On 5 March 2025 Manchester City of Languages hosted a half-day conference on directions of language policy initiatives in the UK. The meeting was part of Manchester’s calendar of events for UNESCO International Mother Language Day (IMLD) 2025. Manchester is one of few cities that adopted IMLD into its official civic calendar. The city has been hosting events on the occasion since 2017.

Participants came from a range of different backgrounds and included teachers, academics, students, and activists and managers working in the culture sector, all based in various cities around the UK.

There was wide agreement about the need for a radical reform of language teaching that will do away with existing language hierarchies and introduce aspects of linguistic diversity as well as general knowledge about language and language variation. It was pointed out that the responses to the Department for Education’s recent call for evidence as part of the Curriculum Assessment Review were equally unanimous in this area (submissions on language can be found here https://clie.org.uk/2024-ca-review/)

There was also agreement that in regard to language teaching we need to break the demarcation lines that surround English, MFLs, and home languages, in every respect including conceptual frameworks, method, structure, value and attention.

Crucially, we acknowledged that language teaching is just one, albeit a prominent aspect of language awareness, and that many of the problems we see in teaching result from a biased societal view of multilingualism, a view that we must act to change at its core. We recognise that this requires a long process, and alongside our optimism we also identify setbacks in recent decades. That means that there is a need for a networked intervention to create a counter-narrative to the current priority at national level that sees languages as, primarily, skills with which to equip civil servants. We need an alternative conversation, and where necessary we need to push back against the attempts to cancel, sideline and ignore alternative narratives.

Our discussion touched on many examples of innovative practice, from the building of coalitions through to drafting and testing of alternative curriculum packages, various pathways to access schools effectively, models of research outreach, and areas where policy should give attention to multilingualism beyond language teaching, such as interpreting provisions and accessibility, protecting cultural heritage, and collating data on language practices. In particular, we emphasised the need to connect personal experiences to institutional structures: To give consideration to inter-generation communication and wellbeing, as well as to confidence in cultural background – the role of language in staying healthy and happy, as one colleague put it. That entails embracing a wider range of concepts – ontologies – of ‘language’ itself.

This requires changes in attitudes and awareness. While we recognise that there is no clear linear path from ‘celebration’ to structural change – indeed there is sometimes even a risk that ‘celebration’ can serve as lip service and an excuse to maintain the status quo – we nevertheless recognise the importance of reclaiming public space at grassroot level and to interrogate prevailing hierarchical views of language, replacing them by more inclusive narratives. Such public displays of multilingualism can help trigger a new sense of agency that can enable change also within institutional frameworks.

We feel that all this is nicely captured by the motto “Respect my language”: It says a lot about want we want, what we expect, what we think we can achieve but also what we think is missing from other initiatives that foreground language but neglect the personal and cultural experience and the social justice aspect.

We are delighted that participants expressed a keen interest in continuing the conversation. Manchester City of Languages will follow up on this exciting new venture and work to facilitate further meetings.