About Macao Journal of Linguistics

Macao Journal of Linguistics

The Macao Journal of Linguistics, known in Chinese as 澳門語言學刊, is a biannual linguistics journal founded in 1995 by the Macao Linguistics Society. It was established before Macao's handover, and over the following decades it built the reputation that the University of Macau would later describe in striking terms: a journal that had published a huge number of quality research papers, made a name for itself in the field, and become a calling card — in the university's phrase, a decent business card — for linguistics in Macao. Since 2022 it has been published by the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Macau in collaboration with the Macao Linguistics Society, and its editor-in-chief is Professor Jie Xu of the University of Macau.

That combination of a society origin and a university present is the central fact of the journal's history. It began as the publication of a learned society in a small, multilingual city, and it survived long enough to be taken into the publishing programme of the city's university when that university created a dedicated centre for linguistics.

Founding in 1995 by the Macao Linguistics Society

The journal was founded in 1995, according to the University of Macau's Centre for Linguistics and the university's account of the 2022 collaboration agreement. Both accounts stress the date and its context: the journal was established before Macao's handover. A linguistics journal founded in Macao in the mid-1990s was therefore a product of the late Portuguese-administration period, created by the Macao Linguistics Society rather than by a university press.

Society journals depend on the sustained labour of a small group of scholars, and the university's accounts name the figure most associated with that labour. Over more than twenty years, UM records, the journal was produced with the joint efforts of various academics, most notably Professor Ching Cheung Fai, also rendered Cheng Cheung-Fai. Ching's name is the one consistently attached to the journal's long middle period, and the credit given to him by both the university and the Macao government news service indicates that his editorship was central to keeping a specialist journal alive in a very small scholarly community.

The Macao Linguistics Society

The founding body, the Macao Linguistics Society, remained the journal's partner even after publication moved to the university. When the 2022 agreement was signed, the society was represented by its president, Huang Yi, who signed alongside Professor Xu Jie on behalf of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities. The society therefore did not disappear from the journal's life in 2022; instead, its role changed from sole publisher to collaborator, with the faculty taking charge of publication in collaboration with the society.

That arrangement is significant for a journal of this kind. A learned society carries the memory of a field — its contributors, its conferences and its informal networks — while a university faculty carries production capacity, staff and a permanent institutional address. The 2022 agreement joined the two, and it is the arrangement under which the journal continues.

The 2022 agreement with the University of Macau

The change came in early 2022, when the University of Macau officially established its Centre for Linguistics under the administration of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities. At the plaque-unveiling ceremony for the centre, representatives of the faculty and the Macao Linguistics Society signed a collaboration agreement on the publication of the Macao Journal of Linguistics. According to the agreement, as UM reported it, the Faculty of Arts and Humanities would be in charge of the publication of the biannual journal, in collaboration with the Macao Linguistics Society.

The timing was deliberate. The Centre for Linguistics was created to unite the interdisciplinary work of UM linguists, to promote high-calibre cross-linguistic research, and to provide a platform for organising linguistics conferences and publishing academic journals, monographs and series. Taking charge of the city's established linguistics journal fitted that purpose exactly: the centre gained a journal with a history reaching back to 1995, and the journal gained the institutional backing of a university centre built for precisely this kind of work.

Editor-in-chief Jie Xu

The University of Macau's official academic journals page lists the Macao Journal of Linguistics among the journals edited by UM staff, with editor-in-chief Jie Xu of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, in a listing dated as of 10 March 2026. Xu Jie signed the 2022 agreement as dean of the faculty and director of the Centre for Linguistics, so the editorship, the deanship and the centre directorship have been held together in the journal's university period.

Xu's own scholarly background is documented by the Macao government news service. He earned his doctoral degree in linguistics from the University of Maryland at College Park in 1993, taught for thirteen years at the National University of Singapore before joining UM in 2008, and was elected a Chang Jiang Scholar Chair Professor in linguistics and applied linguistics for 2016 — described by the government service as the first Chang Jiang Scholar Chair Professor in humanities and social sciences from Macao. His fields of expertise include theoretical linguistics, grammatical theory, language education and language planning, and he has served on the editorial boards of more than ten academic journals, including Contemporary Linguistics, the Journal of Chinese Information Processing and Chinese Linguistics. An editor with that profile gives a small society journal a direct connection to the wider Chinese and international linguistics community.

