36.2910, Calls: Language Sciences - "Special Issue: Sociolinguistics and AI: Approaches, Themes and Insights" (Jrnl)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-36-2910. Tue Sep 30 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.2910, Calls: Language Sciences - "Special Issue: Sociolinguistics and AI: Approaches, Themes and Insights" (Jrnl)

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Date: 29-Sep-2025
From: Britta Schneider [bschneider at europa-uni.de]
Subject: Language Sciences - "Special Issue: Sociolinguistics and AI: Approaches, Themes and Insights" (Jrnl)


Journal: Language Sciences
Issue: Sociolinguistics and AI: Approaches, Themes and Insights
Call Deadline: 31-Dec-2026

Guest Editors:
Iker Erdocia (Dublin City University, Ireland - iker.erdocia at dcu.ie)
Bettina Migge (University College Dublin, Ireland –
bettinamigge at ucd.ie)
Britta Schneider (European University Viadrina, Germany –
bschneider at europa-uni.de)
Special Issue Information:
Machine-learning involving language (or AI) has recently become
ubiquitous in all aspects of life in many parts of the world due to a
commercially driven agenda by a handful of big tech companies from the
US and China. Although language is core to the functioning of AI
technologies and AI technologies are arguably affecting language
practices, understandings of language and research practices, there
is, to date, little published (socio)linguistic research available
that examines these changes. This Open Call Special Issue aims to
encourage exploration of the effects of AI on language in its social
context. We invite contributions from all branches of the broad area
of language in society and encourage papers that apply qualitative,
quantitative or mixed methods approaches, and examine written, spoken
or multimodal language and discursive practices. Case studies and
assessments of current trends, agendas and methodological changes are
equally welcome.
While sociolinguistics has a tradition of investigating the linguistic
practices of technology users and their social indexicalities (e.g.
Blommaert 2015; Androutsopoulos 2021), there is little research on how
linguistic contexts and understandings of language practices are being
reshaped by the rise in algorithmic machine-learning tools. Apart from
having only recently gained prominence in our lives, important reasons
for the relative absence of such work are difficulties accessing
algorithmic processes due to big tech secrecy and researchers lack of
training in computational approaches of language treatment.
Kelly-Holmes (2022) also highlights uncertainty about the
appropriateness of existing methodological approaches, such as
variationist sociolinguistics, for studying increasingly intertwined
human–machine-generated practices. While we acknowledge these issues,
we propose that the sociolinguistic toolkit offers multiple avenues
for tackling them.
One way forward is to explore how different actors (e.g. users,
companies, designers of algorithmic tools, media, researchers,
language authorities, activists and policymakers) in the current
context discursively position themselves to these tools and their
outputs using a language ideology approach (e.g. Gal & Irvine 2019).
Investigating emerging debates provides insights into individual
actors’ understandings of the changes and provides fine-grained
insight into the redistribution of existing power constellations
(Erdocia et al 2025).
Another line of investigation may involve investigating changing or
emerging linguistic practices such as algospeak, terminology used to
construct digital phenomena by the computational industry (Förster &
Skop 2025) or (promotional) media (Lind 2025), and the rise of new
discursive practices driven by technology affordances. This type of
research provides much-needed insight into the social and cultural
indexicalities of digital tools.
We also need case studies that examine how digital tools ‘deal with’,
reproduce, counter or co-construct common sociolinguistic phenomena
such as variation, multilingual practices (Schneider 2022), and
socially stigmatised linguistic practices (Koenecke et al. 2020; Markl
2020) and languages with few digital resources (Fleisig et al. 2024),
including users’ practices of resistance and accommodation (Klug et
al. 2023) among other aspects. Such studies can provide much-needed
empirical insights into the dynamics of how language practices and
power dynamics are being (re)shaped in this new context.
There is also a need for detailed critical investigation from a
sociolinguistic perspective of digital technologies such as Large
Language Models and their components and processes such as data sets
and their preparation (e.g. Baack 2024; Migge & Schneider 2025), the
design of algorithms and processes such as annotation and training
(Seaver 2019) and how algorithms impact on the distribution of genres
and features (Georgakopoulou, Iversen & Stage 2020). It will not only
provide insights into the make-up and conceptualisation of language
that undergird this technology (Erdocia et al. 2024), but will also
help to better understand how material language practices are changing
due to LLMs, how this impacts on sociolinguistic hierarchies and, in
more general terms, on language assemblages (Pennycook 2024) and the
ecology of language.
