Call for extended abstracts: The politics of intercomprehension, Université de Mons, Mons, Belgium, 18-19 June 2026. Deadline: 15 January 2026.
Studies of language acquisition, language education and other contexts of multilingualism present intercomprehension as the phenomenon of understanding, or being understood, through different modes of communication. It is a transdisciplinary and “polyhedral concept”: researchers employ distinct formulations, but all play with the (inter)action of understanding in contexts of difference. This has real political stakes, though they have not always been acknowledged. What does it mean to understand a message, as it relates to power and recognition? What does it mean to understand a person, or to understand each other? Is understanding always necessary? And when (and for whom) is it a privilege? The aim of this two-day conference is to tug at the ideological threads woven into intercomprehension and unfasten it from its purely linguistic interpretation to achieve a transdisciplinary understanding. We hope that this gathering of different academic and activist perspectives will engender a more inclusive framing of the concept.
In the Global North, linguistic intercomprehension is understood as the process of an interlocutor understanding unknown languages within the same linguistic family as their primarily used languages. It has been lauded as a practice subversive to monolingual norms and aligned with European values, without much contextualization of the colonial ontology underpinning European frameworks of multilingualism and multiculturalism. Projects of minority language revitalization have increasingly promoted intercomprehension as a tool for democratic collaboration, but its consequences for linguistically-isolated communities (e.g. Euskera in Euskal Herria, which does not belong to the same linguistic family as neighboring minority languages) has not been explored. What are the benefits and limitations to such practices? How does increased technological intervention transform these practices? Furthermore, we invite contributions that critically explore how politics of intercomprehension are enacted for vulnerable groups, particularly when understanding and intelligibility are transformed into responsibilities rather than rights. For instance, situations of migration and (im)mobility offer unique contexts to further understand how intercomprehension happens when people are mixed together or forced apart.
Organizers invite participants to analyze the relationships between intercomprehension and different conceptualizations of multilingualism. Of particular interest is the moral and ideological work that surrounds this intersection. For example, does the application of intercomprehension practices signify a more democratic future for language users, or are its liberatory aspects overstated, as Jürgen Jaspers warned with translanguaging (2018)? Moreover, the ontological limits of linguistic intercomprehension seem to be restrained to human multilingualism. How can the “animal turn” in sociolinguistics (Cornips: 2025) contribute to theorizing intercomprehension as a distributed and emergent property between sociomaterial actors, human and non-human?
This conference welcomes creative approaches to questions such as these to understand the political and ideological contours of a multilingual future based in intercomprehension.
Center for Intercultural Dialogue 