Call: Linguistic Super-diversity in former Eastern Bloc and Post-Soviet Space
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Marian Sloboda
Oct 28, 2012, 10:02:10 AM10/28/12
to linguisti...@googlegroups.com
Those colleagues who work on the linguistic landscapes in former Eastern Bloc and Soviet countries might be interested in the following conference panel:
LINGUISTIC SUPER-DIVERSITY
IN FORMER EASTERN BLOC AND IN THE POST-SOVIET SPACE
A panel organized by Anastassia Zabrodskaja, Marian Sloboda and Petteri
Laihonen
as part of the Language and Super-Diversity conference, Jyväskylä, Finland,
June 5-7, 2013
http://www.jyu.fi/en/congress/superdiversity/
Panel description
The term super-diversity has not yet been applied to the regions that
belonged to Eastern Bloc or to the Soviet Union, since: "Super-diversity is
a term intended to capture a level and kind of complexity surpassing
anything many migrant-receiving countries have previously experienced"
(Vertovec 2010: 87). Even though Eastern Europe has had a negative balance
of migration since the transition, the issues of contemporary - and past -
East European complexity still deserve far more attention than they have
received so far.
This is especially true of post-Soviet countries which have been
experienced strengthening in ethnically-based nationalism which since 1991
resulted in the discursive "reinterpretation of the history of the Soviet
Union" (Blommaert 2006: 151) and efforts of un-doing Russification.
Everyday linguistic practices and identities' (re)negotiation among new
titular and minority groups during transformation of post-Soviet urban
socio-cultural and linguistic environment have attracted scholarly interest
"as a contested linguistic space, where emotional exchanges over
language-related issues are fodder for the daily news" (Pavlenko 2008:
275).
Before The Second World War Western observers saw the extent of linguistic
diversity in Eastern Europe as "a sign of chaotic and backward political
economy" (Gal 2011: 34). In centralized Western European countries economic
modernization included the exclusion of minority languages from education,
media and administration (e.g. Pietikäinen et. al 2010: 7) As a result,
"the congruence of language and state was successfully achieved: there are
now no monolingual minority-language speakers in states such as France and
the UK." (Wright 2009: 98). The formerly multicultural cities were often
monolingualised in the East, too. However, it is not difficult to find e.g.
rural monolingual Hungarian speakers in Slovakia or Romania, nor Russian
monolinguals in the Baltic States not to mention the Ukraine. As Pavlenko
(2011: 39) underlines, the Soviet Union, which the Bloc countries followed,
never made Russian, the sole language of education, rather, it made
possible "instruction in the native language" of the historical minorities.
Finally, Eastern Europe has traditionally had large Roma and Jewish
populations that escape linguistic, ethnic or national definitions and
might be considered as emblems of heteroglossia and multiculturalism as
such. (Eastern super-diversity includes monolingual Roma and Jews, too).
The transition (1989-) has brought globalization, mobility and
transnationalism to Eastern Europe. However, at the same time, it brought
an overall national awakening. First, prestigious Western models in mind,
the (partly new) states soon aimed at a creation of a homogenous European
Nation State. Secondly, the historical minorities now seek support from the
democratic national and European institutions to maintain and improve the
status of their languages. In the meanwhile migration to the west has
touched the minorities first, beginning with e.g. Germans in Eastern Europe
around 1990. Since the legal status of some Eastern Europeans has changed
in the new millennium due to advancing European integration, also the
majority populations have migrated to work in the West in great numbers. At
the same time, the Western world has appeared in the East in many ways.
First, as soon as the Soviet army left, it was replaced by an army of
English teachers. Secondly, West European and global businesses have
appeared practically in every little town. In the cityscape everything
begun with fast food restaurants and continued with shopping malls, and now
it is often more and more difficult to find a local product or a larger
local employer. The knowledge of English, and to some extent German, French
etc. have become a primary factor for social division in the global economy
both in East Europe and among transnational migrants (see Gal 2012). In the
rural East also village markets have an increasing number of Asian low cost
products, sold by Asian merchants. Finally, it is not unusual to witness
e.g. 'Albanians' selling 'Italian' gelato in a 'Hungarian' village in
Slovakia with a Slovak-Italian-English public signs.