We invite contributions (case studies and assessments of current
trends, agendas and methodological changes) from all branches of the
broad area of language in society and encourage papers that apply
qualitative, quantitative or mixed methods approaches, and examine
written, spoken or multimodal language practices. The overarching aims
of this Special Issue are to explore the multiple ways in which
sociolinguistic investigation can contribute to shedding light on this
new context and to promote critical assessment of current
methodological approaches, agendas and thematic foci to assert our
relevance in this post-digital context.
Manuscript Submission Information:
The submission portal will be made available for authors to submit
from 1st January 2026.
The submission deadline for the Special Issue is 31st December 2026.
Articles will be published continually throughout this time as soon as
they are accepted.
Please refer to the Guide for Authors to prepare your manuscript and
select the article type of “VSI: Sociolinguistics and AI” when
submitting your manuscript online.
For any questions/concerns regarding the topics, please reach out to
the Guest Editors.
References:
Androutsopoulos, Jannis. 2021. Polymedia in interaction. Pragmatics
and Society 12:707–24. doi.org/10.1075/ps.21069.int
Baack, Stefan. 2024. A Critical Analysis of the Largest Source for
Generative AI Training Data: Common Crawl. The 2024 ACM Conference on
Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 2199–2208. Rio de Janeiro
Brazil: ACM, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1145/3630106.3659033
Blommaert, Jan. 2015. Commentary: Superdiversity old and new. Language
& Communication 44:82–88. doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2015.01.003
Erdocia, Iker, Migge, Bettina & Schneider, Britta. 2024. Language is
not a data set—Why overcoming ideologies of dataism is more important
than ever in the age of AI. Journal of Sociolinguistics 28(5): 20-25.
https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12680
Erdocia, Iker, Schneider, Britta & Bettina Migge. 2025. Language in
the age of AI technology: From human to non-human authenticity, from
public governance to privatised assemblages. Language in Society,
Published online 2025. doi.org/10.1017/S004740452500017X
Fleisig, Eve, Smith, Genevieve, Bossi, Madeline, Rustagi, Ishita Yin,
Xavier & Dan Klein. 2024. Linguistic bias in ChatGPT: language models
reinforce dialect discrimination. arXiv 2406.08818v1.
Förster & Skop 2025. Between fact and fairy: tracing the hallucination
metaphor in AI discourse (Special Issues: AI Technology as Human
Interaction – Linguistic and Cultural Framings of AI as Communicative
Infrastructure). AI & Society, Published online 2025.
doi.org/10.1007/s00146-025-02392-w
Gal, Susan & Judith T. Irvine J T. 2019. Signs of difference. Language
and ideology in social life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Georgakopoulou, Alexandra, Iversen, Stefan & Carsten Stage. 2020.
Quantified Storytelling: A Narrative Analysis of Metrics on Social
Media. Palgrave Pivot. Cham: Springer International Publishing AG.
Kelly-Holmes, Helen. 2022. Sociolinguistics in an increasingly
technologized reality. Sociolinguistica 36:99–110.
doi.org/10.1515/soci-2022-0005.
Klug, Daniel, Steen, Ella & Kathryn Yurechko. 2023. How algorithm
awareness impacts algospeak use on TikTok. Companion Proceedings of
the ACM Web Conference 2023 doi.org/10.1145/3543873.3587355
Koenecke, Allison, Namb, Andrew, Lake, Emily, Nudell, Joe, Quartey,
Minnie, Mengesha, Zion, Toupsc, Connor, Rickford, John R., Jurafsky,
Dan & Sharad Goeld. 2020. Racial disparities in automated speech
recognition. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117:
7684-7689.
Lind, Miriam. 2025. Alexa’s agency: a corpus‐based study on the
linguistic attribution of humanlikeness to voice user interfaces
(Special Issues: AI Technology as Human Interaction – Linguistic and
Cultural Framings of AI as Communicative Infrastructure). AI &
SOCIETY, Published, online 2025. doi.org/10.1007/s00146-025-02243-8
Markl, Nina. 2022. Language variation and algorithmic bias:
understanding algorithmic bias in British English automatic speech
recognition. ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and
Transparency. FAccT ’22 521–534. doi: 10.1145/3531146.3533117
Migge, Bettina& Britta Schneider. 2025. The material making of
language as practice of global domination and control: continuations
from European colonialism to AI (Special Issues: AI Technology as
Human Interaction – Linguistic and Cultural Framings of AI as
Communicative Infrastructure). AI & SOCIETY, Published online 2025.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-025-02389-5
Schneider, Britta. 2022. Multilingualism and AI – the regimentation of
language in the age of digital capitalism. Signs and Society 10(3),
362 - 387. doi.org/10.1086/721757
Seaver, Nick. 2019. Captivating Algorithms: Recommender Systems as
Traps. Journal of Material Culture 24 (4): 421–36.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183518820366

Linguistic Field(s): Anthropological Linguistics
                     Applied Linguistics
                     Linguistic Theories
                     Pragmatics
                     Sociolinguistics




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