Prof Manne Bylund and his research collaborator, extraordinary professor Panos Athanasopoulos, are in high spirits after receiving the good news that their research project on multilingual decision-making has received sizeable funding from the Swedish Research Council. The research funding is worth ZAR8 million and will go a long way towards the ultimate success of their research efforts.
The research project concerns findings that multilingual individuals may make different decisions (on risk taking, morality) depending on the language they use for thinking. So, if you are presented with a risk assessment scenario in your second language, you may make a different decision than if you were presented with the same scenario in your first language. So far, the research on multilingual decision-making has not been carried out in multilingual societies but focused mainly on monolingual societies in the global North. Prof Bylund explains that this is a glaring omission, and whether these findings can be generalised to contexts where people regularly switch between multiple languages, like in South Africa, is not really known.
The approval for the research funding did not happen overnight, and it took the researchers a while to put the application together, followed by an eight-month waiting period. With collaborating Prof Athanasopoulos being based in Sweden, the project bears all the hallmarks of an equitable collaboration between the global South (South Africa) and the global North (Sweden). The research project also came at an opportune time given the continued drive at Stellenbosch University to steer collaboration between institutions of higher education locally, nationally and internationally. “It’s a great opportunity for us to put the department and the university at the forefront of research into the multilingual mind. There is almost no participation out of Africa on this topic, even though the continent has the highest degree of multilingualism globally,” says Prof Bylund. This research will certainly give linguistic research and Stellenbosch University an advantage on a global scale.
The project duration will be four years and the researchers will garner assistance from other researchers in the respective countries. Funds will go to experiment costs (data collection, remuneration, and programming); research assistantships; substitute teaching; and travelling. Upon completion of the project, the research findings will be published in scholarly journals, with subscriptions paid through open access funds. This means the findings will be freely available to anyone interested in reading up on them.
On behalf of the Department of General Linguistics, the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, and Stellenbosch University, we wish the researchers success with their research project and any other projects in the future.
Thank you for upholding the reputation of Stellenbosch University as a research-intensive university on a global scale.
Read more on the subject matter on multilingualism:
Africa’s linguistic diversity goes largely unnoticed in research on multilingualism
Read more about the faculty’s successes and the recent Research and Innovation awards at:
https://www.sun.ac.za/english/Lists/news/DispForm.aspx?ID=10964
Read more about the Faculty’s research focus areas and researchers at:
https://arts.sun.ac.za/research-clusters
Find out more about the Swedish Research Council at:
https://www.vr.se/english.html