How to marginalize risks when combining Applied Linguistics and Word of the Year initatives

Word of the year initiatives can increase societal awareness of Applied Linguistics. By reflecting the public discourse of the past twelve months, words of the year can literally show what moved people most and how a society ticks. Conferences on the topic, e.g. the “Key words Conference” in Warsaw 2017, demonstrate the growing interest of scholars in the area where Applied Linguistcs is tangible for society-at-large. At a first glance, this seems to be good news for re-popularizing Applied Linguistics, but a closer look provides evidence that such initiatives entail various risks. Analyzing word of the year evaluation processes around the globe reveals several main risks. First, processes merely based on public propositions, e.g. with opinion polls, are highly engaged with society-at-large but lack grounding in empirical data and transparent evaluation methods. Second, processes that exclusively draw on corpus data and research methods risk excluding the topical view of society-at-large, let alone the contribution of language professionals. Third, the inherent need for funding and promoting word of the year initiatives bears the risk of getting absorbed by exhaustive engagements with social media and community management. In my presentation, I define the key concepts of word of the year initiatives (part 1). Based on the largest corpus of Swiss public discourse data, Swiss AL (2), I explain the evaluation process for the Swiss words of the year 2017 in German, French, and Italian as a combination of corpus analysis, public opinion poll, and a jury consisting of language professionals (3). I then discuss the advantages and difficulties of transgressing and combining disciplinary boundaries with popular AL-informed initiatives (4) and conclude by showing which measures could, from both theoretical and practical perspectives, raise the value added by twinning word of the year initiatives and AL while marginalising the inherent risks