How can linguists make the case for their subject in a new and seemingly hostile climate of political populism?

That was the theme of a workshop organised by and held in London on 6 January.

Since the Brexit vote, said Silke Mentchen, senior language teaching officer at the University of Cambridge, she had felt like ¡°a bargaining chip¡±, waiting for details of the status of the many European Union nationals working in British universities.

Partly in order to ¡°combat [her] own feelings of powerlessness¡±, she had carried out a survey with Andrea Klaus of the University of Warwick ¡°documenting the benefits to students of a year abroad¡±, which are often supported by EU funding under Respondents described such years as ¡°the highlight of my time at university¡± and even ¡°one of the most defining features of my life to date¡±.

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Michael Gratzke, professor of German and comparative literature at the University of Hull ¨C and incoming chair of the UCML ¨C urged delegates to embrace challenges as opportunities and to ¡°help shape what happens two or three years from now [as a result of the Brexit negotiations]¡±. ?

Modern linguists needed to ¡°find [their] voice again¡±, he said. Instead of asking ¡°what can I do in cultural studies?¡± they needed to look for ¡°the burning issues we share with our colleagues¡±, develop ¡°humanities-led interdisciplinary research¡± and then approach others to join the team. Projects illustrating what was possible ranged from to his own

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Recent political developments and ¡°post-truth attitudes¡±, argued Adrian Armstrong, head of the School of Languages, Linguistics and Film at Queen Mary University of London, seemed to represent ¡°the worst nightmare for the enlightened internationalists that we [modern linguists] tend to think we are¡±.?But they also demonstrated something ¡°that¡¯s been most influentially observed in political discourse by a linguist, namely George Lakoff ¨C if you want to convert people, emotion is a lot more powerful than rationality¡±.

So what might it mean to try and make an emotional case for the value of modern languages as a discipline??

It should be seen as ¡°a matter of social justice¡±, suggested Professor Armstrong, ¡°to engage with migrants on different linguistic terms than our own¡± ¨C a point that was likely to ¡°resonate with senior managers as well as prospective students¡±.

He also wanted to celebrate the ¡°deeply interdisciplinary character¡± of a subject involving ¡°a range of different skills and approaches (philological, historical, etc) that both require and promote flexibility and empathy¡­So linguists ¨C even in the unlikely event that they never speak another word of a foreign language after they graduate ¨C are uniquely well equipped to engage with the complexities and overlapping identities of the modern world.¡±

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matthew.reisz@tesglobal.com