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

[elana shohamy]

Hi Francis
Is there a zoom address?
Elana


On 15 Sep 2021, at 3:11, Francis M. Hult via Edling <edling at lists.mail.umbc.edu> wrote:


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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