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Recently, multiple collaborative initiatives have been established which all aim to incorporate and enhance the representation of multilingualism into discussions on the otherwise largely English-dominated “field” of digital humanities. Taking sensitivity to multilingualism as an overarching concept, the present paper introduces and analyzes some recent, and ongoing, collaborative initiatives (mainly with a starting point in Europe) to show how these projects conceptualize, handle, and strive to strengthen language diversity in DH. More specifically, the examples featured in the article include preliminary insights from the Disrupting Digital Knowledge Infrastructures collective, lessons from my pilot graduate course (Digital Humanities and East Asian Studies: Theory and Practice), as well as the role and significance of the DARIAH-EU supported OpenMethods platform. Ultimately, the paper, which also features interviews with Erzsébet Tóth-Czifra and Cosima Wagner from two of the abovementioned initiatives, argues for the importance of language sensitivity in research, teaching, and knowledge dissemination to create a more inclusive, and collaborative, basis toward multilingualism in DH.

This paper presents a bottom-up approach to building a comprehensive infrastructure for the analysis of user-generated content for several South Slavic languages (Slovene, Croatian, Serbian). The goal of this collaboration was to leverage the available knowhow and language similarity in order to provide language resources and tools for the study of netspeak for all three languages in parallel and with minimal resources. We demonstrate the usefulness of the developed infrastructure for a corpus-based, comparative sociolinguistic investigation of language attitudes by Slovenian, Croatian, and Serbian Twitter users, who have witnessed a rapid codification divergence and reinforcement of national languages after the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s.

The proposed paper discusses how the relationships between the researchers and the ‘field’ in social sciences have been transformed during the last decades. It explores the concept of the ‘public engagement’, its ethical and conceptual boundaries, and the criteria of its ‘successfulness’ – in relation to the academic research, researchers, and the local communities where the research is conducted.

This paper argues for a place for linguistics within the UK Modern Languages curriculum as part of a more pluralistic approach to languages study. Based on an intervention involving over 300 A-level students of French, German and Spanish, we demonstrate: 1) that it is feasible and appropriate to include linguistics topics on the A-level Modern Foreign Languages (MFL) curriculum; 2) that many of these topics are inherently interesting for A-level language students; and 3) that pupils report increased confidence in their language skills after having been exposed to a short linguistics course (four hours). In light of our further finding that there is already considerable untapped scope for linguistics within the current formal framework of the A-level MFL qualification, we recommend that linguistics topics should be included in MFL A-levels as a matter of priority. This is the case not least because linguistics has the potential to attract new pupils to the study of MFL, while also providing a crucial bridge between language skills and cultural content, which are so often kept apart in existing MFL curricula. Lastly, we argue that the introduction of linguistics into languages teaching raises awareness of the harmfulness of deeply entrenched prescriptive and standard-language-ideological beliefs in schools, and this will lead to a more inclusive discipline.