Frequency and form

The journal is biannual. The University of Macau described it as a biannual journal in its account of the 2022 agreement, and that frequency — two issues a year — has been the pattern carried into the university period. Its Chinese title, 澳門語言學刊, is the title under which it is cited in Chinese-language scholarship, as in citations to Aomen Yuyanxue kan in the bibliographies of later linguistics articles.

Individual contributions documented in other scholars' publication records illustrate the journal's continuing activity. A study of the language learning willingness of English majors in a multicultural context, by Wei Xu, B. Hu and Y. Wu, appeared in the Macao Journal of Linguistics, Special Issue 2022, at pages 173–181 — evidence both of a special issue in the year of the university agreement and of the journal publishing applied-linguistics research on English education in Macao itself. A comparative study of word-order variation in Chinese and English poetic works was cited from issue 59(1) of the journal, at pages 65–73. Editorial work is also distributed beyond the editor-in-chief: City University of Macau records associate professor William Wei Xu as a member of the journal's editorial board and as its English editor.

Subject matter and Macao's language setting

The journal is a linguistics journal, and its setting shapes what that means. The Centre for Linguistics, its present institutional neighbour, was created because UM linguists are distributed across the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, the Faculty of Social Sciences, the Faculty of Education and the Faculty of Science and Technology, and most notably across the Department of Chinese Language and Literature, the Department of English, the Department of Portuguese and the Centre for Japanese Studies. A Macao linguistics journal therefore works in a scholarly environment organised around several languages at once — Chinese, English, Portuguese and Japanese among them — rather than around a single national language.

The University of Macau has also said that linguistics is one of the strongest areas of research and publication at the university, and one of the few academic disciplines of UM that is internationally ranked. The journal's move to the Faculty of Arts and Humanities placed it inside the university's strongest language-research environment, rather than leaving it to depend solely on the resources of a small society.

Reputation

The language used about the journal at the 2022 signing is unusually warm for an official announcement, and it amounts to a public assessment of its standing. The journal, UM said, had over twenty years or so published a huge number of quality research papers that are impactful in the field of linguistics, had made a name for itself in the field, and had earned for itself a decent business card within the field — the calling-card image that the journal's record in the clean catalogue also preserves. Governments and universities do not usually describe a journal they are taking over in those terms unless the title carries genuine goodwill among the scholars who read and cite it.

That reputation is the journal's principal asset. It has no large commercial publisher and no long list of indexing claims attached to it in the public record; what it has is continuity since 1995, a society that sustained it, an editor most associated with its survival in Ching Cheung Fai, and, since 2022, a university faculty and linguistics centre committed to publishing it.

The journal within UM's linguistics publishing

At the University of Macau, the journal now sits alongside a wider linguistics publishing activity centred on the same faculty. The Centre for Linguistics provides the platform for conferences, journals, monographs and series, and Professor Xu also serves as an editor of the Journal of Chinese Linguistics, whose Macao editorial office was launched at UM in 2023. The Macao Journal of Linguistics should not be confused with that much older international title; it is Macao's own journal, founded by its own linguistics society, and its presence on UM's list of journals edited by UM staff records its status as a faculty responsibility rather than as a university-founded title.

Readers looking for the journal today should therefore look in two places: to the University of Macau's Faculty of Arts and Humanities and its Centre for Linguistics, which publish it, and to the Macao Linguistics Society, its founding body and continuing collaborator. Its official listing is the university's academic journals page, where it appears with Jie Xu named as editor-in-chief.

Publication details

The Macao Journal of Linguistics (澳門語言學刊) was founded in 1995 by the Macao Linguistics Society and is published twice a year. Since the 2022 collaboration agreement, publication has been in the charge of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Macau, in collaboration with the Macao Linguistics Society. Its editor-in-chief is Professor Jie Xu of the University of Macau. No ISSN is stated in the sources used for this profile, and none is claimed here.