Abstracts and slides

Below you will find a short abstract for each presentation. 

Embracing linguistic and cultural diversity in HE: A student-staff model of social inclusion

Christian Ilbury, The University of Edinburgh

Although (UK) universities have heavily invested in Widening Participation (WP) and Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) initiatives over the past few years, linguistic diversity remains underrepresented in institutional action plans and strategies. In this talk, I introduce a student-staff collaborative model designed to address this oversight, with a particular focus on raising awareness of accent bias and linguistic discrimination as a common lived experience of underrepresented student groups. To do this, I reflect on four years of collaborative work at the University of Edinburgh with two student societies, the 93% Club and the Scottish Society. Through a discussion of our activities, I will demonstrate how collaboration between academics and student societies committed to tackling social injustices can be transformational force in centring linguistic diversity in WP and EDI policy and practice and, ultimately, improving social and academic inclusion on campus.

’Det bliver bare ensporet når vi kun har danske fag og engelske fag’: Plurilingual spaces in a bilingual university

Sanne Larsen, CIP, Camilla Falk Rønne Nissen, CBS og Anne Holmen, Institut for Engelsk, Germansk og Romansk, KU

Many Danish universities are characterised by a plurality of languages that are brought into the institutional space by a linguistically diverse population of staff and students. Yet university language policies tend to reflect a rather narrow understanding of this diversity, paying little (if any) attention to languages other than Danish and English. Using the University of Copenhagen as a case, we show how the university’s language policy prioritises English and Danish as key academic languages whose value is largely taken for granted, while other languages, despite their importance for teaching and learning practices in some disciplines, receive comparatively short shrift. We argue that the university would be wise in moving beyond a ‘simple’ bilingual version of parallel language policy as the core principle, particularly as concerns teaching and learning practices at the university. While we do not question the central role of Danish and English as key academic languages, we demonstrate the existence of plurilingual spaces, or ‘niches’, in which other languages are meaningful to students’ learning, disciplinary engagement and their ideas about working life after university. Limiting university language policy to Danish and English thus risks overlooking linguistic resources that are central to both educational quality and meaningful internationalisation.

English for prestige, Norwegian for inclusion? Reflections on power and privilege in Norwegian higher education

Julie Katrine Flikke, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)

Universities in Nordic countries are facing a difficult balancing act: between being internationally oriented knowledge hubs with academic migration and increased use of English on one side, and on the other: as national institutions responsible for educating students for local job markets and preserving unique Nordic languages. This presentation will explore how NTNU, Norway’s largest university, navigates this balance. From increased use of English to protectionist language laws, national debates often frame language as a binary choice between English or Norwegian. Based on interviews with researchers, administrative staff and leaders with Norwegian and international backgrounds, I will show how language is tied to questions of inclusion, power and privilege at the university. From daily interactions to institutional practices, we will explore how language choices might serve as a tool for both inclusion and exclusion at the same time. 

AI to the rescue? Reflections on the use of AI-based captioning to improve accessibility at an international conference

Janus Mortensen, CIP

In August 2026, CIP and the AI-UNI project hosted the international conference Sociolinguistics and AI. To increase accessibility, all presentations were automatically captioned using the live-captioning feature in Microsoft Teams. In this talk, I outline the considerations behind this decision and discuss the practicalities of implementing AI-based captioning at a multilingual conference. I then reflect on what this case reveals about the potential, limitations, and dilemmas of using AI technologies to facilitate inclusion. While AI may increase accessibility for some participants, it may also introduce new forms of exclusion, raising broader questions about the use of AI in managing linguistic diversity in international academic contexts.

Københavns Universitets sprogpolitik i et arbejdsperspektiv /
The language policy of the University of Copenhagen from a labour perspective 

Kamilla Kraft, Department of English, Germanic and Romance Studies, UCPH

Research on multilingual workplaces show that language practices are often highly multilingual, drawing on several semiotic resources to undertake and solve work activities. However, language policies are often geared towards monolingualism, focusing on specific and delineated languages. This condition has implications for the workplace as well as individual workers.

Tracing language policies and their uptake can help us understand how a workplace is imagined, how language is imagined as part of work, what groups of workers are targeted by a language policy, what functions the policy is meant to address, and how it is experienced. By understanding these logics and how they have led to a certain policy, we can also start imagining alternatives that may redress shortcomings of existing policies.

In this presentation, I will consider the case of the University of Copenhagen’s language policy in order to discuss conditions of language policies and how to imagine alternatives.

’Undskyld? Men hva’ mener du?’ Danish language adventures at KU

Kristine Harper, Institut for Naturfagenes Didaktik (IND), KU

Trying to simultaneously get up-to-speed on workplace culture, learn a new language, prepare for teaching, and get a research program started while settling in to a new living arrangement is not, as we say in English, for the faint of heart. Many of our new udenlandske kolleger, junior and senior, face this task every year and often feel like they are constantly walking into a brick wall that they can’t break through, climb over or tunnel under no matter how hard they try. Realistic policies bolstered by supportive actions could make a big difference in making our talented newcomers feel welcomed and valued by the KU community.

Slides from the presentation will follow after the symposium.