Future of Language Research

Language is at the core of everything we do in society and in our global and multilingual world, it is vital that language research is facilitated to support social cohesion and to interpret culture, heritage and the world around us.

The main objective of this project is to co-produce a report which considers the research and innovation landscape of language research in the UK: the major international languages and the UK indigenous and community languages. Research in the indigenous languages of the UK has an important role to play in safeguarding minority language communities and informing policy, locally and globally.

Recent research trends in this area have been innovative in their community and agency-based collaboration practices and development of intervention methodology but there is scope for further development and especially for more research across languages.

The report will summarise current research topics within the specified languages and will identify emerging themes and under-researched themes: this will be achieved through a series of interviews with scholars across the UK.

The report will consider in what ways university research interfaces with language agencies and government departments with a responsibility for promoting the use of indigenous and community languages and will suggest ways in which universities might support the research needs of language agencies. It will do so through interviews with stakeholders in government, the broadcast media and specialist agencies.

The research will engage not only with language broadcasters and media producers in the UK, it will also consider the role of research in the broader cultural and heritage sector. Language is one of the most important vehicles for the practice and transmission of much intangible cultural heritage; research in these areas has the capacity to promote understanding and social inclusion: this would particularly be the case when research is able to translate across cultural and linguistic boundaries for the benefit of increased social unity and cohesion.

In addition to assessing in what ways university research might support policy makers, the report will look for good examples of co-produced community projects and consider how community projects might be better supported by the university sector. Contributions from university researchers have the capacity to make a lot of difference to community research projects and through work of this type, there is potential to develop new methods in co-produced research.

In policy and community co-produced research, in particular, it is likely that this work will cut across other discipline areas; collaboration between language and education academics is common in minority languages as policy makers seek to measure and improve bilingual schooling. This report will consider how more interdisciplinary research and collaboration with disciplines outside of the languages departments might strengthen languages research outputs and benefit language communities.

Given the multilingual dimension to UK society, this report will highlight how languages research can contribute to addressing wider social challenges, e.g., in a minority language context, research on language use in primary-aged children could inform policy and practice in and out of the classroom.

As demonstrated by the OWRI initiative, languages disciplines in the UK remain in a fragile position with shrinking student numbers and threats to the continued existence of university language departments: this at the same time as the UK and the world becomes more global. In collaboration with the work of the other AHRC Fellow, this report will identify areas of shared interest across the broad languages spectrum now present in UK HEIs.

In doing this it is hoped that, in line with the OWRI legacies, cross-language working can be better facilitated to bring added benefit to the sector and ultimately our multicultural and multilingual society.