This conversation between Ilan Stavans and Hassan Hamze is about the birth of the Arabic dictionary in the eighth century, a birth linked to that of other linguistic and religious disciplines in a flourishing society that would inherit the sciences of the ancients before developing and transmitting them to modern Western civilization. The small, utilitarian lexicons quickly gave way to the great dictionary al-ʿAyn, which established the Arabic lexicographical tradition. The bilingual dictionary did not appear until much later, first with the languages of the Arab-Muslim world, then with Latin in Andalusia after the eleventh century, and with other languages, particularly Western ones, in the modern era. Its role today is significant in terminological creation. The Arabic dictionary is, above all, a dictionary of word families classified by consonantal roots. The classification by words, which appeared very early in specialized dictionaries, did not appear in the general dictionary until the mid twentieth century, under the influence of the European dictionary, due to the issues posed by the status of short vowels and broken plurals.

This chapter explores language as a form of capital – both cultural and symbolic – and its role in social inequality. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory (1986), it examines how language distribution reinforces power structures, with ruling classes controlling literacy in specialized fields. The ‘linguistic deficit’ theory links lower socioeconomic status (SES) with limited language resources, leading to educational and social deficits. It also introduces the Matthew effect, where students with more language capital accumulate even more, and the Great Gatsby Curve, suggesting that inequality in language resources perpetuates social stratification.

Through a series of case studies of bilingualism, the chapter illustrates how language shapes social power dynamics. It argues that, in a globalized world, bilingualism – often a privilege in elite education – should be made available to all to address broader social inequities. Only through multilingual education will language policies reduce inequality and enable true social mobility.

Russian lexicography, although relatively recent compared to Western Europe, has rapidly developed since the sixteenth century under Western influence, primarily through Ukrainian and Belarusian intermediaries. While medieval efforts were limited to nonsystematic word lists and onomasticons in ecclesiastical contexts, a new systematic approach began with publications by westernized scholars, marking a pivotal shift toward analytical language study. This lexicographic activity expanded in the seventeenth century, driven by the need to conceptualize a changing world, resulting in numerous dictionaries. Peter the Great’s reforms further propelled this development, epitomized, among others, by Fedor Polikarpov-Orlov, whose works bridged Russian and foreign intellectual traditions. In the nineteenth century, lexicographic practice saw two trends: the Archaists, advocating for a revival of the ancient Rus language, and the Karamzinists (after Nikolai Karamzin), modernizing the language for contemporary use. Nowadays, Russian lexicography continues to evolve, integrating solid traditions and computational technology, represented, among others, by the Active Dictionary of the Russian language.

Dictionaries of Nahuatl, the largest indigenous language in North America, have been produced since the mid sixteenth century. The first were written to facilitate Catholic missionary activities, and Evangelicals continue this production today. Works containing lexical documentation for scientific purposes began to appear in the nineteenth century. Across time, Nahuatl dictionaries have proceeded from manuscripts, through the various stages of printing, to modern, searchable databases. Traditionally, the two most influential works have been Alonso de Molina’s Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana y mexicana y castellana (1555–71) and Frances Karttunen’s An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl (1983); however, students and researchers today tend to consult Stephanie Wood’s Online Nahuatl Dictionary (https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org) and the Gran Diccionario Náhuatl (www.gdn.unam.mx). With one exception, the grammatical information and definitions contained in all Nahuatl dictionaries have been in languages other than Nahuatl; in other words, they have not been written for the purpose of helping Indigenous people to engage in critical and creative thinking within their own language and culture.

Biliteracy is a lifelong process shaped by social and educational factors. While some achieve full biliteracy, others struggle with semi-lingualism. This chapter explores key dimensions of biliteracy – contexts, media, content, and development – showing how language status and literacy traditions impact learning.

A case study follows a Spanish–English bilingual’s journey from being initiated in L1 writing to mastering L2 academic composition, illustrating multilingual education’s potential. However, many systems resist bilingual programmes due to cultural and political factors. This chapter examines biliteracy challenges in Ceuta, Melilla, and the United States, where policies shape outcomes.

Biliteracy is fluid – language dominance shifts over time, requiring educational support. Successful programmes recognize students’ linguistic repertoires, easing language transitions. Research confirms bilingual learners excel when home language literacy is included in instruction. This chapter will help to understand biliteracy’s evolving nature, which is key to building inclusive, effective education systems.