The goal of thsi panel is to investigate the forms of past linguistic
diversity, that made Eastern Europe look chaotic for the Western observers
and to see what has happened to this diversity today. Further, the policies
and practices of the Socialist period that maintained or at least tolerated
linguistic diversity deserve more scrutiny. The transition itself is a key
moment, was there a moment of mutual understanding and linguistic
tolerance? What has happened to it? Here we can consider the different
campaigns to ensure the hegemony of the national standard languages against
different varieties of the state language and various minority languages,
together with the heteroglossic practices and other forms of resistance to
them. In the realm of cultural products, various multilingual practices
have (re)-emerged in the margins of national cultures. Also minority and
migrant languages have, here and there, gained economic value through local
and touristic commodification and transnational trade or labour networks.
The current situation in the former Soviet sphere of influence, where
historical diversity combines with migrant diversity, globalization,
transnationalism and post-multinationalism (Brubaker 2011), awaits an
analysis of its linguistic historiography and consequences (if applicable,
with a special focus on transformation from post-Soviet socio-cultural and
linguistic environment to the status of a European Union member).
Organization of the panel
The panel is comprised of six papers. It will start with brief introductory
remarks from the organizers. Then each contributor will take 20 minutes to
present the paper, followed by a discussion with audience members (up to 10
minutes).
Abstracts of max. 300 words should be submitted to petteri.laihonen(at)jyu.fi by 5th November 2012.
References
Blommaert, Jan. 2006. Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brubaker, Rogers 2011. Nationalizing states revisited: projects and
processes of nationalization in post-Soviet states. Ethnic and racial
studies 34/11: 1785-1814.
Gal, Susan 2011. Polyglot Nationalism: alternative perspectives on language
in the 19th century Hungary. Langage et société 136: 31-53.
Gal, Susan 2012. Sociolinguistic Regimes and the Management of "Diversity".
In Duchene, Alexandre & Monica Heller. Language in Late Capitalism: Pride
and Profit. Routledge: New York, 22-42.
Pavlenko, Aneta (ed.) 2008. Multilingualism in post-Soviet countries.
International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 11 (3&4).
Pavlenko, Aneta 2011. Language rights versus speakers' rights: on the
applicability of Western language rights approaches in Eastern European
contexts. Language Policy 10: 37-58.
Pietikäinen, Sari et al. 2010. Regulating Multilingualism in the North
Calotte: The Case of Kven, Meänkieli and Sámi Languages. Acta Borealia, 27:
1-23.
Vertovec, Steven 2010. Towards post-multiculturalism? Changing communities,
conditions and contexts of diversity. International Social Science Journal
61: 83-95.
Wright, Susan 2009. The elephant in the room: language issues in the EU.
European Journal of Language Policy 1: 93-120.
----------
LANGUAGE AND SUPER-DIVERSITY:
EXPLORATIONS AND INTERROGATIONS
Description of the conference
During the past few decades, the face of social, cultural and linguistic
diversity in societies all over the world has changed radically, producing
complexity of a different kind than what has traditionally been captured in
the notion of multiculturalism. This 'new' diversity, or super-diversity
(Vertovec 2007), encompasses a wide range of societal and cultural
transformations that stem mainly from accelerated processes of geocultural
and mediated globalization of the last two decades.
Super-diversity manifests most notably in such demographic and social
changes as the tremendous increase in the categories of migrants, not only
in terms of nationality, ethnicity, language and religion, but also in
terms of motives, patterns and careers as migrants, processes of insertion
into, settling in and interactions with the host societies. It is also
witnessed in the increasing complexity of both physical and virtual spaces
and their compressed and multi-scalar character. It shows in the enhanced
mobility of people and the speed with which they can move between and
access other places. In the same way, communication, the dissemination of
information and the mediation of cultural practices and products are
increasingly characterized by rapidity, simultaneity and ubiquity.
