ISTVAN KECSKES is Distinguished Professor of the State University of New York, Albany. He is the President of the American Pragmatics Association and the Chinese as a Second Language Research Association. His book Foreign language and mother tongue (Erlbaum 2000) was the first that described the effect of the second language on the first language. His monograph Intercultural Pragmatics (OUP, 2014) is considered a groundbreaking work shaping research in the field. His latest monograph is English as a Lingua Franca: The pragmatics perspective (CUP, 2019). He is the editor of the Cambridge Handbook of Intercultural Pragmatics (CUP 2022) and the founding editor of the journals Intercultural Pragmatics, and Chinese as a Second Language Research, and the Mouton Series in Pragmatics