On December 7th, Professor Xu Daming from Bilingualism Research Lab, Western Sydney University, was invited to deliver a speech on the emergence and development of speech community restructuring theory. The lecture was charied by A/Prof Ronghua Yang, Assistant Dean of the college and about 80 people from different universities and colleges attended the lecture.

Prof. Xu started the lecture with concepts of sociolinguistics and illustrated that though sociolinguistics did explain a series of phenomena of linguistic variation and change and social bilingualism, it, restricted by the static research framework of linguistics, has increasingly showed its limitation. Faced with this situation, scholars abroad and at home have applied the speech community theory to the linguistic study in the large-scale and high-speed urbanized environment, opening a new field of urban language study. Based on the empirical study, they have proposed speech community restructuring theory, which has been the complementing and deepening of the sociolinguistics. Then Prof. Xu took Kunqu dialect in Baotou as an example to elaborate on the emergence and development of speech community.

The whole presentation was lively and interactive. Prof. Xu explained the profound in simple terms, enabling participants to systematically understand the emergence and development of speech community restructuring theory.

Expert profile:

Daming Xu, professor, doctoral supervisor, doctor of Linguistics at the University of Ottawa. He is now chairman of International Association of Urban Language Studies. Prof. Xu taught in many universities in the United States, Canada, Singapore, Australia and China and now he is working in the Bilingualism Research Lab, Western Sydney University, Australia, majoring in Bilingualism, Sociolinguistics and Language Planning. His main contribution are speech community theory and language urbanization theory. The former points out the community interface between language and society, while the latter is about the phenomenon of speech community restructuring in the modern society. The related researches explained the communality nature of language structure system and introduced the dynamic perspective.