International Seminar at the University of Warsaw
On 21 May 2026, the UNESCO Chair on Intangible Cultural Heritage in Public and Global Governance at the University of Warsaw co-organised the international seminar “Language as a Vehicle of Intangible Cultural Heritage”, held on the occasion of the World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development. Organised together with the Centre for Research and Practice in Cultural Continuity at the Faculty of “Artes Liberales”, the event brought together researchers, practitioners and heritage experts to discuss linguistic diversity, cultural continuity, heritage governance and the impact of digital technologies and artificial intelligence on living heritage.
Hosted at the Faculty of Political Science and International Studies of the University of Warsaw, the seminar approached language not simply as a communication tool, but as a living cultural infrastructure through which communities transmit memory, ecological knowledge, values and ways of understanding the world. Throughout the discussions, language emerged as inseparable from identity, environment, wellbeing and social relations.
Opening the event, Agnieszka Bieńczyk-Missala, Vice-Dean for International Cooperation at the Faculty of Political Science and International Studies, emphasized that language carries far more than information. It functions as a carrier of dignity, emotions, memory and cultural continuity. Referring to UNESCO data showing the accelerating disappearance of endangered languages worldwide, she stressed that current technological transformations create both unprecedented opportunities and serious risks for cultural diversity.
The seminar repeatedly returned to one central question: what exactly disappears when a language disappears? As several speakers argued, communities lose not only vocabulary or grammar, but also culturally specific ways of understanding relationships between people, landscapes, memory and everyday life.
Introduction: Why and When Is Language a Vehicle of Intangible Cultural Heritage?
The introductory session featured presentations by Prof. Justyna Olko and Prof. Hanna Schreiber, moderated by Monika Stobiecka.
Prof. Justyna Olko introduced the work of the Centre for Research and Practice in Cultural Continuity, emphasizing its engaged and interdisciplinary approach developed together with Indigenous and minoritised communities. She stressed the importance of recognizing knowledge produced within communities as equally important to academic expertise and argued for approaches that challenge rigid disciplinary boundaries.
Prof. Hanna Schreiber presented the activities of the UNESCO Chair on Intangible Cultural Heritage in Public and Global Governance and reflected on the ethical and political dimensions of heritage governance. She emphasized that heritage is never simply “found” or naturally given, but always shaped through processes of recognition, representation and power relations. Heritage governance therefore requires not only safeguarding mechanisms, but also participation, dialogue and ethical responsibility toward communities whose practices are being recognized and transmitted.
One of the central themes of the introduction concerned the paradoxical status of language within the framework of the 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. As Prof. Schreiber explained, the Convention does not recognize language itself as heritage, but rather as a “vehicle” of intangible cultural heritage. This formulation emerged from political negotiations among Member States concerned about minority rights, sovereignty and identity politics.
Language appears in the Convention in a very interesting and politically cautious way. (…) It is a vehicle through which heritage is expressed and transmitted.
Prof. Schreiber also situated the Convention within a broader genealogy of international language protection. Referring to Article 27 of the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the 1989 UNESCO Recommendation on the Safeguarding of Traditional Culture and Folklore, and the 2001 UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, she demonstrated how languages have gradually gained recognition as essential components of cultural rights, cultural diversity and heritage safeguarding. She further discussed UNESCO initiatives dedicated to multilingualism and language technologies, including the 2003 Recommendation concerning the Promotion and Use of Multilingualism and Universal Access to Cyberspace and the 2025 Global Roadmap for Multilingualism in the Digital Era.
Turning to UNESCO’s heritage mechanisms, she highlighted the changing place of languages within the organisation’s safeguarding framework. Between 2001 and 2005, UNESCO proclaimed 90 Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity, several of which explicitly foregrounded linguistic heritage. Under the 2003 Convention, however, language has become significantly less visible as an explicit category. As of May 2026, only two inscribed elements contain the word “language” in their title: the Whistled Language (Türkiye) and Silbo Gomero (Spain). At the same time, oral traditions and expressions constitute a broader safeguarding category represented by 62 elements on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity (out of 716 elements in total), 13 elements on the List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding (out of 90), and 4 programmes on the Register of Good Safeguarding Practices (out of 43). These figures illustrated both the importance of language for the transmission of living heritage and the continuing reluctance to recognise languages themselves as heritage requiring direct safeguarding.
The discussion demonstrated the ambivalent consequences of this compromise. While it enabled broad international ratification of the Convention, it also left many linguistic communities in a structurally fragile position. Access to institutional support often depends on framing language as part of broader cultural practices rather than as heritage deserving direct protection in itself.
