Josep Soler Carbonell Professor
Contact
Name and title: Josep Soler CarbonellProfessor
ORCID0000-0002-2813-0101 Länk till annan webbplats.
Workplace: Department of English Länk till annan webbplats.
Visiting address Room E 806Universitetsvägen 10 E, plan 8
Office hours By email at: josep.soler@english.su.se
Postal address Engelska institutionen106 91 Stockholm
Research group
About me
Josep Soler Carbonell (also Josep Soler or Josep Soler-Carbonell in his academic work) is a Professor of English Linguistics at the Department of English, Stockholm University, where he joined in 2014 and was appointed full professor in 2023. He obtained his PhD in Linguistics and Communication from the University of Barcelona and has held research and teaching appointments at several international institutions, including the University of California San Diego, Oxford University, the University of Tartu, and Tallinn University. In 2019 he was Visiting Junior Professor at RECLAS (University of Jyväskylä) and in 2023 he held the Càtedra Mercè Rodoreda at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. In 2026 (January-June) he is a visiting researcher at the Centre for Internationalisation and Parallel Language Use, University of Copenhagen, supported by a sabbatical period granted by the Faculty of the Humanities at Stockholm University.
His main research areas/interests are:
1. Sociolinguistics, language policy, and linguistic justice
2. The politics of English as a global language
3. Multilingualism: multilingual practices and discourses
4. The sociolinguistics of minority/minoritised language communities
Josep's research centres on language policy, sociolinguistics, multilingualism, and the politics of English in higher education and in society more generally. He investigates how institutions and communities navigate language tensions in non-Anglophone contexts and how language ideologies, practices, and policies shape academic participation and social inclusion. His work draws on empirical and comparative perspectives and is published in international peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes.
He is actively involved in teaching across undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral programmes, developing courses on sociolinguistics, language policy, intercultural communication, and English language education, as well as supervising doctoral students working on language, power, and multilingual practices.
Since 2004, Josep has taught language and culture courses at the universities of Barcelona, Oxford, Tallinn, and Tartu. At Stockholm University, he has developed, taught, and coordinated various courses within the English Studies programmes at both graduate and undergraduate levels, including sociolinguistics, English language education, language and gender, and intercultural communication. He is also actively involved in teaching and supervising at the PhD level.
Josep's research is primarily in language policy. Over the past few years, He has investigated how, in non-Anglophone contexts, universities and their stakeholders adapt to the growing presence of English in their daily realities. Empirically, his material comes first and foremost from Estonia, a country with which he has established personal and professional ties since 2005. In addition, and in collaboration with colleagues around Europe, Josep has conducted comparative university language policy analyses across an ample spectrum of countries and contexts. In parallel to the role of English in higher education, He has also developed an interest in multilingual families, and has published case studies of parental language ideologies in multilingual homes in Estonia, Sweden, and the UK. More recently, he has turned to questions of linguistic justice, building strong collaboration ties with colleagues in political philosophy and political theory (particularly within the Linguistic Justice Society network). Josep's point of entry to discussions of linguistic justice is the role of English as a global lingua franca and the search for conceptual ways of overcoming its related injusitces. Finally, he remains interested in the sociolinguistics of minority language situations, with Catalonia as a central focus of attention.
Josep's most recent project explores questions of linguistic justice in higher education, combining sociolinguistic work with linguistic justice theories to analyse how universities negotiate language hierarchies and the implications for its key stakeholders (students, teachers, and staff). He is the recipient of a Riksbankens Jubileumsfond Sabbatical grant for the project Linguistic justice at the university, which supports the completion of a monograph that develops a framework for assessing language-related tensions in higher education and offers new perspectives on responsive and equitable language practices.
Josep¡s publications address language policy, multilingualism, and the politics of English as a global language, with a particular focus on higher education and non-Anglophone contexts. Selected works examine English-medium instruction, language ideologies, linguistic inequality, and the sociopolitical dimensions of academic communication. His research has appeared in leading international journals and peer-reviewed edited volumes within sociolinguistics and applied linguistics, including: the Journal of Sociolinguistics, the International Journal of the Sociology of Language, Language in Society, the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, and the Journal of Multlingual and Multicultural Development.