Launching the Revitalisation of Linguistic Diversity & Cultural Heritage (LocalLing) project

It is in some ways paradoxical that, although I started my career by teaching English,¹ the global language par excellence, and while I do try to remain true to my disciplinary beginnings, a lot of the work that I feel closest to my heart involves minority and heritage languages. That’s why I feel very excited to be part of an ambitious new Horizon project, Revitalisation of Linguistic Diversity & Cultural Heritage (or LocalLing) for short, in which my colleagues and I will be working with scholars from all over the world to document, preserve and revitalise less-resourced languages.

We will be sharing information and updates about our work on the LocalLing website, which will be online in due course (we only had our kick-off meeting today!),² but until that time I just wanted to share some highlights about what the project is about, and what we expect to achieve. If you’d like to find out, join me as I explain!

What LocalLing is about

The Revitalisation of Linguistic Diversity and Cultural Heritage initiative is a four-year project (2026-2029), which aims to establish an international and interdisciplinary network of organisations that promote the use, maintenance, teaching and learning of local and heritage languages. These are languages that are deeply embedded in communities, histories, and identities, but which are often marginalised in formal education, policy, and public life. These are not “small” languages in any meaningful sense; they are small only in the attention they tend to receive.

My concern about local and heritage languages stems from the fact that linguistic diversity is under profound threat worldwide. Languages vanish not through natural processes but through historical forces, like colonialism, economic marginalization, educational policies that privilege dominant languages, and the social pressure to assimilate. Experts estimate that half of the world’s approximately 7,000 languages may disappear by the end of this century,³ and whenever a language is lost, it takes with it irreplaceable knowledge systems, cultural practices, and ways of understanding the world.

Linguistic diversity matters because it represents humanity’s intellectual and cultural wealth, and because it offers multiple pathways for thinking, problem-solving, and relating to the world. These are resources we can ill afford to lose in an era demanding creative responses to shared global challenges. At a time when AI translation tools promise to erase linguistic differences and unprecedented human mobility reshapes language communities worldwide, there is an urgent need to understand how local and heritage languages adapt, persist, and thrive rather than simply disappear.

This, by the way, is not the first time I find myself in a project about less well-resourced languages.⁴ But what makes LocalLing distinctive is not what we are researching, but rather how it brings together people to do so.

A global conversation

In the LocalLing project, we will bring together researchers and educators, from thirteen countries spread over four continents: Europe, Asia, South America, and Africa. This geographical spread reflects a core assumption of the project, namely that challenges around heritage and local languages are shaped by specific histories and power relations, but that these resonate across contexts.

More specifically, the project participants include:

• The University of Abomey-Calavi, Benin
• The University of Bucharest, Romania
• The University of Buea, Cameroon
• The University of Calda, Colombia
• The University of Cheikh Anta Diop, Senegal
• The Itqan Foundation & Partners, Morocco
• The University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka
• The University of Manouba, Tunisia
• The University of Montpellier, France
• Tallinn University, Estonia
• The University of Thessaly, Greece
• The Togolese State Archive, Togo
• The University of Zaragoza, Spain

The composition of our consortium aims to exploit this tension between local particularity and global forces. While we do share concerns and values, we are also deliberately using difference as an epistemic resource. That is to say, we are purposefully positioning ourselves in diversity to test, unsettle, and refine our assumptions about language policy and language education.

Beyond preservation narratives

A second important feature of the project is that we refuse to treat local and heritage languages as museum artefacts. The project is not about freezing languages in time, nor about romanticising loss. The questions we are asking, instead, are about how to use, teach, negotiate, and reimagine local and heritage languages in contemporary social life. This involves looking at education, of course; but also at policy, community action, intergenerational transmission, and the everyday choices people make about language use. In this sense, LocalLing sits at the intersection of linguistics, education, cultural studies, and the social sciences, drawing on all of them without fully ‘belonging’ to any single one.

