Editorial [in Language and Intercultural Communication]

As is generally well known, the project of intercultural communication originated on two successive fronts: first as an extension of foreign language training programmes offered to new recruits by the American Foreign Service in the wake of the Second World War (Martin et al., 2012); and later in higher education across Europe as a merging of cultural studies with the teaching of modern and foreign languages (Byram, 1989). However, by the third decade of the twenty-first century, it has evolved into a very much broader-based area of concern: global in its reach, as illustrated by our previous special issue (van Maele & Jin, 2022); and extending beyond the classroom to encompass the ‘languaging’ of multicultural societies as well as the ethics of language and politics (e.g. Holmes et al., 2022). In this final issue of Volume 22 of Language and Intercultural Communication, we offer you a sometimes intriguing, sometimes controversial, selection of these ‘extra-pedagogical’ concerns of intercultural communication. Issue 6 begins with a paper which successfully blends psychological approaches to acculturation with social constructionist discourse analysis. We then bring together two papers which look at the ways in which intercultural communication is carried out on the internet to part celebrate, and part parody, the skills in and knowledge of Chinese language and culture by American microcelebrities. In a challenging essay, Marco Santello next draws on the work of Michel de Certeau as he attempts to restrain claims for the unbridled creativity of translanguaging. The final paper in this collection offers a critique of the current state of Indigenous language education in the Northern Territory of Australia. We round off the volume with our customary two book reviews