EDITORIAL

Abstract

Dear Sustainable Multilingualism community,

Welcome to the 26th issue of the journal.

In his book The Crucible of Language, Vyvyan Evans wrote:

“Like many other species, we are minded creatures: we store representations of the world around us, and of our own internal bodily states. But unlike other species,  we also have language: an unheralded means of packaging these representations – our thoughts – and rendering them public. < …> Making thought public is the hallmark of communication” (2015, p. 3).

The 20 researchers who chose our journal to make their thoughts public, focus on diverse aspects of multilingual theory and practices and come from 8 different countries of Europe and Asia (East, South, Southeast, and Western Asia).

Multilingual Practices in Language Policy Implementation section presents the study by Julia Cervera Moya and Julia Valeiras-Jurado who discuss multimodality and mediation in the policies regulating the official schools of languages and present the case of the Valencian community in Spain, approaching mediation from the perspective of social semiotic multimodal analysis.

Society. Identity. Language Maintenance section features three studies. Alona Shyba and Ineta Dabašinskienė discuss the change in language attitudes and practices among Ukrainian war refugees who arrived in Lithuania seeking for shelter. The study results reveal the complex transformations that female research participants-refugees undergo, having experienced “the traumatic experiences of enemy’s occupation, refuge, lost family members, and homes” and aiming to adapt in the host country, “initially relying on Russian to facilitate communication”, then trying to “gradually transition to Ukrainian”, feeling the “urgent need to preserve the Ukrainian language and culture, as the most powerful factors of their national identity”. Angelica Peccini explores “Language attitudes and self-reflection in immigrant women through the Lithuanian language: A prism of identities in motion” and Omar Mohammad-Ameen Ahmad Hazaymeh explores “Bilingualism in the Jordanian-Russian family residing in Jordan and its impact on communication between its members”.

Language Use and Education in Multilingual and Multicultural Settings section presents four articles: the study by Aybek Sibel and Cem Can focuses on formulaic sequences, investigating “the use of the most frequent 3- and  4-word lexical bundles in the TICLE, the Turkish component of the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE), and the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (LOCNESS) as the control parallel corpus in their research on multiword units or formulaic utterances in their article “Comparative analysis of lexical bundles in academic writings by native English speakers and Turkish EFL learners”, whereas Nivedita Malini Barua explores the role of home language(s) in developing reading comprehension in English in a group of tertiary level ESL students in a university in India. The research results prove that working collaboratively and using “their own home language/s for discussion and taking notes” result in more detailed notes and summaries by students. A group of researchers from Malaysia – Lichao Guo, Nik Aloesnita Binti Nik Mohd Alwi, Abdullah Adnan Bin Mohamed, Li Changlin – present a systematic review of “cross-linguistic influence in additional language acquisition, focusing on how learners’ awareness of differences between their primary and target languages impacts their writing competence.” Jing Xuan Tian presents a pilot study aiming to determining how Mandarin speakers (MS) in Hong Kong acquire English (L2) and Cantonese (L3) pronunciation features, “how the three languages interact in their language learning process”, trying to “identify the pronunciation-related adjustment approaches that MS use to overcome L2 and L3 pronunciation challenges.

Issues in Translation section presents two studies: Aurelija Leonavičienė investigates censorship and self-censorship in interwar and soviet-era translations from French into Lithuania and concludes that “All the examples of translations of canonical French literature into Lithuanian suggest that during the interwar, censorship primarily targeted politically unacceptable revolutionary parts of the originals; whereas during the Soviet era, religious, political and ethical censorship became more widespread.” Lew Ya Ling, Naginder Kaur, Huzaifah A Hamid, and Hoe Foo Terng present their study “Guiding learners in using machine translation for second and foreign language writing: the case at Malaysian higher education”.

I hope you will find all the presented studies scientifically engaging, interesting, useful, and enriching.

