Events
Multilingual Policies and “Small” Languages:
The Case of Luxembourg
Luxembourg is designated as a trilingual country: Luxembourgish is the national language, and French and/or German are legal, judicial and administrative languages. And yet, Luxembourgish is a small, mostly spoken language, so its official state recognition presents a somewhat paradoxical case. It is an unusual example in the European context and, in certain respects, not that dissimilar perhaps to the status of te reo Mãori in New Zealand. This seminar thus examines the case of small languages like Luxembourgish and how language policies, as well as ideologies and interests informing them, impact on people's lived experiences of language in Luxembourg, including residents with migration trajectories. On a broader level, Kristine Horner will explore the utility of the term 'small language' - its strengths and weaknesses - and open up discussion as to why it is relatively widely used in European contexts and whether it has any useful purchase elsewhere.
Korean Studies Association of Australasia (KSAA) - Emerging Researchers Group Seminar
There has been an influx of North Korean refugees defecting to South Korea to seek freedom and better economic, educational, and professional opportunities. Thus, an increasing number of North Korean students are entering university in South Korea. Previous studies that examined North Korean students’ adaptation to South Korean universities have focused on their difficulty with English language learning. However, little scholarly attention has been paid to other challenges they encounter in their courses, particularly how they cope with linguistic marginalization and insecurity, which can directly affect their daily academic engagement and social interaction. In this presentation, Mi Yung Park will highlight what strategies North Korean students use to negotiate and reposition their identity when they are discriminated against as linguistic and cultural Other, and their identity as Korean is delegitimized. Mi Yung will end by discussing implications for educational policy and practice in South Korean higher education as a crucial space and context for refugee students’ identity (re)construction, and the support they need to integrate and participate more fully in academic communities.
McGill Plurilingual Lab Online Speaker Series
In this presentation, Stephen will first chart the interdisciplinary understandings of linguistic racism, drawing on sociological discussions of nationalism and critical race theory, and sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological discussions of language ideologies, linguistic racism, and raciolinguistics. Stephen will then discuss, by way of example, its prevalence in his own national context, Aotearoa New Zealand, with particular reference to contemporary discursive racist constructions of our Indigenous language, te reo Māori (the Māori language). Stephen concludes with suggestions of how we might more broadly address/contest these kinds of (linguistically) racialised discourses.
Researching Language Attitudes With Discourse Tools
In this presentation, Christina Higgins examines language attitudes as layered expressions of stance (DuBois, 2007) and shows how discourse tools can be used to investigate the dynamic and dialogical nature of language attitudes. Drawing on tools from appraisal theory (Martin & White, 2005), Christina illustrates how stances can be coded and quantified, thereby respecifying attitudes as dispositions-in-discourse. To illustrate these ideas, she discusses two projects that explore people’s attitudes towards marginalized and/or minoritized languages in Hawaiʻi. First, Christina presents an analysis of stances that were expressed in response to a public conference about Pidgin, the creole language of Hawaiʻi, that aimed to normalize Pidgin in pedagogical practices, a domain where it has historically been considered illegitimate. Second, she examines family language attitudes towards Hawaiian and Japanese to analyze how speakers take stances toward their family languages and toward their family members’ stances as a means of understanding the attitudinal mechanisms of language maintenance and language shift in the family.