Technologies of communication and information circulation offer new
opportunities for interaction in which identifications are not organized on
the basis of local, ethnic or national categories only but which are
characterized by translocality, connectedness and heterogeneity.
In language use, a crucial effect of super-diversity is that the language
and cultural biographies and repertoires, forms of communication and
interaction between individuals, groups and communities cannot be
presupposed. Language uses are not necessarily tied to national or ethnic
groups or to standard varieties of language. Instead, they encompass a
broad field of less predictable actors, activities and creative energies.
In new combinations and intertwining of stability and instability, reliance
on tradition and established normative orders are tied in with situated
emergent forms of practice.
To capture, describe and explain the forms, processes, practices and
effects of super-diversity, sociolinguists are faced with a multi-faceted
challenge, calling forth a revision of some of their key tools - their
theoretical apparata, methods of data gathering and analytic concepts
(Blommaert and Rampton 2011). The aim of this international conference is
to explore and interrogate the perspective offered by super-diversity, a
perspective which for sociolinguistic study has tremendous heuristic
potential
References
Blommaert, J. and Rampton, B. Language and Superdiversity. Diversities.
2011, vol. 13, no. 2. UNESCO.
www.unesco.org/shs/diversities/vol13/issue2/art1
Vertovec, Steven. 2007. Super-diversity and its Implications. Ethnic and
Racial Studies, 30(6), pp. 1024-1054.
Invited speakers
- Michael Silverstein (University of Chicago)
- David Parkin (University of Oxford)
- Christopher Stroud (University of Western Cape)
- Sirpa Leppänen (University of Jyväskylä)
Invited round-table discussion on Language and Super-diversity
- Jan Blommaert (University of Tilburg)
- Ben Rampton (King's College)
- Karel Arnaut (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic
Diversity)
- Jens Normann Jorgensen (University of Copenhagen)
- Robert Moore (Penn Graduate School of Education)
- Cécile Vigouroux (Simon Fraser University)
Deadline for abstracts: Panel proposals, November 15, 2012; paper and
poster proposals, December 15, 2012.
Guidelines for submission: http://www.jyu.fi/superdiversity/call-for-papers
Third Call for Papers
This international conference invites scholars to propose topics relevant
to language and super-diversity. These can include (but are not limited to)
both contemporary and historical studies on
a. multilingualism
b. language and globalization
c. language crossing, switching, and mixing
d. contact-induced language variation and change
e. polylanguaging, translanguaging, metrolingualism
f. linguistic landscapes
g. new literacies
h. computer-mediated discourse
i. language assessment for the determination of origin and citizenship
j. language (education) policy
k. language socialization
l. narratives of cultural belonging and difference
In terms of settings, the conference welcomes work on different everyday,
institutional and educational settings at mega-cities, small places in
centres and margins, as well as in mediated translocal communicative
environments.
Studies on any languages and (inter)disciplinary takes (e.g. linguistics,
sociolinguistics, sociology of language, linguistic anthropology, discourse
studies, new literacy studies, pragmatics, ethnography, multi-modality and
language education) are welcome.
Young and beginning scholars are warmly encouraged to contribute; the
conference fee will be waived for five students from non-EU countries
(applications to be included in the online registration form, to appear on
the conference website).
Submissions are solicited for thematic panels, papers, and posters. Each
participant may have at most two presentations at the conference: one
single-authored and one co-authored paper/poster.
The language of the conference is English, but we encourage the use and
visibility of other languages in bi/multilingual handouts, slides, etc.
