2017

Last week, the INTPART 2017 Linguistics Summer School was held at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.The topic for the course was "Multilingualism, multimodality and embodiment: Sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic perspectives."

Pernille Hansen gave her doctoral defense on October 6 in Gamle Festsal at Domus Academica.

Yolandi Ribbens-Klein, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the UCT, Cape Town, is visiting MultiLing for a four week-research stay. 

Janet Connor, PhD fellow at the University of Chicago, is currently visiting MultiLing. In her PhD project, Connor is looking at linguistic and semiotic interactions in Tøyen, and during her monthly stay at MultiLing, Connor will commence her dissertation fieldwork.

A warm welcome to our new MultiLing affiliate, Kofi Yakpol!

Is it really possible to have a strict separation of the cognitive and social aspects of human activity? This year’s summer school examined interdisciplinary approaches to multilingualism with a focus on socio-cognitive aspects.

Maimu Berezkina defended her dissertation on June 20 in Gamle Festsal at Domus Academica.

Kamilla Kraft defended her PhD dissertation Constructing migrant workers: Multilingualism and communication in the transnational construction site on May 26.

Professor II at MultiLing, Mira Goral (The City University of New York) recently visited MultiLing for two weeks. Goral will lead the research work on multilingual aphasia at MultiLing. 

For four weeks in May and June, Professor Christine Anthonissen (Stellenbosch University), visited MultiLing as part of the INTPART network project.

Recently, the 11th International Symposium on Bilingualism (ISB) took place in Limerick, Ireland. A number of MultiLingers and MultiLing's collaborators attended the conference for four days packed with the latest research in multilingualism.

Research Professor II at MultiLing, Aneta Pavlenko, visited the Center for a week in June. Pavlenko has been with MultiLing from the start as Member of the Scientific Advisory Board and joined the Center as Research Professor in 2017.

This week, MultiLing marked the start of our project Studies of Multilingual Aphasia with a kick-off seminar with guests from home and abroad.

In March, MuliLing was visited by the very inspiring and creative PhD student in Media Studies Prinola Govenden from Wits University in South Africa, through the INTPART partnership. Among other things, she helped further develop the Center's media strategies and general communications. Here is an informal interview with her.

Last week, MultiLing held its very first Spring School. PhD students from all over the world were gathered in Oslo for four days to learn more about how they can go from formulating questions and hypotheses to have their hypotheses tested. 

On Friday 24 March, the launch of the new book Multilingual Ethiopia: Linguistic Challenges and Capacity Building was celebrated with cake, speeches and guests from near and far.

Professor II at MultiLing, Jannis Androutsopoulos (University of Hamburg) visited MultiLing for a week in March. During his stay, he collaborated on several ongoing projects. He also gave one guest lecture and hosted a methodological workshop.

Dr. Pavlenko is originally from Ukraine, but emigrated to the US right before the collapse of the USSR—two unrelated incidents. She has had an impressive linguistics career and is very well-versed in many languages. At the Center, she will focus on communication in legal cases where refugees and immigrants are involved.

Ekaterina is Russian, and holds a PhD from the University of Hong Kong, where she did research on aphasia. At MultiLing she will work on her project "Cognitive control and patterns of bilingual aphasia".  

MA student Christina Davril is doing her internship at MultiLing in February and March 2017.

A warm welcome to our new MultiLing affiliate, Sébastien Lucas!

During the first week of March, researchers from MultiLing, University of Oslo and Université de Rouen Normandie gathered at a workshop at MultiLing. This workshop did officially kick off the project Language Contact and Language Change across Three Generations in Turkish Families in Norway and France.

Scientific Advisory Board member, Professor Kees de Bot (University of Pannonia) spent four weeks at MultiLing in January and February. During his stay he collaborated on several ongoing projects, and gave two guest lectures.

How does meaning transfer, i.e., crosslinguistic influence involving meaning, originate from different levels of mental representations, and how do we study it?

January 30 – February 3, 20 PhD students from 17 different universities attended MultiLing’s winter school. Through their week in Oslo, the participants got to explore the use of methods for collecting linguistic ethnographic data with a specific focus on language, youth, and identities in culturally and linguistically heterogeneous urban spaces.