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Multilingualism and Multiculturalism in Central Europe and the Balkans

This group provides a forum for discussing multilingual practices in Central Europe and the Balkans from a linguistic and literary perspective.

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Central Europe ca. 1900 © Brockhaus-Lexikon/Wikimedia

About the Group

In Central Europe (including Italy) and the Balkans, a multilingual and multicultural society has been a lived historical reality for centuries. Over the past few decades, Scandinavia has acquired large groups of migrants from this region. The experience of living in a multilingual society has also left a profound trace in the work of writers both in Central Europe and Scandinavia.

This group provides a forum for discussing the diachronic and synchronic dimensions of multilingualism in Central Europe and the Balkans and its links to the everyday experience, perceptions, and cultural expressions of multilingualism among diasporic communities from those regions now living in Scandinavia.

We focus on, but do not limit ourselves to:

  • Historical and contemporary manifestations of multilingualism: policies, practices, and legacies of multilingualism in the late Habsburg and Ottoman Empires; lived practices of multilingualism, current legislation and policy, language rights and minority rights
  • Multilingual literature: bilingual and translingual writing, self-translation, code-switching, multiscriptality, and other literary hybridization strategies, representations of multilingualism and language change in the work of writers from Central Europe and the Balkans or migrant writers from those regions residing in Scandinavia
  • Bilingualism, language shift, language adaptation and language acquisition among first- and second-generation migrants from Central Europe, the Balkans, and Italy in Norway
  • Discourses of multilingualism and multiculturalism in Central Europe and the Balkans, Italy, and Scandinavia

We are a group of linguists, literary scholars, and historians with expertise in Central Europe and the Balkans; in Slavic, German, and Italian philology, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, migrant and multilingual literature.

We regularly invite guest speakers (open to a broader audience) and organize reading group sessions to discuss theoretical texts and work in progress by members of the group. 

We aim to build a platform that will raise the profile of our research at UiO and beyond, to support funding applications, to build international collaborations and attract external researchers.

  • We are open to participate in applications for European or national funding
  • We are open to visits to and from similar research Groups
  • We are open to join project applications with Nordic partners (NOS-HS) as well as EC-funded applications (e.g. as host for Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral research fellows)

Activities

The group meets regularly to discuss relevant research publications and to comment work in progress by group participants.

Spring 2022

2 February: Damjan Božinović presents his PhD project on Memory and Multilingual Writing in Post-Yugoslav Literature (in collaboration with the Research Group Cultural Memory Studies)

14 June: Karen Gammelgaard presents her book project Språkpolitikk i den slaviske verden etter 1989

Autumn 2022

13 September: Davor Beganović gives a talk about Guilt and Law in Meša Selimović's novel Death and the Dervish 

5 December: Damjan Božinović interviews the Croatian author Kristian Novak 

6 December: Kristian Novak gives a talk about multilingualism, language activism and language planning in 19th c. Croatia

Spring 2023

28 March: Barbara Siller gives a talk about Multilingual Aesthetics in German and Italian Literary Texts from South Tyrol, in collaboration with the research group Border Readings

1-2 June 2023: members of the group give a paper at the Conference Trauma, Memory and Counter-Culture in (Post-)Communist Europe 

Autumn 2023

4 December: Workshop about Reading Multilingual Literature from East-Central Europe

4 December: Julie Hansen gives a talk about code-switching and language-mixing in Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace and Eugene Vodolazkin's Laurus.

Tags: Multilingualism, Central Europe, Balkans, Italy, Bilingualism, Multilingual Literature
Published Oct. 13, 2017 10:56 AM - Last modified Nov. 21, 2023 10:25 PM

Participants

Detailed list of participants