This lecture is open for all and there is no registration.
Zoom: https://uio.zoom.us/j/65363215443
Abstract
With increased transnational migration in recent years, raising children with more than one language has become increasingly common as people cross borders, integrate into new cultural-linguistic landscapes, form intermarriages and partnerships, and create multilingual families. While certain multilingual families result from immigration and transnational movement, others stem from intercultural bonds, with some recently established, and others having existed for generations. In these families, minority and heritage languages have been maintained or lost over time, and some endangered languages have experienced revitalization.
Today home language maintenance and development in multilingual families have become highly complex, given the social, cultural and linguistic changes brought about by globalization with new communication technologies and changes in the political and economic landscape. More than 70 years after publication, Einar Haugen’s pioneering work continues to inspire scholars on the nature of language in contact in its social embedding. His volumes The Norwegian Language in America: A Study in Bilingual Behavior (1953) and The Ecology of Language (1972) document the process of heritage language use, development, maintenance, and loss, which provides a blueprint for understanding family multilingualism in its social environment.
This year’s Einar Haugen lecture examines how family multilingualism unfolds across time and space, highlighting “space” not only as a geographical location but as a social, ideological, discursive, material, and power-laden construct. By drawing on case studies from various contexts, the lecture explores how family language practices shape, are shaped in, and shaped by, specific spaces such as homes, neighborhoods, schools, digital platforms, and more generally the media, with these spaces imbued with histories of migration, language policy, ideologies, and inequality. By placing contemporary multilingual families in a temporal and spatial perspective, the lecture invites participants to rethink common assumptions about family and language.
About the speaker
Elizabeth Lanza is Professor Emerita of Linguistics at the University of Oslo, member of The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, and former Director of MultiLing – Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan (2013 – 2021), a Centre of Excellence funded by the Research Council of Norway. She has published widely on multilingualism, addressing issues of childhood multilingualism and language socialization, family language policies and practices, migrant narratives, language ideology, language policy, linguistic landscape and research methodology.
Her most recent publications include “Thinking out of the box about family and language: Resisting conceptual binaries, expanding methods” (Bloomsbury), “Language policy: The home and the neighborhood” (with Christine Anthonissen, Bloomsbury), and “English in Ethiopia” in The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of World Englishes (with Hirut Woldemariam). Lanza is the co-editor of the forthcoming volumes The Routledge Handbook of Family Language Policy (with Piotr Romanowski) and Wiley’s Current Approaches in Bilingualism and Multilingualism Research (with Unn Røyneland and Li Wei). Lanza was the co-editor of the special issue of Journal of Multilingual Theories and Practices: “Family Multilingualism: Decolonial and Southern Approaches” (with Rafael Lomeu Gomes).
The Einar Haugen Lecture
On September 26, the European Day of Languages, MultiLing honors Einar Haugen with the annual Einar Haugen Lecture. Haugen was a Norwegian-American linguist and a Professor at Harvard University in the 1960-70s. Haugen’s many influential works contributed to the then emerging field of sociolinguistics for which he is credited for having had an important impact, particularly in the domain of language policy. His pioneering work ‘The Norwegian Language in America: A Study in Bilingual Behavior’ (1953) is a landmark study in the field of bilingualism.