State of the field

Ten years ago, the most-studied topics in this field were about the structure of language: its grammar, its history, how languages relate to one another. The field's attention has moved since then. The topics that climbed most are now about language in use. Translanguaging, the study of how multilingual people draw on all their languages at once, is the clearest case, far higher in the ranking than it was in 2014. Linguistic landscape, the study of language in public space, rose with it, and so did the work that ties language to identity, race, and power, including Raciolinguistics, though that one starts from so few papers in 2014 that its position is real but easy to move. Less of the field's work now goes to the older, formal strands. Construction Grammar and Universal Grammar sit lower than they did, and so does the language-history tradition of Indo-European, Saussure, and Philology. My reading is that the field has shifted from studying the system to studying the speaker. The direction is in the table. The explanation is mine.

The study of language learning moved in the same direction, toward the learner's own experience. For most of the 2010s, the organising ideas were about motivation: the future self a learner imagines, and their willingness to speak. Those ideas are still studied. But they have stopped climbing, and both now sit just short of their own past peaks. What rose instead is more immediate. Learner engagement, how involved a student actually is in the work, is the single largest climber on the whole table, and anxiety about using the language rose with it. The interest moved from what a learner wants over years to what a learner feels in the moment.

A few of the topics that built second-language research are being passed without ever shrinking. Second language writing is the clearest example. It publishes more now than it did a decade ago, and still ranks lower, because the work around it grew faster. Study abroad is the one real loss: it produces fewer papers now than at its 2018 peak, a fall that lines up with the closing of borders and campuses from 2020 to 2022, though all the table can show is the decline and not the cause.

And then there is what had no place here at all. ChatGPT and generative AI are absent from the 2014 record, because they did not yet exist as questions the field could ask. They do now.

Rose Translanguaging, Linguistic landscape, Raciolinguistics, Linguistic Identity, Language teacher identity, Social Justice, Learner engagement, Language Anxiety
Fell Construction Grammar, Universal Grammar, Indo-European, Saussure, Philology, Second language writing, Study abroad
Below their own recent best Ideal L2 self, Willingness to communicate
New this decade ChatGPT, Generative AI