The 'Language of Shoes' project, based in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University, UK, is primarily concerned with how shoes function as a communication code in everyday life.

The project approaches this question from two complementary perspectives:

How shoes themselves can communicate aspects of a wearer's or organization's personality and attitudes

How people talk about shoes and themselves using everyday language - what words they use and how these words vary from context to context and from language to language.

The main methodologies employed are those of computer-assisted content analysis, semantic differential scales, and word associations.