[Lgpolicy] International Conference - Sociolinguistics and AI

[Francis M. Hult via Lgpolicy]

Sociolinguistics and AI

19-21 August 2026

University of Copenhagen, South Campus

As we write this, in November 2025, three years after ChatGPT was made
available to the general public, ‘AI’ seems to be every­where. Strong in
connotation, weak in deno­tation, and deeply entangled in contradictory
dis­courses of desire and anxiety, profit and preju­dice, power and
injustice, capitalism and en­vironmentalism, ‘AI’ has – for better and for
worse – become a keyword of our times. A range of different technologies
branded in­dis­criminately as ‘AI’ have ac­quired a discur­sive and
material presence in the social world, affecting the lives of millions of
people around the globe, in different ways and with different consequences.

Though not the only form of ‘AI’ around, large language models and their
deployment as part of text-generative tools have come to be seen as
prototypical exemplars of ‘AI’. Lan­guage plays a central role in ‘AI’ –
not only as part of the discourses surrounding the tech­nology, but also as
part of the technology it­self. It is therefore not surprising that
socio­linguists have been keen to explore ‘AI’ from a range of different
perspectives. Many im­portant in­sights have started to emerge, but a
seemingly endless list of questions con­cerning the inter­face between
socio­linguistics and ‘AI’ never­theless remains to be explored:

If ‘AI’ is indeed a keyword of our times, then what does sociolinguistics
have to say about it? How can sociolinguistics as a discipline help us
understand the ‘new’ technologies that are being introduced at breakneck
speed? And what about the implications of the tech­nologies for fundamental
human concerns such as identity, social relations and, indeed, humanity? Is
‘AI’ changing the way we use lan­guage, think about language or think about
hu­mans as a languaging spe­cies? Is it changing language itself? Do we
need new ways of con­ceptualizing the rela­tionship between lan­guage,
technology and the environment? Do we need new methods and theories to
bring sociolinguistics into the era of ‘AI’ – or will estab­lished
approaches suffice?

Registration information:
https://cip.ku.dk/english/projects-and-collaborations/ai-uni/slx-and-ai-2026/
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