Prof. Olko’s lecture critically examined dominant approaches to linguistic diversity in academia and public policy. Drawing on research conducted with Indigenous communities in Mexico and Vanuatu, as well as work concerning linguistic minorities in Poland, she challenged the widespread tendency to treat languages as fixed, countable and clearly separable entities. Instead, she argued that language should be understood as inseparable from culture itself — deeply connected to social relations, environmental knowledge, emotional wellbeing and collective identity.
Particular attention was devoted to the limitations of quantitative linguistic models and state-centered classifications. Contemporary datasets and linguistic maps often present languages as standardized units separated by clear borders, while ignoring multilingual realities and overlapping identities. Speakers argued that such approaches may reproduce colonial forms of knowledge production, where institutions external to communities define linguistic legitimacy and determine what counts as a “real” language.
Historical examples discussed during the seminar illustrated how administrative systems themselves have often become instruments of exclusion. Speakers referred, among others, to archival census practices in Mexico, where Indigenous language speakers unable to communicate with officials in Spanish were classified as mentally disabled. The discussion repeatedly returned to the broader problem of “internal colonization” within modern nation-states and to the ways in which minority and regional languages continue to encounter structural resistance and invisibility.
The distinction between language and culture is artificial. When a language is lost, the culture may survive in some forms, but it is profoundly modified.
The introduction also emphasized the relationship between language, wellbeing and resilience. Research discussed during the seminar demonstrated that heritage languages often function as protective factors supporting psychological wellbeing, intergenerational continuity and social cohesion. The loss of language entails not only the disappearance of vocabulary, but also the erosion of ecological knowledge, oral traditions and culturally specific ways of interpreting relationships between humans and the environment.
One particularly powerful testimony cited during the session came from a Nahua community member in Mexico describing communication with plants in their heritage language:
We tell them that they look beautiful, that they are clean, and that the air refreshes them. They are also very happy when they are free from weeds. This is how we communicate with plants in our language.
The example illustrated a recurring argument throughout the seminar: language is not merely used to describe reality, but actively shapes forms of relational knowledge and belonging.
Roundtable I: Minoritised Languages and Cultural Diversity
The first roundtable focused on the relationships between minoritised languages, cultural diversity and community resilience. Bringing together researchers and practitioners working in different cultural and geographical contexts, the discussion explored how local languages function not only as means of communication, but also as carriers of memory, identity and social belonging.
Heniek Małolepszy reflected on local linguistic heritage and urban identity in Warsaw, focusing particularly on the disappearing sociolect and cultural practices associated with pre-war Warsaw street culture. His presentation demonstrated how urban language traditions preserve not only vocabulary and expressions, but also specific forms of humour, emotional distance, solidarity and ways of coping with historical trauma.
Beginning the session with a live performance of Warsaw urban folk music on the bandżola, a traditional Warsaw banjo-like instrument associated with Stanisław Grzesiuk and Warsaw street folklore — Małolepszy situated language within a broader ecosystem of sound, music and everyday cultural practice. The performance itself became an example of intangible cultural heritage functioning as a living, embodied experience rather than a purely archival object.
Drawing on examples connected with Warsaw songs, oral storytelling and local speech traditions, he showed how the city’s linguistic heritage emerged historically through the coexistence and interaction of Polish, Yiddish, Russian and German influences. In this sense, Warsaw speech traditions reflected not linguistic purity, but urban multilingualism and cultural hybridity.
Małolepszy also emphasized that contemporary revitalisation efforts rely less on institutional protection than on rebuilding emotional attachment and everyday presence. Community reading groups, performances of pre-war songs, humour and informal intergenerational transmission all function as mechanisms through which urban linguistic heritage remains socially meaningful. His presentation demonstrated that urban dialects and sociolects should not be treated merely as nostalgic relics of the past, but as living forms of collective memory capable of sustaining local identity and social continuity in rapidly changing cities.
The discussion on living urban heritage connected naturally with another example of linguistic revitalisation presented during the roundtable: the case of Wymysiöeryś, the language of Wilamowice. Presented by Dr Tymoteusz Król, the case demonstrated how communities can build “living archives” through theatre, education, social media and everyday cultural practices. Following decades of suppression after the Second World War, the language has been revitalized not by preserving it as a museum artifact, but by bringing it into contemporary life through theatre productions, youth engagement and digital culture, including TikTok.
The language is no longer treated as a shameful relic but as a source of pride and community-building among younger generations.
The discussion showed that revitalisation depends not only on institutional recognition, but also on whether communities are able to create meaningful social spaces where language remains useful, visible and emotionally significant. Speakers emphasized that heritage survives through active use, adaptation and transmission rather than through symbolic protection alone.