Scientific committee
Sirpa Leppänen, Karel Arnaut, Dong Jie, Martha Karrebak, Ben Rampton, Chris
Stroud, Max Spotti and Cécile Vigouroux
Local organizing committee
Sirpa Leppänen, Mia Halonen, Henna Jousmäki, Samu Kytölä, Mikko Laitinen,
Mika Lähteenmäki, Taina Saarinen, Sonya Sahradyan, Minna Suni, Elina
Westinen
Conference secretary: Saija Peuronen
Financial secretary: Satu Julin
Event Coordinator: Taru-Maija Heilala-Rasimov
Contact: superdi...@jyu.fi
IN FORMER EASTERN BLOC AND IN THE POST-SOVIET SPACE
A panel organized by Anastassia Zabrodskaja, Marian Sloboda and Petteri
Laihonen
as part of the Language and Super-Diversity conference, Jyväskylä, Finland,
June 5-7, 2013
http://www.jyu.fi/en/congress/superdiversity/
Panel description
The term super-diversity has not yet been applied to the regions that
belonged to Eastern Bloc or to the Soviet Union, since: "Super-diversity is
a term intended to capture a level and kind of complexity surpassing
anything many migrant-receiving countries have previously experienced"
(Vertovec 2010: 87). Even though Eastern Europe has had a negative balance
of migration since the transition, the issues of contemporary - and past -
East European complexity still deserve far more attention than they have
received so far.
This is especially true of post-Soviet countries which have been
experienced strengthening in ethnically-based nationalism which since 1991
resulted in the discursive "reinterpretation of the history of the Soviet
Union" (Blommaert 2006: 151) and efforts of un-doing Russification.
Everyday linguistic practices and identities' (re)negotiation among new
titular and minority groups during transformation of post-Soviet urban
socio-cultural and linguistic environment have attracted scholarly interest
"as a contested linguistic space, where emotional exchanges over
language-related issues are fodder for the daily news" (Pavlenko 2008:
275).
Before The Second World War Western observers saw the extent of linguistic
diversity in Eastern Europe as "a sign of chaotic and backward political
economy" (Gal 2011: 34). In centralized Western European countries economic
modernization included the exclusion of minority languages from education,
media and administration (e.g. Pietikäinen et. al 2010: 7) As a result,
"the congruence of language and state was successfully achieved: there are
now no monolingual minority-language speakers in states such as France and
the UK." (Wright 2009: 98). The formerly multicultural cities were often
monolingualised in the East, too. However, it is not difficult to find e.g.
rural monolingual Hungarian speakers in Slovakia or Romania, nor Russian
monolinguals in the Baltic States not to mention the Ukraine. As Pavlenko
(2011: 39) underlines, the Soviet Union, which the Bloc countries followed,
never made Russian, the sole language of education, rather, it made
possible "instruction in the native language" of the historical minorities.
Finally, Eastern Europe has traditionally had large Roma and Jewish
populations that escape linguistic, ethnic or national definitions and
might be considered as emblems of heteroglossia and multiculturalism as
such. (Eastern super-diversity includes monolingual Roma and Jews, too).
The transition (1989-) has brought globalization, mobility and
transnationalism to Eastern Europe. However, at the same time, it brought
an overall national awakening. First, prestigious Western models in mind,
the (partly new) states soon aimed at a creation of a homogenous European
Nation State. Secondly, the historical minorities now seek support from the
democratic national and European institutions to maintain and improve the
status of their languages. In the meanwhile migration to the west has
touched the minorities first, beginning with e.g. Germans in Eastern Europe
around 1990. Since the legal status of some Eastern Europeans has changed
in the new millennium due to advancing European integration, also the
majority populations have migrated to work in the West in great numbers. At
the same time, the Western world has appeared in the East in many ways.
First, as soon as the Soviet army left, it was replaced by an army of
English teachers. Secondly, West European and global businesses have
appeared practically in every little town. In the cityscape everything
begun with fast food restaurants and continued with shopping malls, and now
it is often more and more difficult to find a local product or a larger
local employer. The knowledge of English, and to some extent German, French
etc. have become a primary factor for social division in the global economy
both in East Europe and among transnational migrants (see Gal 2012). In the
rural East also village markets have an increasing number of Asian low cost
products, sold by Asian merchants. Finally, it is not unusual to witness
e.g. 'Albanians' selling 'Italian' gelato in a 'Hungarian' village in
Slovakia with a Slovak-Italian-English public signs.
