The first week of the LocalLing event in Volos

The first week of March 2026 marked the beginning of the LocalLing event, the kick-off meeting of our Revitalising Linguistic Diversity and Cultural Heritage Horizon programme. It was a busy and stimulating week, and difficult to capture fully in the space of a blog post. So what follows is an attempt to capture, however partially, some salient moments in the event, document the intellectual work that the event is facilitating, and foreshadow how the network moves forward.

What we did this week

Introductions and networking

Day 1 of this month-long meeting began, as such events do, with introductions, welcomes and networking events. This allowed us to get to know the meeting participants, who came from Colombia, Spain, Morocco, Tunisia, France, Togo, Cameroon, Romania and Estonia. Some more participants, who were unable to be with us in person, on account of travel disruptions and visa complications, were able to join us virtually.¹

Partner presentations

One strand of the meeting focused on the linguistic ecologies of our partner countries. As each team presented their context, the sheer diversity of linguistic realities across the network became increasingly clear. It’s hard to summarise this richness in a few sentences, but the impression that stayed after the specific details² faded was just how powerful it is to bring such vastly different traditions of knowledge into conversation.

The LocalLing publication agenda

A part of the meeting of which I was particularly proud was when I introduced what I envision as a publication programme that can grow out of the LocalLing project. This included two edited books, two special issues, and a collaborative position paper, which are intended to leverage the writing potential of our diverse group.

What I found most pleasing, however, was the explicit statement of what I consider important publication principles,³ as follows:

• Epistemic justice: We will encourage contributions from early-career researchers, practitioners, and scholars working outside dominant academic centres, alongside more established academics. Our work will recognise diverse forms of knowledge production, including practitioner research and classroom-based inquiry, as legitimate scholarly contributions.
• Language justice: While pragmatic considerations make English the primary language of publication, we will actively promote the visibility of less widely used languages. This may include multilingual abstracts, the inclusion of data excerpts in original languages, and explicit recognition of linguistic diversity in research contexts.
• Citational justice: We will commit to engaging substantively with scholarship produced in under-represented languages, regions, and knowledge communities. Authors will be encouraged to reflect critically on whose work is cited and whose perspectives may be missing.
• Cognitive justice: We will encourage methodological and epistemological pluralism, welcoming research that draws on diverse traditions of inquiry and knowledge-making rather than privileging a single model of scholarly evidence.

The library visit

One of the activities that I enjoyed the most was the visit to the University of Thessaly Central Library. This proved a welcome change of pace after several days of intense discussions and presentations, and an opportunity to explore a different side of the university. Our host, Agapi Polyzou, guided us through the building and introduced us to the work that goes on behind the scenes, and the visit quickly became one of the most pleasant moments of the week. Beyond the formal tour, what made the experience particularly enjoyable was the sense of shared curiosity in the group. People lingered over exhibits, asked questions, and compared notes about the kinds of materials that exist in their own institutions. It was one of those moments when the pace of the meeting slowed down a little and allowed for informal conversations and quiet discovery.

What we are beginning to learn

The most important insight from the meeting, at least for me, emerged during one of our networking activities. At one point, I found myself in conversation with three people whose perspectives on the themes of the meeting could hardly have been more different. One was a member of a minoritised linguistic community, and therefore approached the discussion from a deeply personal, insider perspective. Another was a political scientist, whose training provided a broader understanding of language policy, even if his engagement with linguistics itself was more limited. The third was a European linguist working with local communities in South America: an outsider, in many ways, carefully negotiating his way into their perspective.

What struck me in that moment was how bringing such different perspectives into proximity created affordances that none of us could have generated alone. This, I think, is the real power of interdisciplinarity. Interdisciplinarity does not occur simply because someone develops a passing interest in a neighbouring field, or borrows a concept that happens to illuminate the questions they already care about. It happens when we rely on the expertise of others, and when we allow their knowledge, their assumptions, and their ways of seeing the world to reshape our own understanding of the problem.

Moments like that, I suspect, are where the real work of LocalLing begins.

What comes next

In Week 2 of the project, we will focus mostly on capacity building and research training. This includes two professional development workshops and a training on research proposal writing, led by the University of Tallinn. It also includes a workshop on nexus analysis, which we will use as one of the proposed tools for researching less visible languages. Another day that I am looking forward to will focus on linguistic landscapes: this will involve a workshop, a guided tour of the Volos linguistic landscape, and a presentation of the linguistic landscapes of Estonia.

Also scheduled for next week (Tuesday) is a book presentation of the new book by LocalLing partner Fethi Helal, coauthored by Joe Lo Bianco, Language Politics in Tunisia: A Study of Language Ideological Debates (2025, Multilingual Matters).

Finally, throughout the week, we will be learning about our partners’ ongoing research. In a series of presentations, our partners from across the world will share overviews of the projects in which they are involved, and we will explore possible research collaborations. This promises to be an exciting week, and I am looking forward to sharing an update about it in a few days!

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Footnotes

1. And you cannot believe how relieved I was that the zoom infrastructure worked! ↩︎
2. Did you know that there are over 250 languages spoken in Cameroon? That the blue, green and yellow Amazigh flag represents the sky, mountains and desert of their land? That there are four types of forest in Sri Lanka? ↩︎
3. You may recongise, in this, the influence of Sofia Tsioli’s thinking, as outlined in Tsioli (2025) and Tsioli and Kostoulas (2026). ↩︎

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