The Department of Language and Culture (ISK) is responsible for research, education, and dissemination within language, literature, media, and cultural studies. The department hosts about 76 permanent employees, and with recruitment positions and other temporary staff, there are about 150 employees, primarily at campus Tromsø, but also at campus Alta. The department has approximately 500 students.

The department consists of a total of 12 disciplines. Each discipline has a program director (see under management at the About us -page). In addition, we have DIVVUN – Sami language technology, which develops language technology tools for Sami languages. DIVVUN collaborates closely with Giellatekno and is led by Sjur Nørstebø Moshagen. DIVVUN is funded by KDD.

Our disciplines are:

• General Literature Studies
• Divvun
• English Literature English Language and Theoretical Linguistics
• Art History
• Kven and Finnish
• Media and Documentation Studies
• Nordic
• Norwegian as a Second Language
• Russian
• Sami (including Giellatekno)
• Spanish
• German

The department has very strong research environments within linguistics and houses one of the world’s foremost research communities in linguistics represented by Center for Language, Brain and Learning (C-LaBL). The center is funded by the Trond Mohn Research Foundation and UiT. The department has two top research groups: Language Acquisition, Variation, and Linguistic Attrition with a focus on Norwegian contexts (AcqVA-Nor) and Cognitive Linguistics: Empirical Approaches to Russian (CLEAR). Additionally, there are research groups such as Giellatekno (Sami language technology) and The Multilingual North: Diversity, Education, and Revitalization (MultiNor). Within literature studies, art history, and media and documentation studies, the department has the following research groups: 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).

The department also has the following research networks: Libraries, Archives, and Museums in the Community (LAMCOM), Marginalization in Early Modern Spain: Theories and Practices (MEMS), Sami Language Acquisition and Revitalization (SámGOE), The Hamsun/Ibsen Network, and Narrating the High North.

ISK offers teaching in the following fields: linguistics, literature studies, art history, media and documentation studies, English, Kven, Finnish, Norwegian, Russian, Sami, Spanish, and German as one-year studies, 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.  The department has continuing education courses in Northern Sami, German, and Nordic. Furthermore, the department offers doctoral education in cultural/literature studies, art history, media and documentation studies, and linguistics.