can be used and adapted for other multilingual contexts. The Welsh Government has already expressed an interest in the app project as a tool to help it achieve its strategic goal of increasing the number of Welsh speakers to 1 million by 2050. Bernie O’Rourke was an invited speaker at a conference in Wales in July 2024 to talk about the project. This is a high-profile event which was attended by policy makers from within the Welsh government. There is potential also to extend the project to other European cities (Catalan in Barcelona, Irish in Belfast, Dublin) with similar ambitions. 
 
The app can also be adapted to other multilingual settings (e.g., Polish, Spanish, Chinese-speaking communities in Glasgow) to support the quality of life of diverse communities and their multilingual needs. The potential of the app for other language learners more broadly including students of modern languages will also be explored. 
 
The research underpinning this IAA project draws on existing interdisciplinary work involving Prof Bernie O’Rourke (SMLC), Prof Qunshan Zhao (Urban Big Data Centre) Prof Lei Zhang and Prof Muhammad Imran (School of Engineering) through which they co-designed an interdisciplinary methodology to collect conceptual and geolinguistic information on multilingual cities (O’Rourke et al. in press)*. They tested this approach in the city of Glasgow to understand when and where Gaelic is used in an urban setting, with a focus on identifying key spaces of usage in the city. 
 
The interdisciplinary team for the IAA will be further expanded to include Dr Tim Storer (School of Computing Science) and newly appointed Research Associate, Dr Erin McNulty (SMLC), one of our PhD graduates in the Language & Society Cluster in the School. 
 
*O'Rourke, B., Zhao, Q., Dayán-Fernández, A., Dickson, E., Wang, R., Wang, M., Zhang, L. & Imran, M. A. (in press 2024) Integrated Geospatial Methods for Multilingual Cities: Combining GPS, Electronically Activated Recorder, and Map-based Ethnographic Interviews. Journal of Research Methods in Applied Linguistics (special issue on interdisciplinary approaches). 

 

 

First published: 16 September 2024

<< News