Applying linguistics to sport: My story of connection, collaboration, consolidation, and field building

Abstract This position paper chronicles and critiques my attempts to help establish sport as a field of application for applied linguistics. In this way, it is a nontraditional article: a first-person, autobiographical, position paper. As background to this endeavor, the paper first acknowledges the critical role of collaborative publications and the establishment of a research network. The paper then explores the affordances and complications associated with building a sports-based community of applied linguistics, especially given preexisting scholarship in sports linguistics, as well as considerable scholarship in the related discipline of communication studies. The paper then briefly recounts my own research in sports linguistics with the aim of bringing to consciousness my goals and purpose. Drawing on Bakhtin’s imagined audience, I reflect on how these motivations not only shaped my research agenda but, in turn, my conceptions of the relationship between linguistics and sport and applied linguistics. I then turn to Bernstein to further reflect on my classification of sports linguistics – the discipline, its knowledge and knowers – and its influence on my attempts at community building. As a position paper, I conclude with some insights for readers who find themselves engaged in similar attempts at community building.