Linguistic diversity in institutional collections: Beyond preservation to valorisation

Language’s capacity to shape and perpetuate ideologies, cultural values, and social conditions is well-established across linguistic theory. From this perspective, combatting linguistic prejudice and promoting language equity are key to contemporary cultural concerns around challenging prescriptivist worldviews and disrupting hegemonic historical perspectives. Institutional collections represent promising staging grounds for such efforts, with wide reach and accessibility, but are typically focused and curated in mainstream language varieties. This paper explores how institutional collections may correct this homogeneity, through connecting materials containing regional/social language varieties, including those of community archives, into collections more representative of diverse linguistic and cultural landscapes. Using an AHRC-funded project integrating community-generated content into the UK national collection as example, this paper addresses challenges and makes recommendations for effectively valorising language varieties in institutional collections. Consequently, this paper argues for the potential of linguistically diverse institutional collections as transformative tools for promoting language equity and reducing linguistic prejudice.