About the Journal
(Last updated 14 December 2025)

READERSHIP

The readership for the JALA, the Journal of Asian Linguistic Anthropology, is diverse. While the primary intended audience for the JALA is academic, and hence those readers who have a strong familiarity with tenets and principles of Linguistic Anthropology, Cultural Anthropology, Asian Language and Society, and pertinent fields, the material and its content is highly accessible for all scholars and non-scholars. The JALA published articles can be a hybrid of multiple genres connected to the fields of Asian Linguistic and Cultural Anthropology, as well as genres beyond and outside of this academic field.
As such, the journal invites a wide readership to explore the fields of the Linguistic Cultural Anthropology, Sociolinguistics, and Language and Society of Asia, with or without any training in the field. Similarly, the JALA seeks to gradually socialize readers into the global community of Asian Linguistic and Cultural Anthropology.

CONSIDERATIONS

The journal shall fairly and without recourse to cultural, intellectual, or other bias, accept for consideration submissions from scholars that adhere to the following requirements:
Frequency
Authors may submit multiple manuscripts for consideration at any time, where all manuscripts will be inserted into the review and editing processes immediately upon their submission. These submissions will be processed separately, and in strict accordance to all GLOCAL JALA ethical processes and standards. However, authors should note the strict GLOCAL policy of publishing a maximum of two papers per calendar years and separated by one issue, that is, authors may not be published in two consecutive quarters, should they be published twice within one calendar year. At times, The GLOCAL JALA may choose to republish an old article, and for which, the JALA retains all authority.
Originality
The GLOCAL JALA will only consider original work, and will not embark on a process of review, evaluation, editing and the like, should the submission not initially and immediately pass the ‘originality’ review process.
Artificial Intelligence and the Assistance of Technology
The GLOCAL JALA values highly original human text, as an anthropological publication. Here, no human text is overly erroneous and inappropriate, where, any revision to the submission shall be made by human editors strictly without the assistance of machine generated text. The JALA takes a very strong stand against texts produced in part or in full by technology, and informs submitting scholars that such manuscripts are rejected at the onset. The JALA and the GLOCAL consider the submission of such texts to be plagiarism, whether or not the author does immediately foreground the use of such assistance. Submissions shall not at any point include the assistance of technology in order to generate text. While at times, authors may want to draw on software that assists in the editing process, all submissions are scrutinized stringently, and any significant appearance of texts that have been produced by technology will culminate in the immediate rejection of the manuscript and a possibly grey or blacklisting of the author, a barring that shall be predicated on the intensity of the use of technology, and a decision that shall be at the discretion of the Editor-in-Chief of the Editorial Board

FUNDING

The GLOCAL, the Global Council for Anthropological Linguistics, is funded by a combination of grants from prominent bodies, such as the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Japan Foundation, and other such bodies, as well as conference funding, where monies are directed immediately to the management of services that structure the GLOCAL. However, the GLOCAL is strictly non-profit, and any surplus money is directed to scholars, communities, and so forth. 
The GLOCAL JALA is structured to operate through voluntary contributions. The Editor-in-Chief, the GLOCAL Central Committee, and all reviewers do not receive any remuneration, and therefore, the GLOCAL JALA has no effective operating costs at the present time.

SCOPE

The Journal of Asian Linguistic Anthropology represents an international peer-reviewed journal seeking to strengthen the junctures between linguistics and anthropology, in and for Asian regions. The JALA is produced in collaboration with the GLOCAL, the Global Council on Anthropological Linguistics.

Following repeated requests from global bodies for such a journal, the JALA first emerged to satisfy the need for a situated Anthropological and Linguistic representation.

The Journal of Asian Linguistic Anthropology solicits academic work that combines complex rhetoric with simple methodology, and thus welcomes the integration of both simple linguistic genres with those at a high level of linguistic complexity and hence intensified rhetoric. Work submitted to and accepted by the JALA must be of sound methodological structure, yet must attempt to move beyond rigid convention in the field of Linguistic Anthropology, to attempt entrepreneurial and heuristic work pertaining to Asian regions. Papers accepted by the JALA will display a progressive nature in the field of Asian Linguistic Anthropology, and thus will effectively balance progressive and innovative themes, with attempts to extend (on) current academic and anthropological work with respect to language, and with a (reflexively) critical approach to all work, theorists, and theory.

The JALA is an international journal whose academic mission is to connect scholars at all levels of work and expertise on the Linguistic Cultural Anthropology, Sociolinguistics, Language and Society, and related fields, of Asia and its diaspora globally. The journal is a mediating platform for such work, and in the process, is fully committed to a diverse approach to the above fields, and makes every attempt to expand these fields through theory, empirical data, methodological innovation, and academic exploration, while increasing academic commensuracy and freedom of voice globally, hence safeguarding the academic rights of all scholars within its reach, and beyond.
In line with the above, the JALA confirms that it pursues a highly interdisciplinary approach to Asian Linguistic Cultural Anthropology and related fields. The themes it encourages its contributors to explore include but are certainly not limited to the following:
  • ethnography
  • symbolism, iconicity, and indexicality
  • spatial and temporal frames
  • agency and the equilibrium between the individual and the social
  • (multi)methodology
  • language contact
  • multifunctionality
  • revitalization
  • universality vs. particularity
  • linguistic relativity
  • socialization
  • speech (and sociocultural) communities practices
  • language, globalization, and transnational flows
  • language and identity
  • the ethnography of language
  • structuralism and post-structuralism
  • ethics in research
  • cultural determinism and relativism
  • critical approaches and reflexivity
  • sociolinguistics of urban and non-urban spaces
  • the linguistic anthropologies of translation

POSSIBLE THEMES

The Journal of Asian Linguistic Anthropology engages in theoretical and pragmatic debates in fields including:

  • ethnography
  • symbolism, iconicity, and indexicality
  • spatial and temporal frames
  • agency and the equilibrium between the individual and the social
  • (multi)methodology
  • language contact
  • multifunctionality
  • revitalization
  • universality vs. particularity
  • linguistic relativity
  • socialization
  • speech (and sociocultural) communities practices
  • language, globalization, and transnational flows
  • language and identity
  • the ethnography of language
  • structuralism and post-structuralism
  • ethics in research
  • cultural determinism and relativism
  • critical approaches and reflexivity
  • sociolinguistics
  • the linguistic anthropologies of translation

 

GENERAL INFO

  • ISSN: 2207-0656
  • Frequency: Quarterly
  • Review: Peer-reviewed
  • Rating and Impact: To be updated
  • Index: SCOPUS Indexed
Head Office: Global Association of Linguistic Anthropology
67 Finniss Street, Marion, Adelaide 5043
Australia
Tel.: +618 8358 1514
Branch/Distributor: The Global Council for Anthropological Linguistics
128 City Road, London EC1V 2NX,
United Kingdom
Tel.: +44 7498 746488

ADVERTISING AND PUBLISHING

The GLOCAL JALA does not accept at this stage any outside advertising to appear in the Journal. As such, all publication aspects of the Journal are devoid of any influence and sway by advertisers, and hence, the review processes and all publishing are strictly governed by the blind, double peer review process.
All information regarding the GLOCAL JALA, as with all GLOCAL journals, events, media, and other information, is disseminated to its subscribed global networks, and is placed on platforms such as academia.edu, ResearchGate.net, and websites of affiliated universities.