BRUM: Birmingham Research for Upholding Multilingualism

This research offers a snapshot of the presence and visibility of languages and their associated cultures in contemporary society. The survey focuses on Birmingham, the country's second city, that hosts speakers of over 100 languages. This multicultural city has a long working-class history and is home to migrants, a population increasingly excluded from language education (British Council's Language Trends Survey 2018). It also falls outside recent DfE's attempts to promote excellence in language pedagogy. Yet, the region has benefited from local initiatives in support of languages and cultures (e.g. the West Midlands Routes into Languages network hosted until summer 21 by Aston University). That institution's withdrawal of language programmes means that UG programmes including languages will soon be restricted to red-brick institutions Birmingham and Warwick, which effectively excludes a significant portion of the regional population from studying languages and compromises the supply of teachers. This challenges ambitious initiatives in inner-city schools such as Broadway Academy that intensively promotes languages for school improvement, or the King Edward VI Consortium's declared ambition to "make the city the best place to study in the UK." Birmingham's diversity, its central position and well-established academic links with the community make this project an ideal case study for initial diagnostic and recommendations in support of future research into linguistic and cultural diversity.
The project's originality is to adopt a bottom-up approach by involving the grassroots in the survey and the diagnosis of the situation, and to look for measures that raise lay awareness of the economic, societal and personal benefits of learning languages and their associated cultures. In concrete terms, this means that:
1. the presence and visibility of languages will be surveyed in everyday contexts such as education (e.g. languages offered, sustainability of teacher supply), businesses, public services (e.g.access to health or justice services in languages other than English) or leisure (e.g. multilingualism in the local cultural productions). This will help assess the exposure to linguistic and cultural diversity in daily life.
2. Non-academic input will be core to the project. The data will come from the everyday experience of lay citizens and will be collected on the ground by local stakeholders, recent language graduates (currently engaged in PG study, incl. teaching qualifications) who used to be language ambassadors for Routes into Languages West Midlands and undergraduate placement and final year students. Such research assistants are expected to build a more direct rapport with the informants and to provide an approach devoid of academic preconceptions. The public will also be invited to contribute to the survey by submitting images of the linguistic landscape of Birmingham through a locally adapted version of LinguaSnapp. A school competition will be organised to encourage pupils to consider the visibility of languages around their school. This crowdsourcing of data will serve the community. For instance, the presence of certain languages in areas of the city provides (unlike the census that suffers from the potential distortions of self-report) an up-to-date snapshot of language use and needs in a neighbourhood. Such information could inform the translation of official documents (see the lack of information in community languages during the COVID19 crisis) or the marketing strategy of local businesses.
3. Recommendations will focus on initiatives that broaden access to languages and their associated cultures, develop appreciation for and sustainability of language provision and on deliverables that positively impact the community and exhibit the economic, societal and personal benefits of multilingualism and multiculturalism, thereby igniting a renewed interest in languages and supporting their future and study in the UK