Prof Jeroen Darquennes is a professor of German and general linguistics at the University of Namur. He specialises in research on language contact, language conflict, language policy, and language planning in indigenous European language minority settings. He is currently in the process of preparing a handbook on Language Contact that will be published as part of De Gruyter's HSK-series in 2018 (vol 1) and 2020 (vol 2). His co-editors are Joe Salmons and Wim Vandenbussche.

He presented a paper entitled Advances in the study of language conflict: lessons from Belgium. Against the background of a broad overview of the history and the areas of focus of research on language conflict, this paper first of all discussed the causes, the visibility, the manifestations, the discursive focal points, the management, and the outcomes of the management of societal language conflict from a theoretical point of view. The theoretical approach to language conflict is then scrutinised against a discussion of (the history of) language conflict in Belgium.