Developing this perspective further, Prof. Fabrizio Galeazzi discussed storytelling and participatory cultural practices as tools for strengthening the visibility and continuity of underrepresented linguistic traditions. Drawing on projects situated at the intersection of heritage, technology and community engagement, he emphasized that endangered languages cannot survive solely through institutional preservation or archival documentation. Instead, they need to remain socially meaningful and emotionally present within everyday life.
Heritage survives not through passive preservation, but through active everyday use.
Particular attention was devoted to the role of narrative practices — including oral storytelling, community media and participatory cultural production — in rebuilding intergenerational relationships around language. Galeazzi highlighted that revitalisation processes become significantly more effective when communities are not treated merely as “informants” or passive heritage bearers, but as active co-creators of cultural knowledge and representation.
His intervention also addressed the importance of immersive and experiential approaches to heritage transmission. Referring to examples connected with digital storytelling and extended reality (XR) environments, he argued that technology can support linguistic revitalisation when it creates active engagement rather than passive consumption. In this perspective, language is experienced not simply as vocabulary or grammar, but as part of a broader sensory, emotional and spatial relationship with culture, memory and place.
Moderated by Jinyoung Seo from the International Information and Networking Centre for Intangible Cultural Heritage in the Asia-Pacific Region (ICHCAP), the roundtable ultimately showed that the survival of minoritised languages depends less on symbolic declarations and more on whether communities are able to create real social spaces where language remains useful, visible and emotionally meaningful. The cases discussed during the session demonstrated that revitalisation is most effective when language functions not as a protected artifact, but as a medium of everyday life — present in theatre, humour, music, digital communication and intergenerational relationships. The discussion also made clear that current legal and administrative frameworks still struggle to accommodate multilingual realities that do not fit neatly into nation-state categories or rigid distinctions between “language” and “dialect.”
Roundtable II: Technology and AI in Intangible Cultural Heritage
The second roundtable focused on the impact of digital technologies and artificial intelligence on the safeguarding, representation and transmission of intangible cultural heritage. The discussion addressed both the opportunities and the risks connected with the growing role of digital infrastructures in shaping cultural visibility and participation.
Participants explored how online platforms, AI systems, automatic translation tools and digital archives increasingly influence linguistic diversity and cultural continuity. While digital technologies can support documentation, accessibility and revitalisation efforts, speakers emphasized that technological systems are never neutral. Questions concerning AI in heritage contexts therefore inevitably involve ethics, representation, ownership and power.
One of the central concepts discussed during the roundtable was the “openness paradox.” Communities often share their cultural heritage online in order to preserve visibility and support revitalisation efforts, yet digital platforms and AI systems may simultaneously extract and standardize this material without reciprocity or community control. Participants noted that cultural knowledge uploaded in the spirit of openness frequently becomes raw material for commercial AI systems operating far beyond the control of the communities that produced it.
At the same time, the discussion addressed how processes such as algorithmic “data cleaning” may erase accents, humour, emotional tone and culturally specific meanings in favour of standardized models optimized for technological efficiency. AI systems trained predominantly on dominant languages often struggle to capture dialectal diversity, contextual meanings and culturally embedded understandings of landscape and environment present in minoritised languages.
Kamila Neumann discussed Wikimedia initiatives and open culture practices aimed at increasing access to knowledge while strengthening community participation in digital heritage environments. Her presentation focused particularly on the tension between openness as a democratic value and openness as a mechanism of extraction in the platform economy. She reflected on how communities documenting their languages and traditions online frequently contribute to systems that later reuse this material without consent, contextual understanding or benefit-sharing.
Neumann emphasized that debates surrounding open knowledge can no longer ignore questions of power asymmetry between local communities and global technological actors. According to her, heritage communities increasingly face situations in which visibility becomes inseparable from vulnerability: remaining absent from digital space may accelerate marginalisation, while participation simultaneously exposes cultural knowledge to uncontrolled appropriation.
The question is no longer simply whether knowledge should be open, but under what conditions openness remains fair and non-extractive.
Joanna Dolińska reflected on the role of digital tools in community-oriented cultural continuity projects and discussed the practical challenges of documenting and transmitting living heritage in technologically mediated environments. Her intervention highlighted the tension between the fluid, relational character of intangible cultural heritage and the technical logic of digital systems, which often require categorisation, simplification and standardisation.
Particular attention was devoted to the risks connected with reducing heritage to isolated digital “content.” Dolińska stressed that intangible cultural heritage does not exist independently from the social relations, emotions and contexts through which it is practiced. Digitisation should therefore not be understood as a neutral act of preservation, but as a process that inevitably transforms the forms through which heritage is experienced and transmitted.
