Language revitalisation, mobility and the transformation of community: Revitalise Project, 1st Workshop Briefing Report

This paper reports on the deliberations of the first Revitalise workshop held at Aberystwyth University on 22-23 May 2017. Revitalise is an interdisciplinary research network, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK), that aims to examine the implications of some of the major social, economic and political changes witnessed across Western societies today for our understanding of how contemporary language revitalisation efforts should be designed and implemented. It brings together an international group of academic researchers, spanning the arts, humanities and social sciences, along with a number of prominent language policy practitioners. The network is led by Dr Huw Lewis (Aberystwyth University), Professor Wilson McLeod (Edinburgh University) and Dr Elin Royles (Aberystwyth University).

The first workshop was entitled 'Language revitalisation, mobility and the transformation of community', and its aim was to provide an opportunity to reflect critically on recent changes on notions of community and their implications for our understanding of how to approach language revitalisation. On the first day, participants were encouraged to consider the implications of the shift towards increasingly mobile lives that cover a wider geographic area, and also the implications of the decline, in many locations, in informal social capital and the implications of the revolution in communication technology and the advent of what is described as the ‘network society’. The second day placed a greater emphasis on contemporary migration with participants focusing both on instances of international and intranational migration. A copy of the workshop’s programme can be found at the end of this paper.