The goal of thsi panel is to investigate the forms of past linguistic
diversity, that made Eastern Europe look chaotic for the Western observers
and to see what has happened to this diversity today. Further, the policies
and practices of the Socialist period that maintained or at least tolerated
linguistic diversity deserve more scrutiny. The transition itself is a key
moment, was there a moment of mutual understanding and linguistic
tolerance? What has happened to it? Here we can consider the different
campaigns to ensure the hegemony of the national standard languages against
different varieties of the state language and various minority languages,
together with the heteroglossic practices and other forms of resistance to
them. In the realm of cultural products, various multilingual practices
have (re)-emerged in the margins of national cultures. Also minority and
migrant languages have, here and there, gained economic value through local
and touristic commodification and transnational trade or labour networks.
The current situation in the former Soviet sphere of influence, where
historical diversity combines with migrant diversity, globalization,
transnationalism and post-multinationalism (Brubaker 2011), awaits an
analysis of its linguistic historiography and consequences (if applicable,
with a special focus on transformation from post-Soviet socio-cultural and
linguistic environment to the status of a European Union member).
Organization of the panel
The panel is comprised of six papers. It will start with brief introductory
remarks from the organizers. Then each contributor will take 20 minutes to
present the paper, followed by a discussion with audience members (up to 10
minutes).
Abstracts of max. 300 words should be submitted to petteri.laihonen(at)jyu.fi by 5th November 2012.
References
Blommaert, Jan. 2006. Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brubaker, Rogers 2011. Nationalizing states revisited: projects and
processes of nationalization in post-Soviet states. Ethnic and racial
studies 34/11: 1785-1814.
Gal, Susan 2011. Polyglot Nationalism: alternative perspectives on language
in the 19th century Hungary. Langage et société 136: 31-53.
Gal, Susan 2012. Sociolinguistic Regimes and the Management of "Diversity".
In Duchene, Alexandre & Monica Heller. Language in Late Capitalism: Pride
and Profit. Routledge: New York, 22-42.
Pavlenko, Aneta (ed.) 2008. Multilingualism in post-Soviet countries.
International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 11 (3&4).
Pavlenko, Aneta 2011. Language rights versus speakers' rights: on the
applicability of Western language rights approaches in Eastern European
contexts. Language Policy 10: 37-58.
Pietikäinen, Sari et al. 2010. Regulating Multilingualism in the North
Calotte: The Case of Kven, Meänkieli and Sámi Languages. Acta Borealia, 27:
1-23.
Vertovec, Steven 2010. Towards post-multiculturalism? Changing communities,
conditions and contexts of diversity. International Social Science Journal
61: 83-95.
Wright, Susan 2009. The elephant in the room: language issues in the EU.
European Journal of Language Policy 1: 93-120.
----------
LANGUAGE AND SUPER-DIVERSITY:
EXPLORATIONS AND INTERROGATIONS
Description of the conference
During the past few decades, the face of social, cultural and linguistic
diversity in societies all over the world has changed radically, producing
complexity of a different kind than what has traditionally been captured in
the notion of multiculturalism. This 'new' diversity, or super-diversity
(Vertovec 2007), encompasses a wide range of societal and cultural
transformations that stem mainly from accelerated processes of geocultural
and mediated globalization of the last two decades.
Super-diversity manifests most notably in such demographic and social
changes as the tremendous increase in the categories of migrants, not only
in terms of nationality, ethnicity, language and religion, but also in
terms of motives, patterns and careers as migrants, processes of insertion
into, settling in and interactions with the host societies. It is also
witnessed in the increasing complexity of both physical and virtual spaces
and their compressed and multi-scalar character. It shows in the enhanced
mobility of people and the speed with which they can move between and
access other places. In the same way, communication, the dissemination of
information and the mediation of cultural practices and products are
increasingly characterized by rapidity, simultaneity and ubiquity.
Technologies of communication and information circulation offer new
opportunities for interaction in which identifications are not organized on
the basis of local, ethnic or national categories only but which are
characterized by translocality, connectedness and heterogeneity.
