Researching Dementia in Multilingual Contexts : Approaches, Challenges, and Solutions

This Open Access book explores the intersection of multilingualism and dementia, bringing together previous research on language, aging and cognitive change. It offers an accessible guide to studying multilingualism and dementia, with a focus on interaction, ethics, and real-world research design. It also provides a critical overview of existing research, highlighting key questions addressed so far, identifying persistent gaps, and outlining what is needed to move the field forward. Across five chapters, it discusses the major ethical and practical challenges researchers are facing in this field and explores the complexity of managing variables in research involving older, multilingual individuals living with dementia. It then guides readers through practical methodological decisions and concludes with future directions for research, policy, and practice. This book will be of interest to academics, students and practitioners working in applied linguistics and pragmatics, particularly those with a focus on multilingualism, and health communication, especially discourses relating to dementia.