“Makers, advocates, and users of language policy as co-creators of sociolinguistic research: onward migrants in London”

This project will establish the linguistic challenges that OMs face in their everyday lives, the linguistic needs that they have, and the extent to which these are known to and met by existing policy makers and policy advocates. The project team will work closely with the external partners identified above as well as with focus groups of OMs to produce a policy brief and a research agenda. The policy brief will summarise research findings and provide recommendations for closing the gaps in linguistic support that may currently exist; ways to reach OMs as particular subsets of citizens whose languages are often ignored or rejected by society; and, anticipated benefits of doing so. The research agenda will identify specific avenues for further investigation into the link between language and onward migration, including funding opportunities, and details on how the working relationship between the project team and the external partners will be developed in the future. Scholars in migration studies have identified language as a key element that shapes the migratory experiences of OMs. Speaking little or no English can be a motivation to migrate to the UK, as OMs seek to improve their language skills, but also a factor contributing to precarity, as OMs become entangled in potentially exploitative labour relations with co-ethnic and/or co-national migrants (Dimitriadis, 2020; McIlwaine, 2020; Mapril, 2021). Good knowledge of English can facilitate social integration and equitable access to public services, the development of community structures, and the geographic dispersal of OMs outside negatively perceived ethnic enclaves (Bhachu,1985). OMs also use the languages they acquire in their places of origin and their various migratory destinations to better their financial and social situations (Márquez-Reiter & Patiño-Santos, 2021). Existing works, however, do not focus on language or any of the three OM groups with which we propose to work. Onward migration remains underexplored from a (socio)linguistic point of view. What is more, OMs are commonly left out of official statistics and datasets regarding migration (Tyldum & Johnson, 2014), and are therefore ignored by (language) policy makers both in their country/-ies of citizenship and in the UK. For example, the Greek and Italian Consulates in London do not provide any services or information in Albanian or Portuguese for citizens who may speak little or no Greek or Italian, respectively.