30.2474, FYI: Digital Modern Languages Mailing List and Seminar

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-30-2474. Tue Jun 18 2019. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 30.2474, FYI: Digital Modern Languages Mailing List and Seminar

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Date: Tue, 18 Jun 2019 21:14:57
From: Naomi Wells [naomi.wells at sas.ac.uk]
Subject: Digital Modern Languages Mailing List and Seminar

 
We are delighted to announce the launch of a new mailing list called ‘Digital
Modern Languages’ which is intended to provide a forum for research and
teaching across Modern Languages which engages with digital culture, media and
technologies. We hope it will allow for communication across different
languages and language-related disciplines, with a primary focus on languages
other than English.
 
You can subscribe to the list here:
https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=DIGITALMODERNLANGUAGES
 
We invite you to use the list to share announcements about your own events and
initiatives, and hope it will provide the opportunity to share knowledge and
experiences across the languages community.

Second Digital Modern Languages Seminar:
 
Following the successful launch of the Digital Modern Languages seminar
series, we are also delighted to announce below the details of the next
seminar on Tuesday 25 June, with Mandana Seyfeddinipur (Director of the SOAS
World Languages Institute and Head of the Endangered Languages Archive).
 
Tuesday 25 June 2019 – Mandana Seyfeddinipur (SOAS) – Two Sides of the Same
Coin: Why the Digital is Blessing and Curse for Endangered Languages
6-8pm, Tuesday 25 June, Bush House Lecture Theatre 2, King’s College London
https://digitalmodernlanguages.wordpress.com/2019/05/14/tuesday-25-june-2019-m
andana-seyfeddinipur-two-sides-of-the-same-coin-why-the-digital-is-blessing-an
d-curse-for-endangered-languages/
 
Abstract: Globalisation, urbanisation and climate change are affecting
people’s lives all over the world drastically. Languages are falling silent at
an alarming rate because people migrate to cities and give up their languages
for more prestigious major language promising social and economic mobility.
Linguists estimate that half of the world’s 7000 languages spoken today will
be gone by the end of this century. And with these languages humanity’s
knowledge about our own history, the local knowledges about flora and fauna
and medicine, about social systems and cosmologies.
 
At the same time the advent of digital technology has allowed linguists all
over the world to record these disappearing languages and to preserve them in
digital archives around the world. But while the internet held the promise of
democratising access to knowledge, it is also the demise for linguistic
diversity as the knowledge represented is heavily skewed towards the knowledge
of the usual subjects and is only accessible in English or Chinese. The youth
who are the hope for the survival of small languages wants to participate in
the modern world and for that their small languages are not effective.
Revitalisation and maintenance interventions try to utilise digital tools,
games and phone apps but also their effects are limited. A digital
multilingual and linguistically diverse world is the desire but the reality of
it is complicated.
 
The seminar will be followed by a wine reception. The lecture theatre is
located on the Fourth Floor of Bush House (R on the campus map). Please
register in advance at: https://modernlanguages.sas.ac.uk/events/event/19928
 

Paul Spence (King’s College London) and Naomi Wells (Institute of Modern
Languages Research)
 
This series is part of the AHRC-funded Open World Research Initiative, and is
supported by the Cross-Language Dynamics: Reshaping Community and Language
Acts and Worldmaking projects, and by the AHRC Leadership Fellow for Modern
Languages (Janice Carruthers).
 



Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics
                     General Linguistics
                     Language Documentation
                     Ling & Literature
                     Sociolinguistics
                     Translation





 



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