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 and Humanities Research Council of Canada-funded project LLIMU.

FULL SYMPOSIUM PROGRAM

Suggested Preparation for the Symposium

In preparation, please kindly also consider exploring a few of these surveys at your leisure and sharing them with your classes as an assignment on the syllabus or Canvas page!

• Linguaphobia
• Linguistic Indifference
• The Monolingual University
• Authoritarian Language
• Linguistic Disobedience

LLIMU Exercise

Aditionally, check out this exercise around linguaphobia, linguistic indifference, and monolinguality. Read the statements below and think about where you stand with regard to them.

Linguaphobia

1. There are no legitimate reasons to fear language(s).
2. Students choose their courses and majors independent of linguaphobia (fear of language(s).
3. The ways and intensities with which people experience linguaphobia interacts with how they experience gender, racialization, sexuality, ability/ableism, wealth and class.
4. Linguaphobia is a natural feature of human interaction.
5. Linguaphobia is produced, maintained, and intensified by both subtle and blatant institutional means.
6. Linguaphobia is less prevalent at universities than elsewhere.
7. Linguaphobia is not culturally specific.
8. Irrational reasons to fear language(s) outnumber rational ones, and this is more so the case in 2025 than in other eras.

Linguistic Indifference

1. My field of study has a (surprising) propensity to ignore the analytic importance of language(s) in its research questions, without noticing the consequences of doing so.
2. I come in contact with others’ fields of study and am surprised to see the way its research questions seem to express a disinterest in language(s).
3. Linguistic indifference effects public policy, curricular planning, and geopolitics in important ways.
4. Linguistic indifference is taught at a young age.
5. Linguistic indifference impacts different languages in different ways, and more present in some historical periods than in others.
6. Literary and linguistic fields, including Translation Studies, are immune to linguistic indifference.
7. Certain administrative and political processes depend on linguistic indifference to succeed.
8. I can think of a research question or course topic that can afford to be linguistically indifferent
9. Linguistic indifference is the same as linguistic neutrality or linguistic agnosticism.

The Monolingual University

1. Universities like UBC are less monolingual than they used to be, when it comes to their student bodies.
2. Universities like UBC are more monolingual than they used to be, when it comes to their curricula, proprietary technologies, and student services.
3. Monolingualism constrains the university’s ability to do cutting-edge research in a variety of fields.
4. Monolingualism at universities is an own-goal; it is a self-imposed mechanism that supresses diversity, knowledge, and participation—with no benefit in return.
5. Corporate-driven accessibility / transparency ideals, and the dream of ensuring a “common language” for exchange between members, propels the university towards a monolingualism no one actually asked for.
6. Universities in 2040, including UBC, are likely to be more monolingual than they are in 2025.
7. At UBC, Anglocentricity and monolingualism mean the same thing.
8. It is too unwieldy and methodologically unsound to teach classes (on topic x) in multilingual ways.