In language use, a crucial effect of super-diversity is that the language
and cultural biographies and repertoires, forms of communication and
interaction between individuals, groups and communities cannot be
presupposed. Language uses are not necessarily tied to national or ethnic
groups or to standard varieties of language. Instead, they encompass a
broad field of less predictable actors, activities and creative energies.
In new combinations and intertwining of stability and instability, reliance
on tradition and established normative orders are tied in with situated
emergent forms of practice.
To capture, describe and explain the forms, processes, practices and
effects of super-diversity, sociolinguists are faced with a multi-faceted
challenge, calling forth a revision of some of their key tools - their
theoretical apparata, methods of data gathering and analytic concepts
(Blommaert and Rampton 2011). The aim of this international conference is
to explore and interrogate the perspective offered by super-diversity, a
perspective which for sociolinguistic study has tremendous heuristic
potential
References
Blommaert, J. and Rampton, B. Language and Superdiversity. Diversities.
2011, vol. 13, no. 2. UNESCO.
www.unesco.org/shs/diversities/vol13/issue2/art1
Vertovec, Steven. 2007. Super-diversity and its Implications. Ethnic and
Racial Studies, 30(6), pp. 1024-1054.
Invited speakers
- Michael Silverstein (University of Chicago)
- David Parkin (University of Oxford)
- Christopher Stroud (University of Western Cape)
- Sirpa Leppänen (University of Jyväskylä)
Invited round-table discussion on Language and Super-diversity
- Jan Blommaert (University of Tilburg)
- Ben Rampton (King's College)
- Karel Arnaut (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic
Diversity)
- Jens Normann Jorgensen (University of Copenhagen)
- Robert Moore (Penn Graduate School of Education)
- Cécile Vigouroux (Simon Fraser University)
Deadline for abstracts: Panel proposals, November 15, 2012; paper and
poster proposals, December 15, 2012.
Guidelines for submission: http://www.jyu.fi/superdiversity/call-for-papers
Third Call for Papers
This international conference invites scholars to propose topics relevant
to language and super-diversity. These can include (but are not limited to)
both contemporary and historical studies on
a. multilingualism
b. language and globalization
c. language crossing, switching, and mixing
d. contact-induced language variation and change
e. polylanguaging, translanguaging, metrolingualism
f. linguistic landscapes
g. new literacies
h. computer-mediated discourse
i. language assessment for the determination of origin and citizenship
j. language (education) policy
k. language socialization
l. narratives of cultural belonging and difference
In terms of settings, the conference welcomes work on different everyday,
institutional and educational settings at mega-cities, small places in
centres and margins, as well as in mediated translocal communicative
environments.
Studies on any languages and (inter)disciplinary takes (e.g. linguistics,
sociolinguistics, sociology of language, linguistic anthropology, discourse
studies, new literacy studies, pragmatics, ethnography, multi-modality and
language education) are welcome.
Young and beginning scholars are warmly encouraged to contribute; the
conference fee will be waived for five students from non-EU countries
(applications to be included in the online registration form, to appear on
the conference website).
Submissions are solicited for thematic panels, papers, and posters. Each
participant may have at most two presentations at the conference: one
single-authored and one co-authored paper/poster.
The language of the conference is English, but we encourage the use and
visibility of other languages in bi/multilingual handouts, slides, etc.
Scientific committee
Sirpa Leppänen, Karel Arnaut, Dong Jie, Martha Karrebak, Ben Rampton, Chris
Stroud, Max Spotti and Cécile Vigouroux
Local organizing committee
Sirpa Leppänen, Mia Halonen, Henna Jousmäki, Samu Kytölä, Mikko Laitinen,
Mika Lähteenmäki, Taina Saarinen, Sonya Sahradyan, Minna Suni, Elina
Westinen
Conference secretary: Saija Peuronen
Financial secretary: Satu Julin
Event Coordinator: Taru-Maija Heilala-Rasimov
Contact: superdi...@jyu.fi
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