The University of Cantabria (UC) will take part in the EUNICE Language Festival, known as SPEAK EUROPE: Language Festival 2026, from 2 to 6 November. This year's theme is 'In motion'. The initiative, organised by the European university alliance that includes UC, aims to provide various activities for language practice, cultural exchange, and interaction among students from different countries.
Over five days, the festival will offer a programme that complements regular academic activities, featuring coordinated proposals from various EUNICE universities. Activities will include workshops on audiovisual translation, conversation meetings, multilingual games, and tours to explore the presence of different languages in everyday spaces.
The EUNICE Office at the University of Cantabria is organising an international micro-story competition titled the Multilingual Flash Fiction Competition. Participants are invited to write a 500-word story related to this year's theme. Submissions can be made in one of the alliance's languages or in English, aiming to blend creative writing with the use of multiple languages. This activity will allow participants to explore the theme of movement from various personal and cultural perspectives, through stories that may reflect experiences of travel, displacement, change, or encounters between people and languages. The submission period for stories will be open from 2 to 6 November, with winners announced on 6 November at 12:00.
On 2 November, a workshop on audiovisual translation and animation adaptation, organised by the University of Hauts-de-France (France), will focus on translating scenes from animated films, addressing challenges such as humour, wordplay, and cultural references when switching languages. Another event, scheduled for 3 November, will be a multilingual meeting discussing society's relationship with cars, organised by the Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg (Germany) and the University of Mons (Belgium). This session will feature artist and philosopher Kilian Jörg, who has published works on the social and environmental impact of automobiles.
Multilingual conversations among students from different campuses and activities observing linguistic landscapes will also take place. The latter will invite participants to analyse the languages present in signs, advertisements, street names, and other elements of public space. On 5 November, participants from various cities, including Cottbus, Corinth, Bogotá, Mons, and Catania, will compare their observations in a virtual session.
The programme will also include informal meetings for conversation in Swedish, Finnish, and English, organised by the University of Vaasa (Finland), and sessions of the game The Impostor, designed by students to practice language skills through collective activities. Additionally, a multilingual meme festival coordinated by the Polytechnic Institute of Viseu (Portugal) and a virtual visit to the University of Vaasa campus are among the other proposals.
