Humanities

Foreign Languages in Denmark in the Future: Recommendations

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Lingoblog forsider 4 1

In June, the National Centre for Foreign Languages (NCFF) published its latest report on the future of foreign language education in Denmark. At a time when learning languages in one’s spare time – through evening classes or apps such as Duolingo – has never been more popular, interest in studying languages within the formal education system continues to decline. Lingoblog was invited to bring the recommendations here. The full report (in Danish) can be accessed here.

System and Structure

Foreign language education faces deep-rooted structural challenges across the Danish education system. Student enrollment is falling, fewer pupils choose languages, and access to language education is becoming increasingly limited. At the same time, Denmark faces a growing shortage of qualified language … ↪

A linguist takes on the AI hype and dehumanization

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Banevogteren 1
Emily M. Bender is one of the most prominent critical voices against the uncritical adoption of “AI”-branded language technology. What makes her voice particularly insightful is her domain expertise as a computational linguist and her technical understanding of how languages models work — and how significantly they differ from the way that humans acquire and process language.
This week, Professor Bender is visiting Aarhus University and will give a talk titled “Resisting Dehumanization in the Age of ‘AI’, the View from the Humanities”. Her argument is that the production and promotion of so-called “AI” technology involves dehumanization on many fronts: The computational metaphor valorizes one kind of cognitive activity as “intelligence”, devaluing many other aspects of human experience, while also
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