Jean-Marc Dewaele is an applied linguist whose work put emotion at the centre of how we understand people who live in more than one language. Long based at Birkbeck, University of London, where he is now Emeritus Professor of Applied Linguistics and Multilingualism, he holds a PhD from the Free University of Brussels and has published over 300 papers and chapters on the psychological, emotional, and sociolinguistic individual differences that shape second-language acquisition and Multilingualism.
His central insight is that a multilingual's languages are not interchangeable channels but carry different emotional weight. Swearing, expressing love, or speaking to a child can feel sharper in one tongue and muted in another, and Dewaele's research traced how factors like age of acquisition, context of learning, and frequency of use govern that difference.
Dewaele built his career at Birkbeck, University of London, in the Department of Applied Linguistics and Communication. Beyond his own research he has held a string of field-shaping editorial and leadership roles: General Editor of the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (2013–2018) and subsequently of the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development; president of the European Second Language Association (2007–2011), of the International Association of Multilingualism (2016–2018), and of the International Association for the Psychology of Language Learning (2022–2024). In 2016 he received the Robert Gardner Award for Excellence in Second Language and Bilingualism Research, a recognition that ties his name to the social-psychological tradition founded by Robert Gardner.
Dewaele is one of the architects of the affective and positive-psychology turn in second-language research. His collaboration with MacIntyre established enjoyment as a construct worth measuring in its own right, not merely as the absence of Language Anxiety, and helped seed the broader Positive Psychology in SLA agenda. His work on emotional expression across languages shaped how applied linguists, and increasingly counsellors and clinicians, think about what it means to live and feel multilingually.