All my tongues: Replacing the concept of mother tongue with empirically grounded values for the roles of languages in repertoires

University of Helsinki, 27th of August 2026
Organised by Grégoire Andreo, Friederike Lüpke and Katharina Tyran
Workshop description

The workshop brings together members of the CoCoLaC community at the University of Helsinki and (socio)linguists, language acquisition researchers and language teachers and researchers from across Finland with the goal not to critique the mother tongue / native speaker construct further, but to propose alternative ways of understanding the values and roles of language in repertoires, language use and identification. Our aim is also to ground these new criteria in concrete language ecologies and scale up for comparison, rather than using external, predefined categories and apply them to different settings. 

We are happy to confirm the Belgian psycholinguist Annick De Houwer as our keynote speaker.

You can find the Call for papers

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CoCoLaC Workshop 

ALL MY TONGUES
REPLACING THE CONCEPT OF MOTHER TONGUE WITH EMPIRICALLY GROUNDED VALUES FOR THE ROLES OF LANGUAGES IN REPERTOIRES, LANGUAGE USE AND IDENTIFICATION 

27 August 2026, 09.00-18.00

University of Helsinki Main building 
Fabianinkatu 33, Studium 1 (F3020)

Registration until 17 August 

09.00  Welcome coffee    

09.15 – 10.30 
Opening words  
Keynote lecture
Annick De Houwer
Language learning and use across the lifespan: the dynamics of changing contexts 

 10.30 – 11.00 
Coffee break 

11.00 – 11.40 
Iiris Rennicke
Speakers of Portuguese as a heritage language in Finland: native or doubly non-native?    

11.40 – 12.20 
Tuulia Suvanto
Navigating Basque varieties in family: experiences of Basque parents in the BAC and in Finland   

12.20 – 13.30 
Lunch break  

13.30 – 14.10 
Lauri Marjamäki
Elite Multilingualism before 1800: The letters of Johanna Theresia Harrach (1637­–1706)

14.10 – 14.50
Maria Fedina
Native languages: how legal and ideological constructs affect living practices                                         

14.50 – 15.10 
Coffee break    

15.10 – 15.50
Louise Rolland
Understanding language repertoires for trauma processing in psychotherapy    

15.50 – 16.30
Daniel Talv 
“My tongue has no mother”: rethinking  affect and heritage in access-driven EMI repertoires    

16.30 – 16.45  
Coffee break   

16.45 – 17.25 
Mélanie Buchart
Acceptability of Linguistic Variation in  French: Learners’ Representations, Repertoires, and Reflexive Normativity 

17.25 – 18.00  
Closing discussion 

18.00 – End of Workshop   

Contact:




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