International Conference on language regimes

[Florian Coulmas]

An international conference on "Changing Language Regimes in Globalizing
Environments, Europe and Japan" will be hosted by the Department of Modern
Japanese Studies and the Interdisciplinary Centre of the Humanities of
Duisburg-Essen University, 31 March - 2 April 2004. For details see:
http://www.uni-duisburg.de/Fak2/IZG/veranstaltungen/symposien.htm


----- Original Message -----
From: "Harold F. Schiffman" <haroldfs at ccat.sas.upenn.edu>
To: "Language Policy-List" <lgpolicy-list at ccat.sas.upenn.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, March 10, 2004 2:31 PM
Subject: International Conference on Minority Languages


> Forwarded from Linguist-List: International Conference on Minority
> Languages
>
> Date: 01-Jul-2005 - 02-Jul-2005
> Location: Trieste, Italy
> Contact: Marina Ussai
> Contact Email: secretary.icml at slori.it
> Meeting URL: http://www.slori.org/conference/index.php
>
> Minority languages in post-2004 Europe. Problems and challenges.
>
> Trieste represented in the past a symbol of the multicultural Hapsburg
> empire. But later on, during the Fascist regime, it also became a symbol
> of ethnic and linguistic intolerance and nationalism. During the Cold War,
> it was a peripheral border town between West and East. It is now
> re-emerging as a meeting-point of diverse ethno-linguistic environments,
> languages and societies. As Trieste has to re-consider its own position
> and function in an enlarged Europe, the ICML-X would like to re-think some
> basic considerations concerning minority languages in the post-2004 Europe
> that will quite soon lead towards a possible United Europe. Language is
> definitely one of the basic discriminants of ethnic and national
> difference, its typology and intensity of use indicates the dimension and
> the quality of different cultural spaces, the success of its survival
> across different generations, the vitality of language codes, its level of
> social attraction and status.Emigration, social and political events in
> Europe, especially in marginal areas or in those of cultural contact,
> contributed substantially to radical changes of the original language map
> creating multiethnic and multilanguage areas as well as quite common
> variable identities.The big challenge for modern Europe is to create
> social, economic, and political integration maintaining cultural
> diversities and thus offering a new model of civilisation that will not
> coincide with the Americanisation and the "melting pot".This new European
> model will be tested and eventually come into action in many European
> contact areas. Contact between different nations, ethnic and linguistic
> communities, and the creation of rules for coexistence and the
> preservation of cultural peculiarities are the main issues.
>
> The elimination of the last national, ethnic and linguistic "borders"
> will imply a truly new idea, opposed to the traditional ethnocentric
> conceit and social behaviour based on the exclusion of "others" and
> "the different". It will be necessary to realise that among states
> different ethnic, regional and linguistic identities exist, and that
> the borders between them are everything but linear and definite.
>
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