18-19 June 2026, Mons, Belgium<\/p>\n
We are pleased to invite you to a two-day conference of different academic and activist perspectives that will tug at the ideological threads woven into intercomprehension and unfasten it from its purely linguistic interpretation to achieve a transdisciplinary understanding.<\/p>\n
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 (Melo-Pfeifer: 2015). It has been lauded as a practice subversive to monolingual norms and aligned with European values (Clua: 2007; Dzik: 2019; Mei\u1e9ener: 2011), 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 (Faulstich-Orellana and Rodr\u00edguez-Minkoff: 2016).<\/p>\n
With this conference we aspire to highlight contexts of communication often neglected by hearing academics, such as those explored in Deaf Studies and Disability Studies. Intercomprehension is often characterized as an inherent element of communication in deaf communities (Zeshan: 2015), an idea which scholars have critically examined (see Bagga-Gupta: 2019; De Meulder et al.: 2019; Moriarty Harrelson: 2019; Moriarty Harrelson and Kusters: 2021). Studies such as these navigate the relation between intercomprehension and intersubjectivity as tools to analyze how people create shared understanding (Gillespie & Cornish: 2009; Heasman & Gillespie: 2019). Research on neurodivergence illuminates the topic of intercomprehension and how language users \u2018queer\u2019 ableist notions of languaging and understanding (Walker: 2015). It is essential to include such perspectives in our discussions so that hearing and neurotypical academics do not perpetuate ableism, audism and oralism through their work and theorizations of comprehension and intelligibility (Bauman: 2004; O\u2019Connell: 2021; Rajagopalan: 2010).<\/p>\n
We also 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 J\u00fcrgen Jaspers warned with translanguaging (2018)? Moreover, the ontological limits of linguistic intercomprehension seem to be restrained to human multilingualism. How can the \u201canimal turn\u201d in sociolinguistics (Cornips: 2025) contribute to theorizing intercomprehension as a distributed and emergent property between sociomaterial actors, human and non-human?
\nThis conference welcomes creative approaches to questions such as these to understand the political and ideological contours of a multilingual future based in intercomprehension.<\/p>\n
More information:<\/p>\n