Workshop Minority Languages in a Multilingual Europe
During the 34th TABU Dag, an annual linguistic conference in Groningen, The Netherlands, a workshop on minority languages in a multilingual Europe will be organised on Thursday June 13th 2013 from 13:30 until 18:00. In Europe, 23 official languages and more than 30 regional and minority languages are spoken. The European Union considers respecting and protecting the linguistic diversity within the European Union to be one of its most prominent responsibilities, because it forms the cultural identity of its citizens. But how can this goal be achieved, with so many languages and language varieties being spoken in the European Union, the smallest of them sometimes only by around 1000 speakers? How can a minority language be maintained in a period of globalisation? Are language policies the way to maintain a minority language or can they sometimes be counterproductive? Which other factors play a role?
Topics of the workshop will be:
- Vitality vs. endangerment
- Language policies
- Language attitudes
- Language and identity
- Minority languages in education
The plenary speaker of the workshop is Jeroen Darquennes from the University of Namur. During the workshop four other speakers will get the chance to present their work on European minority languages. We invite short abstracts of no more than 300 words, excluding title, author names, keywords, data and references. Abstracts should be submitted in .pdf or .txt format. Time allotted for presentations is 20 minutes, followed by 5 minutes of discussion.
- The official language of the conference is English.
- The deadline for the abstract submission for the workshop Minority Languages in a Multilingual Europe is 31 March 2013.
- Abstracts can be submitted through this link.
- Notifications of acceptance will be sent on 30 April 2013.
- For further information, please visit the conference website.
