Oxford World English Symposium 2022 recap [podcast]

Episode 72 of The Oxford Comment was hosted by Rachel Havard.

Dr Danica Salazar is World English Executive Editor for Oxford Languages, where she leads editorial projects for world varieties of English, as well as researches and writes World English entries for the Oxford English Dictionary. She publishes and lectures regularly on lexicography, phraseology, World Englishes and Spanish- and English-language teaching. Dr Salazar is the author of Lexical Bundles in Native and Non-native Scientific Writing (2014), co-editor of Biomedical English: A Corpus-based Approach (2013), and co-author of several language textbooks for learners of Spanish.

Dr Lisa Lim is Associate Professor in the School of Education at Curtin University in Perth, having held positions at the National University of Singapore, the University of Amsterdam, the University of Hong Kong, where she was Head of the School of English from 2016-2018, and in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Sydney, where she was Chair of Department from August 2019 to December 2020. Her interests centre around contact dynamics in New, especially Asian, Englishes, in multilingual ecologies; issues of language shift, endangerment, and postvernacular vitality in minority and endangered language communities; and the sociolinguistics of globalisation, with attention to migration and mobility, computer-mediated communication, and urban linguistic diversity, and their impact on contact dynamics. She is co-author of Languages in Contact (with Umberto Ansaldo, Cambridge University Press, 2016), and writes a fortnightly ‘Language Matters’ column for Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post’s Sunday Post Magazine.

Michael Proffitt is Chief Editor, Oxford English Dictionary. He was born and educated in Edinburgh. After studying English language and literature at Oxford, he joined the Oxford English Dictionary project in 1989. He managed the OED’s new words team for over a decade, introducing programmes to enhance OED’s monitoring and coverage of neologisms and of English worldwide. He later worked on the project to develop a new editing system for the dictionary, and to direct the editorial teams in establishing OED’s priorities for online publication, before succeeding John Simpson as Chief Editor in 2013.

Dr Phillip Louw is Publishing Manager: Dictionaries and Dictionary Data. He completed a D.Litt. in lexicography (focussing on school dictionaries) at the University of Stellenbosch. He started his career as lecturer in the Afrikaans and Dutch department there, after which he worked as co-editor of the WAT (Dictionary of the Afrikaans Language) for seven years. In 2005 he started as senior editor at Oxford University Press Southern Africa where he has worked on a range of bilingual and monolingual dictionaries, of which the Oxford South African Concise Dictionary is the flagship. Currently he is the publishing manager for dictionaries and dictionary data at OUP SA, with additional support duties in the rest of Africa and in Australia. Beyond OUP, he served on the Afrikaans language commission from 2013 to 2019 and was co-author of the 11th edition of the AWS (Afrikaans wordlist and spelling rules). In 2019 he started a second stint on the board of the African Association for Lexicography (AFRILEX) and was also on the scientific committee for the European Association for Lexicography (EURALEX) conference in 2021.

This episode was produced by Steven Filippi and Abi Bradfield-Taylor.