This volume is offered as a celebration of the life and work of the late Bert Peeters, long-time proponent and pioneer of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach in French. It comprises contributions from Bert’s close associates and former students, all of whom engage with salient aspects of his work and, in doing so, honour his important and long-lasting influence on the field, including his conceptualisation of the term ‘applied ethnolinguistics’. The title Explorations in Applied Ethnolinguistics reflects the multiple and diverse possible applications enabled by the NSM approach, as outlined and demonstrated in the contributions to this volume. These range from linguistic studies of semantics and culture to cross-cultural studies, and into other fields of research such as psychology and childhood education. This volume is intended to build on previous studies of applied ethnolinguistics and brings a diversity of voices to this area, covering nineteen languages across the world. Noone did more than Bert to bring the many different applications of this particular linguistic approach to the attention and interest of a great number of scholars. He achieved this both through his own numerous publications and through his dedication to maintaining the NSM Approach website ( https://nsm-approach.net ).