She also emphasized the importance of long-term sustainability and community ownership in digital heritage projects. Many initiatives disappear once temporary grant funding ends, leaving communities dependent on unstable infrastructures or external technological partners.
Intangible cultural heritage does not happen inside databases. It happens between people.
Developing the discussion further, Fabrizio Galeazzi addressed participatory storytelling and immersive approaches to heritage communication in technologically mediated spaces. Drawing on projects situated at the intersection of heritage, digital storytelling and extended reality (XR), he argued that technologies such as VR and immersive media can support linguistic revitalisation when they encourage active participation rather than passive consumption.
He emphasized that language should not be approached merely as grammar or vocabulary, but as part of a broader sensory and emotional relationship with memory, landscape and social interaction. Referring to immersive heritage projects involving endangered languages, Galeazzi demonstrated how digital environments may help recreate emotional proximity and embodied engagement that traditional archives often fail to capture.
At the same time, he warned against purely technological solutionism. According to Galeazzi, immersive technologies become meaningful only when communities themselves remain active participants in designing and shaping the narratives through which their heritage is represented.
Technology becomes useful for heritage only when it strengthens relationships rather than replacing them.
The roundtable also highlighted the growing asymmetry between local communities and large technological platforms. Participants stressed that many current AI systems remain structurally poorly equipped to handle linguistic diversity, particularly in the case of low-resource and minoritised languages. As a result, digital infrastructures often reinforce existing hierarchies of visibility and representation rather than reducing them.
Moderated by Bartosz Pieliński from the UNESCO Chair on Intangible Cultural Heritage in Public and Global Governance, the discussion highlighted several concrete tensions emerging at the intersection of AI and intangible cultural heritage: the dependence of cultural visibility on privately controlled infrastructures, the risks of algorithmic homogenisation and the growing imbalance between local communities and global technological actors.
At the same time, the roundtable demonstrated that digital technologies are not inherently incompatible with safeguarding efforts. Their impact depends largely on governance models, community participation and the extent to which technological systems remain capable of preserving context, plurality and cultural nuance. The discussion ultimately suggested that future heritage technologies must move beyond extractive models toward approaches grounded in long-term participation, contextual understanding and forms of digital sovereignty that allow communities to retain meaningful control over how their cultural knowledge is represented and circulated.
Summary
The seminar demonstrated that contemporary debates on linguistic diversity can no longer be separated from broader discussions concerning democracy, ethics, wellbeing, technological governance and cultural resilience. Across all sessions, language emerged not simply as a communication tool, but as a living infrastructure of social relations, memory and knowledge.
A recurring theme throughout the discussions was the inseparability of language and culture. Speakers repeatedly emphasized that when a language disappears, communities lose far more than vocabulary or grammatical structures. They lose oral traditions, ecological knowledge, emotional frameworks and culturally specific ways of understanding relationships between people, landscapes and non-human environments.
The seminar also highlighted the political tensions embedded within contemporary heritage governance. The status of language as merely a “vehicle” of intangible cultural heritage within the 2003 UNESCO Convention reflects broader struggles between cultural safeguarding, minority recognition and state-centered models of governance. Several presentations demonstrated how linguistic diversity continues to challenge administrative systems built around standardisation, clear categorisation and monolingual assumptions.
At the same time, the discussions repeatedly showed that successful revitalisation rarely depends on symbolic recognition alone. Theatre, storytelling, humour, music, social media and everyday intergenerational transmission often play a more decisive role in sustaining linguistic continuity than formal legal frameworks. The examples of Warsaw urban speech traditions and the revitalisation of Wymysiöeryś demonstrated that heritage survives primarily when it remains socially meaningful, emotionally present and actively practiced.
A major thread running through the seminar concerned the growing influence of digital technologies and artificial intelligence on cultural representation. While digital tools create new possibilities for visibility, documentation and revitalisation, they also risk deepening asymmetries between local communities and global technological platforms. Discussions surrounding the “openness paradox” revealed how communities increasingly face a difficult dilemma: remaining digitally invisible may accelerate marginalisation, while digital participation simultaneously exposes cultural knowledge to extraction, standardisation and loss of contextual meaning.
When languages weaken, communities lose not only vocabulary but also social relations, rituals, ecological knowledge, and ways of interpreting the world.
Ultimately, the seminar framed linguistic diversity not as a niche cultural issue, but as a broader question concerning the future of cultural plurality, democratic participation and the capacity of communities to retain agency over how their knowledge, identities and heritage are represented in an increasingly standardised and technologically mediated world.
