UK universities increasingly present themselves as global institutions with diverse campuses and a plethora of international partnerships.
However, this vision relies on an under-examined assumption that a narrow form of standard academic English is the default language of higher education. Although universities claim to value linguistic diversity, policies on teaching, learning, and internationalisation rarely treat language as a core resource affecting inclusion, success, and whose knowledge is recognised.
We argue that the time has come for UK higher education to pay explicit and sustained attention to language and languages in all policy domains, rather than treating language as an afterthought or an individual deficit to be corrected.
The myth of the monolingual university
Despite persistent assumptions, UK campuses are multilingual spaces. Students and staff routinely draw on a complex range of languages and linguistic repertoires shaped by heritage, socioeconomic and educational background, discipline, profession and community. Even those with only one “named” language shift between linguistic varieties depending on context. Others have lived, learned and worked in multiple languages, often doing significant emotional and cognitive labour to operate academically in English.
And yet this diversity goes largely unrecognised. English is treated as a single, neutral standard against which everyone is judged. The consequences are predictable: international students are framed as “lacking”, regional and working‑class students face accent bias, and multilingual staff and students feel compelled to minimise their linguistic identities.
How hidden language norms create inequity
The lack of explicit attention paid to linguistic diversity and the unexplored norms shaping beliefs about standard academic English means universities tend to operate under unwritten or covert language policies. This means expectations or implicit norms determining acceptable language use are embedded in, for example, disciplinary conventions, assessment criteria, email etiquette. Indeed, most educational and professional interactions in the academy are heavily prescribed by unspoken expectations and judgments about clarity, correctness or fluency in academic language use.
But language carries symbolic and social power. Certain varieties are perceived as academically legitimate; others are interpreted as incorrect, unclear or in some way deficient. Such judgments often mask assumptions tied to class, race, nationality and professionalism. They shape concerns about falling standards, frustrations about poor grammar, and the whispered and widespread references to a “language problem” when classrooms do not meet an imagined ideal of fluent academic debate.
Regulation has reinforced these assumptions. The Office for Students’ emphasis on assessing “correct” spelling, punctuation and grammar — without specifying what “standard English” means — embeds ideologies that linguists have challenged for decades. In practice, such norms disproportionately disadvantage students and staff whose language backgrounds, accents or socioeconomic or educational histories differ from an unquestioned normative ideal.
The rise of AI makes language policy more urgent
The proliferation of large language models may tempt universities to imagine that translation and automated correction or editing will make language differences irrelevant. In reality, AI amplifies the need for explicit language values and knowledge.
AI tools reproduce narrow versions of standard English, often encoding social and cultural biases. Many institutions have already recognised this, offering guidance to ensure AI is used critically, transparently and ethically in relation to academic communication.
Without an explicit institutional language policy, AI risks deepening inequities for those whose repertoires diverge from the linguistic norms embedded in AI training data. Importantly, long-held notions of criticality, academic voice, and originality, so often encoded language choices, need revisiting in the advent of a widespread educational use of AI.
From deficit to asset: recognising linguistic plurality
Viewing language diversity as a problem — something to manage or fix — stifles educational innovation. A shift to seeing linguistic plurality as an asset creates space for richer teaching, more representative curricula, and genuinely global engagement.
Multilingualism enhances disciplinary insight, creativity and cultural intelligence. It also deepens work on decolonising the curriculum, challenging Eurocentric assumptions about what counts as legitimate knowledge, and expanding whose voices shape universities.
But this shift won’t happen organically. It requires institutional articulation and leadership.
What an institutional language policy could do
We propose the creation of institutional language policies or manifestos—not as rigid sets of rules, but as evolving statements of intention that make linguistic diversity visible and guide practice. Such policies would position language as a central concern within institutional life, emphasising both flexibility and responsiveness to changing contexts.
These policies would serve several key purposes. First, they would recognise linguistic diversity as an institutional norm, acknowledging that staff and students bring valuable multilingual repertoires that enrich academic environments. They would also make implicit norms explicit by foregrounding the unwritten rules governing academic communication. This would help to reduce the disadvantages experienced by certain groups when faced with a ‘hidden curriculum’. In addition, institutions should strengthen their pedagogical practices by integrating linguistic awareness into teaching and assessment, supporting more inclusive and participatory forms of engagement.
At a strategic level, universities increasingly foreground priorities such as decolonisation, internationalisation, EDI, and belonging. Recognising the significant and complex role of language(s) within these initiatives would support their coherence and impact. Explicit language policies would also create space for critical conversations about how linguistic hierarchies shape whose voices are heard, trusted, and valued.
Finally, cross-institutional working groups should be established to ensure that language is considered across curriculum design, assessment policy, staff development and student support. Such an approach helps to avoid siloed or reactive practices, instead embedding language as a shared institutional responsibility. Models such as the Jersey Language Policy show how values‑based, flexible frameworks can guide practice without imposing unnecessary constraints.
A call to action
No UK university is monolingual, but many operate as though they are. Making language(s) visible is not a niche linguistic concern — it is central to equity, academic integrity, student experience and institutional strategy.
The sector already contains models of good practice — work on accent bias at Leeds and QMUL; Glasgow’s plurilingual classrooms course; Edinburgh’s commitment to Gaelic- provide examples of how institutions might extend conversations around linguistic diversity.
What is now needed is institutional clarity: a shared, explicit commitment to language as a core dimension of inclusion, belonging, internationalisation and academic excellence.
If universities want to build communities where everyone belongs and everyone can contribute, they must start by recognising the linguistic realities already present. Language is not peripheral to university life. It is foundational. And it is time to treat it that way.
