The Linguaphobia, Linguistic Indifference, and the Monolingual University (LLIMU) is a research initiative run by David Gramling and Ervin Malakaj. Together with collaborators at UBC and various North American institutions of higher education, the project team aim to understand how linguaphobia (a general aversion and anxiety about language—in contrast to the current enthusiasm at universities for “big data” analytics or other realms of informatic empirical practice) and linguistic indifference (a dismissal or diminishment of the role of language as a material component for knowledge-making, industry, and livelihood) become norms of the North American research university’s future monolingual strategic planning processes.
LLIMU aims to grasp how these strategies uphold colonial English (and specific standardized academic forms of it, even in the bilingual Canadian context) as the only viable and efficient format for impactful research practice. How do these norms make other linguistic forms of research livelihood and knowledge-sharing, beyond the Anglo-monolingual and colonial, appear unscholarly, unscientific, compromised, or peculiar, casting doubt on the viability and importance of any research results that ensue from them?
Latest Announcements
-
UBC Symposium on “Linguaphobia, Linguistic Indifference, and the Monolingual University”
Time/Date: Wednesday, October 29, 2025, all-day. To RSVP for the event, fill out this form. Audience: faculty, graduate students, undergraduate students, staff, and the public are all welcome! Place: IKBLC Peña Room, 9:00-3:30pm Who: featured speakers include Profs. Moberley Luger, Nesrine Basheer, Marie-Eve Bouchard. Co-sponsored by the UBC Strategic Equity and Anti-Racism Enhancement Fund and the Social Sciences…
-
CfP: Volume on “Linguaphobia, Linguistic Indifference, and the Monolingual University”
Call for Contributions for an Edited Scholarly Book “Linguaphobia, Linguistic Indifference, and the Monolingual University” Edited by David Gramling and Ervin Malakaj, University of British Columbia Timeline Abstracts of 300 words + bio of 100 words, due February 1, 2026 to llimuproject@gmail.com Full essays / articles due August 1, 2026 Project Overview When West Virginia University announced plans in Fall 2023…
-
CfA: LLIMU Comics and Graphic Art Artist
This project seeks to expand the visual language around these themes, inviting critical, conceptual, experimental, experiential, personal, and political work of various kinds that tests the boundaries and critical power of the concepts below. We invite artists to compose a visual narrative on one or more of the following topics. Artists can interpret these themes…
-
CfA: Graduate Academic Assistant for LLIMU
As part of the ”Linguaphobia, Linguistic Indifference, and the Monolingual University” Project, the successful GAA will undertake an environmental scan / audit of ubc.ca Webpages as relates to multilingualism, translation, monolingualism, and non-anglophone content. They will collect, catalogue, map, and analyze the implications of the various instances and forms of these phenomena in the outward-facing…