The University of Massachusetts Amherst is about to say “hello” — and “hola,” “bonjour,” “cześć” and “ni hao” — to a new, two-day festival.
The Festival of Languages and Dialects (FOLD) will debut at Thompson Hall on Saturday, April 10. The event aims to celebrate the diversity of language and empower those whose accents or dialects have been stigmatized. It invites “everyone who has ever wanted to play with words” to explore the rich tapestry of local and global languages.
“Every different kind of language is something that we want to celebrate,” said UMass Visiting Lecturer Edwin Everhart, who created the festival. “We’re going to spend a lot of time at this festival not understanding what’s being said.”
FOLD’s lineup features roughly 25 acts, ranging from performances to academic presentations. The diverse program explores languages and dialects, including Afro-Caribbean Spanish, Arabic, Ukrainian, Karabakh Armenian, Amazigh, Korean and more. Local history also takes the stage, with a featured presentation on the evolution of speech and accents in western Massachusetts.
Everhart specializes in research about dialects and language standardization. The latter, he said, is “terrified of dialect and accent variation, because that’s going to make it hard for people to hear their military commanders and understand them, and it’s going to make it hard for us to have workers who are transportable across the country, and so on.” His research focuses primarily on Japan, where those concepts gained attention in the 1960s and 1970s.
“It was a big thing then, because the scholarship was basically like, ‘Wait, why are these people still speaking dialect? Why do these people still have an accent? Shouldn’t they have switched to sound how TV is by now? Shouldn’t they know that’s stigmatized?’ It’s wild,” Everhart said.
Dialect had a resurgence in Japan in the 80s and 90s, and “every city, town, village, hamlet, outhouse, steakhouse, roundhouse and bathhouse” in the country capitalized on the trend, Everhart said. Communities everywhere began selling dialect-themed merchandise and producing regional plays to celebrate their unique speech.
“Every different kind of language is something that we want to celebrate.”
Edwin Everhart
That sparked the creation of what Everhart translates as “The All-Japan Festival of Dialect” (“全国方言大会,” “Zenkoku Hōgen Taikai”), which ran in the town Mikawa in the Yamakata Prefecture until 2003. That festival, in turn, inspired FOLD.
“They had comedians, they had singers, they had academics, they had people with clothing, they had food people, they had all [kinds] of people coming and sharing their expertise, their experience, their perspectives,” Everhart said. One year was tourism-themed: bus tour guides from around the country would perform their tour guide routines onstage.
“The potential to build connections between these different places, to build connections between these different communities, to understand what struggles they have in common in terms of accent stigma, and to learn from each other’s strategies — I think that potential is huge,” he said.
Everhart drew further inspiration from the Japanese festival’s use of a mascot, though he decided FOLD needed two so they could “talk” to each other. While the original event featured “Dialect Boy,” FOLD’s local ambassadors are a squirrel and a “grinny” — the word for a chipmunk in his grandmother’s Pittsburgh dialect.
Another element of the festival on Sunday, April 11 is a 1.3-mile parade from the UMass campus to the Amherst Town Common. The parade will be held rain or shine, unless there’s severe weather.
While Everhart intentionally designed the festival to feel more like a “fan convention” than a “dry academic conference,” its mission does have a serious purpose. Beyond the mascots and parade, FOLD exists to highlight the importance of preserving and respecting variations in languages.
“We have an expectation in contemporary society that, ‘Oh, you can just correct your accent. You can give up your community language and switch to the dominant thing.’ We don’t know how to say that directly, but people know it,” Everhart said. “People know it because of a correct fear that they have that they’ll be laughed at. There are people who fall silent, rather than let it be known how they sound. And there are people who need to be taken seriously at the hospital, need to be taken seriously in the courthouse, need to be taken seriously in the school, and they aren’t.”
“One of the main ways that we mask all the structures of exploitation in our society [is], we pretend that it’s okay because, ‘Well, these people don’t talk very well, so how smart could they be?’” he continued. “If people don’t say that directly, it’s often felt, so if we can undo that way of thinking, then we have opened ourselves up to a radically new way of seeing people as fellow human beings.”
The Festival of Languages and Dialects will take place on April 11 and April 12. Each day begins at 9 a.m. Admission is free.
For more information, visit sites.google.com/umass.edu/fold2026.
