It is now a little over a decade since the publication of Caffarel et al.'s Language Typology: a functional perspective – a book which drew together papers based on workshops and seminars focusing on the description of languages other than English from an SFL perspective. Since that time, SFL work on languages from different language families has expanded considerably. This year's forum is dedicated to encouraging these developments, with special reference to inspiring the role scholars in Chinese universities might play by working on Chinese, minority languages in China and regional languages. The forum will consist of five days of intensive seminars and paper presentations, led by several ground-breaking functional linguists from around the world (Nick Enfield, Giacomo Figueredo, Randy LaPolla, J R Martin, Christian Matthiessen, Edward McDonald, Beatriz Quiroz, Miriam Taverniers, Kazuhiro Teruya and Wang Pin). Their provisional keynote address titles are listed below. As this selection of keynote speakers suggests, the forum organisers are keen to encourage dialogue across a range of functional perspectives, alongside SFL.