However, before ending this brief Editorial, I will use this opportunity to introduce one event which appeared concurrently with this issue: the 8^th international conference Sustainable Multilingualism 2025 (SM25), organized by the Institute of Foreign Languages of Vytautas Magnus University and the Language Teachers’ Association of Lithuania and held in Kaunas, Lithuania, on May 28–30, 2025.

Although the primary focus of the SM25 was on language reclamation, preservation, and sustainability, as in the previous conferences, a wide range of themes on the key issues of multilingualism, the development of plurilingual competence, and language education were also addressed. Five keynote speakers from three continents honored our conference and presented their research on diversity of themes:

• prof. dr. Karina Firkavičiūtė (Head of the Lithuanian Karaim Association of Culture, a civil servant of the EU Research Executive Agency, musicologist, and native Karaim language speaker) introduced Karaim — a Turkic West Kipchak group language spoken today exclusively in Lithuania by approximately 30 people in the community of about 200 people — in her keynote Karaim Language. Challenges to Survive. 
• A South Saami and Scottish Gaelic poet, traditional yoik singer, writer, literary scholar, and teacher Johan Sandberg McGuinne gave a keynote From Stoere Vaerie to Ubmejen jiännuo — Traditional Yoiking as a Tool in Saami Language Revitalisation. We had an opportunity to enjoy yoiking — traditional Saami singing, “a powerful tool in the ongoing language revitalisation process within the Saami homelands.”
• dr. John W. Schwieter (researcher of cognitive and neuroscientific approaches to multilingualism and language acquisition, professor at Wilfrid Laurier University and McMaster University, Canada) discussed The Bilingual mental lexicon, language switching, and cognitive effects. I am happy to announce that professor has accepted our invitation to join the Editorial Board of our journal.
• dr. Jūratė Ruzaitė (a researcher in sociolinguistics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, language and ideology, researcher in Semantika-2 project that developed software for automatic detection of offensive online comments in Lithuanian, Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania) presented her keynote These are not just words: Hate speech, propaganda, and novel words for old prejudices.
• dr. dr. Ghil’ad Zuckermann (listed among Australia's top 30 ”living legends of research" by “The Australian” (2024), the recipient of the Rubinlicht Prize for his outstanding contribution to Yiddish scholarship in 2023, the author of Revivalistics: From the Genesis of Israeli to language reclamation in Australia and Beyond (2020) and many other books and articles, professor at Flinders University (Adelaide), Australian Catholic University (Sydney), Australia) presented a keynote on Language reclamation and cross-fertilization: The emergence of a "Revival Language" called Israeli. It is with great honor that I acknowledge that professor Ghil’ad Zuckermann has been a member of Sustainable Multilingualism Editorial Board since2020.

The program featured two plenary sessions and parallel sections included over 120 presenters from nearly 20 countries worldwide who, together with 15 non-presenting participants, were engaged in discussions on more than 60 oral presentations and 15 poster presentations, ensuring a multidisciplinary, multilingual, and multicultural approach to sustainable multilingualism.

A round table discussion From policy to practice: University alliances and Plurilingualism rallied representatives from five university alliances to discuss issues of multilingualism in the university alliances. The conference languages were Lithuanian and English, but over 20 parallel panel sessions included presentations in French, German, Latvian, Spanish and Ukrainian, apart from Lithuanian and English.

Several presenters and keynote speakers will have their research published in upcoming issues of the journal. You are welcome to follow us on the journal website. Our 9^th Sustainable Multilingualism conference will be held in the spring of 2027 – hope to see you here, in Kaunas, Lithuania.

Traditionally, welcoming the 26th issue of the journal, I would like to take the opportunity to express my gratitude to all contributors: the authors who chose our journal to share their valuable research, competent reviewers who provided valuable constructive feedback and ideas for manuscript improvement, and the whole editorial team: executive editors and the technical support group (proofreaders, layout designers, and translators) whose conscientious efforts, thorough work, and belief in the mission of the journal allow us all to pursue the goal of sustaining multilingualism.