This conversation between Ilan Stavans and Francisco Javier Pere explores the history of Spanish-language dictionaries, both general and regional, in the Iberian Peninsula as well as in Hispanic America, and their respective cultural history. It starts with the work of converso lexicographer Antonio de Nebrija in 1492 and moves on to the making of the Diccionario de autoridades at the dawn of the eighteenth century. The making of the Diccionario de la lengua española and the foundation of the Real Academia Española as an institution devoted to safeguarding the Spanish language is analyzed. Spanish-language lexicographers in the Americas, including Andrés Bello, are discussed. Other topics in the conversation are the processes of traditional creation where ideology has played normatively in their creation. An emphasis is made on the present-day poli-centrism as a basis of the pan-Hispanic policy, anti-hegemonic, anti-purist, and anti-nationalist.

A reflection on how dictionaries define themselves, followed by an invitation to explore the parallel histories of dictionaries in twenty different languages, including ancient Greek, Arabic, English, Esperanto, French, Hebrew, Nahuatl, Quechua, Russian, Spanish, and Yiddish.

This chapter delves into the critical role of lexis in L1 and L2 acquisition, exploring how vocabulary reflects language development and impacts text quality. The mental lexicon forms an intricate web of semantic connections, with bilinguals processing words differently based on proficiency. Low-proficiency learners rely on L1 translation, while advanced speakers strengthen direct links to L2 vocabulary. Research shows that both languages remain active during lexical tasks, shaping bilingual cognition.

Lexical richness is analysed through key models, including Crossley’s and Jarvis’. Advances in natural language processing have enabled automated evaluation tools like Coh-Metrix and TAALES, enhancing lexical analysis.

As bilinguals progress, their writing becomes more diverse and sophisticated, though L1 and L2 development may diverge in features like word concreteness. Formulaic language is also crucial – high-proficiency L2 writers use more native-like phrasal structures. By examining lexical acquisition, this chapter highlights its significance in bilingual proficiency, providing insights into how vocabulary shapes linguistic competence.

The chapter is divided into two parts, focusing on historiography and methodology, respectively, and linked by a survey of the functions of punctuation over time. The historiographical part offers a discussion on the principles of written language, the fundamental representational principles and functional designs in the history of English orthography, and the system and status of Present-Day English orthography in terms of the main historical lines as seen from structural as well as sociolinguistic viewpoints. The emphasis in the methodological part is on the development of new approaches and methodologies based on the expanding digitisation of historical texts that have grown in interdisciplinary ways out of the traditional philological paradigm – research primarily using large digital datasets and corpus-driven methodologies, as well as exploring the data in innovative ways to chart sociolinguistic networks.

This tri-part chapter reports early and modern women’s roles in language contact, transmission and codification, acknowledging limitations of mediated and absent evidence. In contact, English has been both a colonising and colonised language. Women’s surviving Englishes index privilege or vulnerability, and contextualised social values: Standard English mediating ex-slave narratives symbolised tyranny and humanity simultaneously. In corpus studies, surviving correspondence and other genres hint at literate women’s roles in the transmission and development of English; records and roles are more elusive as status falls. Women’s linguistic innovations in changes ‘from below’ may reflect social subordination. Educated women increasingly lead changes ‘from above’, as education and standardisation spread. Women’s codifying texts initially overrepresented their roles as domestic educators, but their rhetorical responses to social inequities occasionally provoke statutory redefinitions of terms such as person and woman.

The Yiddish language, the rich cultural treasure of Ashkenazi Jews, is more than 1,000 years old, and flourished in Central and Eastern Europe for centuries until the Holocaust, when six million Jews, many of them Yiddish speakers, were murdered by the Nazis. Yiddish has seen the production of numerous dictionaries, with the earliest one published at the end of the 16th century. As a result of migration over time, especially in the 19th and 20th centuries, Yiddish-speaking communities appeared in many other geographic areas of the world, including the United States, Argentina, Australia, Canada, South Africa, Mexico, Israel and elsewhere. Consequently, Yiddish dictionaries - most of them bilingual - were produced for use in these other cultures where Yiddish continued to be actively spoken and taught. This conversation traces the history of some of those dictionaries, with the main focus on the development over decades of the most recent bilingual dictionary, the Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary (Indiana University Press, 2016; 2nd edition, revised and expanded, 2021).

This conversation between Ilan Stavans and Carla Marello and Claudio Marazzini traces the development of Italian dictionaries over the centuries, with an emphasis on Francesco Del Bailo’s (alias Alunno) Fabrica del mondo (1548), the Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca (1612) published by Italy’s Accademia della Crusca, and Salvatore Battaglia and Giorgio Barberi Squarotti’s Grande dizionario della lingua italiana (1961–2002). It also focuses on the role Dante Alighieri played in the development of the Italian vernacular.