The Department of Language and Culture has a very active and diverse research profile. The Department’s core activities are research, teaching, and dissemination within linguistics, literature, art history, and media and documentation studies. The Department hosts about 160 employees the majority of which are situated at campus Tromsø, but some are at campus Alta. There are about 500 students at the department.

The Department houses one of the world’s foremost research communities in linguistics represented by Center for Language, Brain and Learning (C-LaBL). I addition, there are research groups within acquisition (AcqVA-Nor), cognitive linguistics (CLEAR), Sami language technology (Giellatekno and Divvun), and sociolinguistics, multilingualism, and revitalization (MultiNor). The Department’s research communities within literature, art history, and media and documentation studies are nationally highly competitive, and are organised into research groups such as Arctic Voices, Engaging Conflicts in a Digital Era (ENCODE), Health, Art and Society (HAS), Interdisciplinary Phenomenology (IP), Pax Slavia in FLux: European Contexts (PSIF) and Worlding Northern Art (WONA).

ISK offers teaching in the following fields: linguistics, literature, art history, media and documentation studies, English, Kven, Finnish, Norwegian, Russian, Sami, Spanish, and German, as one-year programmes, as well as full Bachelor and Master programmes (including three international programmes). The department is also involved in teacher education level 8-13 and provides teaching in North Sami, Spanish, English, Nordic, Russian and German. In addition, the department is responsible for all the Sami language teaching (mother tongue and second language) at UiT. It also offers PhD programmes in linguistics, cultural/literary studies, art history, as well as media and documentation studies.