Let me get into some, slightly technical, detail about what we’ll be working towards in this project. So, the project deliverables are organised in three interconnected strands of activity, and these are supported by a layer of research development and ethical coordination, running across the three strands.

Use and maintenance
of local and heritage languages

The first set of materials we’ll be producing is a set of thematic research outputs that will focus on the use and maintenance of local and heritage languages. In these outputs, we will address questions of language policy, identity, culture, and governance, with particular attention to issues of equity, inclusion, and power. What we will try to do is document sociolinguistic practices, linguistic features of heritage languages, and the ways in which language intersects with migration, law, conflict, and peace-building. The aim here is to produce a set of context-sensitive analyses that foreground both local specificities and cross-contextual resonances and help us understand why local and heritage languages are under threat and what dynamics we can mobilise to sustain them. This leads us to the second set of deliverables…

Teaching and learning
local and heritage languages

The second set of deliverables we aim to produce is pedagogical and educational resources for teaching and learning of local and heritage languages. These will include frameworks, teaching resources, and course designs informed by sociolinguistic perspectives. They will also include materials addressing intercultural competence, multilingual education, and language revitalisation.

We are especially keen on developing resources for children’s and youth contexts, rural and marginalised settings, and on exploring ways to productively bridge tradition and technology. We expect these deliverables to be helpful for educators and teacher educators, not just academic audiences.

Resources for studying local and heritage languages

Thirdly, the project will develop a suite of methodological resources for research on local and heritage languages. Some examples of such resources include guidance on classroom-based research, linguistic ethnography, linguistic anthropology, and language documentation. We also want to highlight approaches to analysing colonial memory, linguistic landscapes, and cultural artefacts.

Our immediate aim with these resources is to support high-quality research within the consortium. More broadly, these materials that will remain usable beyond the lifespan of the project aim to build longer-term capacity among early-career and community-based researchers who work with local and heritage languages.

Research development and support

Across all three strands, LocalLing will deliver structured research development and support mechanisms. These include mentoring and networking opportunities for junior researchers, shared ethical frameworks, and platforms for research communication and collaboration in research literacy and language education. This overarching work ensures coherence across outputs and supports the sustainability of the project beyond its formal duration.

Taken together, all the deliverables above reflect the project’s central ambition: to strengthen the conditions under which local and heritage languages can be researched, taught, used, and sustained in socially just and contextually meaningful ways.

What our next steps are

The project begins with a month-long meeting of the consortium members at the University of Thessaly. During this meeting, the University of Thessaly team and our colleagues from Tallinn University will lead a programme of cross-institutional co-teaching for all the project participants.

Some of the activities in which our participants will engage include participation in courses that supplement those at their home institutions, and contributing to knowledge-sharing workshops that address gaps in our expertise. This will help to build shared methodological and pedagogical capacity across the consortium.

We will also dedicate time to collaborative proposal development, with participants working together to identify themes and funding opportunities for future joint research. Complementing these meetings, we will facilitate structured opportunities for initiating collaborative research publications.

Our goal is to use this first intensive meeting to establish the academic, pedagogical, and collaborative foundations on which the rest of the project will build. We are all very keen to start with this project and share our outputs as they develop.

If you find yourself similarly excited, or at least moderately intrigued, you might be interested in following the LocalLing project as it unfolds. From our collaborative research meetings and emerging findings to new teaching resources and methodological tools, I’ll be sharing updates here on the blog.

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Footnotes

1. If you haven’t read that story, you can do so here. ↩︎
2. I’m losing my touch. When we started ReaLiTea, I had the website up and running two months before the official launch date. ↩︎
3. I often ask students in my Introduction to Linguistics class when a language should be considered extinct. Most reply that this happens with the death of the last speaker. It is actually when the second-to-last speaker dies. ↩︎
4. My most recent work in that field was the Apprentisage des Langues MODIMEs (ALaMODe) in collaboration with partners across Europe, which only just ended. ↩︎