Abstract The role of languages in poverty alleviation has received increasing attention in China. However, international scholarship in this field is yet to be introduced. This paper uses CiteSpace as a research tool to analyze the relevant literature in order to demonstrate the state of the art and trends concerning the relationship between language and poverty. Altogether 412 articles in the Web of Science database published between 1999 and 2019 have been selected for bibliometric analysis. The results show that the research output on this topic has been on the rise in the past two decades, and the contributions from research institutions in developed countries constitute the majority of the publications. This topic gains attentions in numerous disciplines, such as education, psychology, developmental psychology, educational psychology and linguistics. However, the most cited journals take different perspectives and methodologies in the exploration of language and poverty. Four major research themes have been identified in the literature: the impact of poverty on language development; the age variation of poverty on language speakers; impact of low family social-economic status on language learning and other language problems confronted by poor people. We suggest that future directions include building up research teams to conduct dedicated and sustainable research, collaboration among researchers in different disciplines, and expansion of research scope in this area.
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