Honorary Professor awarded Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship

Professor Colin H. Williams, Honorary Professor at Cardiff University’s School of Welsh, has been awarded a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship.

The prestigious award has been made to enable Professor Williams to carry on his research on The Transformation of Official Language Regimes as a Senior Research Associate of the Von Hügel Institute, St Edmund’s College, University of Cambridge.

The focus is on minority language policy as an expression of human respect and dignity and as an attempt to reduce structural strains arising from former discriminatory approaches to the treatment of non-hegemonic languages within the modern state system.

This project is a comparative analysis of language policies in selected European and Canadian jurisdictions which will focus on how in-migration influences the development of official language planning and promotion; the provision made for new speakers; the strengthening of atrophying networks; and variations of the degree of compliance by designated authorities with official language regulations.

A sociolinguist of international renown, Professor Williams has been active in European minority language networks and has contributed to government policy development in several jurisdictions. His latest volume Language Policy and the New Speaker Challenge is due for publication by Cambridge University Press later this year (autumn 2022).