Conference | Workshop
AI as a Site of Language Ideologies
- Date
- Friday 5 February 2027
- Time
- Location
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 2.27
This workshop approaches AI as a site of language ideologies. By AI, we mostly mean generative AI, chatbots in particular, including translation tools. Language ideologies, broadly speaking, are discourses around language. The idea is to investigate not only the actual use of AI, but also which perceptions and ideas about what language is or what language is for we project on it.
AI tools are built on assumptions about language, and they circulate such assumptions in turn. Questions of correctness and standard language, of which languages and varieties count as supported, of what makes a text sound human or machine-generated, and of whose writing counts as competent all surface in how people prompt these tools, evaluate their output and talk about them.
Users, developers, institutions, and public debate all contribute to these discourses. Studying AI through the lens of language ideologies connects concrete practices of use with the broader beliefs about language that shape them, and that these practices in turn reinforce or unsettle.
The workshop brings together researchers from Leiden and selected students from the Research Master (ResMa) and the BA/MA German Studies, who will present original empirical data collected in their courses. It is organized as part of a Una Europa project. Registration is open to everyone, including people outside of Leiden University.