[Edling] Online Event - 24 Sep | Does multilingualism need a history? | Aneta Pavlenko

[Francis M. Hult via Edling]

2021 Einar Haugen Lecture
Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan
University of Oslo

Sep. 24, 2021 3:15 PM–5:00PM (Oslo time) via Zoom

"Does multilingualism need a history?"
Professor Aneta Pavlenko

More information:
https://www.hf.uio.no/multiling/english/news-and-events/events/guest-lectures-seminars/einar-haugen-lecture/2021/aneta-pavlenko-does-multilingualism-need-a-history.html


Abstract
One of the many delightful surprises of Einar Haugen’s (1953) landmark
study of Norwegian language in America is the fact that it begins in 1825,
nearly a century before the author’s birth.

Using church documents, journalistic accounts, poetry and immigrant
letters, Haugen recreates social and economic conditions and language
attitudes on both sides of the Atlantic, linking the changes in language
maintenance to World War I and the relentless Americanization in its wake.
It is only in Volume 2 that we get to meet his informants and learn about
his fieldwork. Today, such diachronic treatments are the prerogative of
historical sociolinguists and historians. In studies of multilingualism,
history gets short shrift.

In this lecture, I pay tribute to Haugen’s commitment to history by
reexamining four tenets often used to justify this neglect:

    Modern multilingualism presents a greater public challenge than ever
before.
    Modern language policies are more tolerant.
    Modern multilingualism is quantitatively different: linguistic
diversity at the population level is greater, more dense and dispersed than
ever before.
    Modern multilingualism is qualitatively different: globalization gave
rise to ‘increasingly unbounded’ transidiomatic practices.

To judge the validity of the claims, we will take a tour in a time machine,
starting out in Ptolemaic Alexandria in 323 BC and then making short stops
in imperial Rome, Norman Palermo, medieval Toledo and London, the Grand
Duchy of Lithuania, imperial St Petersburg, colonial Philadelphia, and the
capital of Habsburg Hungary Pressburg-Poszony.

The purpose of each stop is to take a quick look at the nature of the local
‘multilingual challenge’ and the state’s response in nine institutional
domains: (1) administration; (2) courts of law; (3) currency, (4) army; (5)
religion, (6) education, (7) libraries, (8) commerce and (9) public signage.

My hope is to surprise you, to entertain you, to celebrate linguistic
diversity and to show that by neglecting history in the longue durée we get
our own multilingualism wrong.
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