UPF has been chosen to join the UNESCO chair on Language Policies for Multilingualism. The chair’s Executive Committee unanimously passed UPF’s incorporation to this international network and highlighted as a highly positive value the research and training on different aspects of multilingualism carried out at UPF. The Committee also stressed the high positions UPF achieves each year in the main international university rankings and the weight contributed by language-related studies.

UPF effectively joined the UNESCO chair on 24 September 2019, at the meeting of the chair’s Executive Committee in the city of Macau (China). UPF was represented by doctor Vicent Climent-Ferrando, who was appointed to take charge of the research coordination of the UNESCO chair. The UPF research team will consist of the professors María Aguilar Solano, Montserrat González and Montserrat Ribas, members of the Discourse Studies and Translation research group (GEDIT) at UPF, which belongs to the Department of Translation and Language Sciences (DTCL).

Climent-Ferrando presented to the Executive Committee the priority lines of research to be carried out by UPF, which deal with the following four areas:

• Languages, society and migrations, which will address the new (re)conceptualizations of current language policies, understood as social policies, in increasingly multilingual environments.
• Language, discourse and society: research line on the dominant discourses on multilingualism and the conceptualization of languages in the new globalized world order. 
• Language rights: the comparative analysis of language legislation in bilingual and multilingual environments
• Teaching in multilingual environments: the analysis of increased multilingualism in the classroom, the conservation of autochthonous languages as vehicular languages in bilingual environments, the presence of English as a language of instruction, and the languages of immigration.

About the UNESCO chair

The UNESCO chair on Language Policies for Multilingualism emerged in 2018 with the aim of creating a research network on multilingualism from several disciplines such as linguistics, translation, education, politology, sociology and law, among others. Its members include 23 universities from around the world, including Brazil, China, India, Mexico and Russia. Since September 2019, UPF has been a member of this network of academic excellence on multilingualism.