One year of PLURILINGMEDIA: what’s next?

Craig Willis: Particularly since spring 2025, we have become a lot more visible as a project. We launched our social media channels, which have grown steadily month on month, and our website went live in June. This has helped give us visibility online and grow awareness of the network, but it has also seen us receive hundreds of working group member applications.

I am always surprised by how much crossover there is in terms of key issues surrounding regional and minority languages across wider Europe. Of course, every situation is unique and this has to be remembered, but bringing people together from all corners of the continent always identifies commonalities and opportunities for collaboration. This is particularly the case for media in the 2020s: the mediascape has become increasingly uniform due to global streaming and social media platforms dominating the market. Thus, thirdly, I believe that regulations and interventions at the level of the European Union or the Council of Europe are crucial for the topics that concern PLURILINGMEDIA.

This is indeed the question for the ad hoc committee to tackle! Part of the issue is that most people in our network are AI-curious, but we want to bring together our AI competence and inform all the working groups and their members. We know that some larger languages, such as Catalan, are making significant changes in their media sphere, as MIDAS member VilaWeb shows with its use of AI. However, we want to explore the situation more holistically for numerically smaller or lesser-resourced languages. The aim is to identify challenges and opportunities for linguistic diversity in media, including how the EU’s advances in digital and AI legislation may impact this.

Our major event for the second year of the project is the General Conference in December 2025, organised in Warsaw. Here we will welcome over 70 participants, presenting close to 50 papers over the two days. We will then also begin our series of policy workshops, with Working Group 1 meeting in Galway and Working Group 4 meeting in Helsinki. Then we will have our second training school in Rijeka, focused on legislation and standards.

To increase the presence and awareness of linguistic plurality among scholars and practitioners of media more broadly. PLURILINGMEDIA had two broad targets from the outset: to encourage those working with languages to consider media, and to encourage those working with media to consider languages. In the first year, we’ve done very well with the former but need to work more on the latter!