Multilingualism as a resource in education was the topic of discussion as researchers and educationists from 14 different countries gathered for the Multilingualism and Education conference at UiO last week.
News - Page 2
MultiLing's socio-cognitive laboratory was officially opened on March 22. To mark the occasion, the center organized a tour of the facilities and a demonstration of the equipment.
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.
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.
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.
How does meaning transfer, i.e., crosslinguistic influence involving meaning, originate from different levels of mental representations, and how do we study it?
At Warruwi Community around ten Indigenous languages from five different language families are used among only 450 people. Why are so many languages still spoken at Warruwi when linguistic diversity has sharply declined in the rest of Australia? Visiting scholar Dr. Ruth Singer from the University of Melbourne held last week’s Wednesday seminar where she presented her research on this topic.
The annual meeting with MultiLing's Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) was held last week, on October 27–28. In addition to the SAB members, two of our new Adjunct Professors attended the meeting.
To juggle multiple grammars at once is a complex task, and the effects of crosslinguistic influence might occur when the grammars are simultaneously active. Associate Professor and MultiLing affiliate Mike Putnam presented his research on how filler-gap dependencies can help us investigate multilingual grammars.
The linguistic situation in Singapore has undergone dramatic changes in its 50 years of history. The result is a language shift away from Chinese, Malay and Tamil, and an increasing use of English.
What does it mean to bridge the gap between psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic approaches to multilingualism? Scholars who have been successful in doing interdisciplinary work were invited to the workshop Bridging gaps: Conceptual and epistemological approaches which was held at MultiLing last week.
More than half the world is bilingual — speaking at least two and sometimes more languages with some proficiency. Recent research suggests that bilingualism has protective benefits for the brain. The power of bilingualism is beyond language itself.
How do you reconstruct a language that is no longer spoken when there are few documentation records? Lenore Grenoble illustrates how mapping sociolinguistic context plays an important role in this kind of work.
How do immigrants position themselves by acquiring/not acquiring the local dialect? This was one of the questions raised at the workshop Dialect acquisition and migration.
Associate Professor Cecelia Cutler, the City University of New York, is visiting MultiLing in April to participate in the workshop Dialect acquisition and migration and in the SONE (Sociolinguistic Network in Norway) Conference. In her presentation at the workshop, “’People don’t see me as white’: how appearance plays in dialect acquisition among immigrants in the U.S.”, she addressed the topic of embodiment. She also explored people’s experience of being in a physical body, and how this experience shapes their language choices and their construction of identity. It’s not just about how it feels to be in your body, but also how others perceive you and how others frame you or attempt to construct you based on how you look.
Professor Gillian Wigglesworth from the University of Melbourne is a Chief Investigator on the Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language and has been visiting MultiLing this week. Her major research focus is on the languages indigenous children living in remote communities learn, and how these languages interact with English once the children start school. How can we improve the children’s school results and reverse the increasing loss of indigenous languages?
Inger Moen, Professor of applied linguistics at the University of Oslo, passed away on November 28th 2015, at the age of 75.
MultiLing, the Center for Multilingualism in Society Across the Lifespan, is one of five research communities at the University of Oslo that will receive funding from the Norwegian government for the recruitment of leading international scientists.
MultiLing has become a member of the research network LingNet Europe.
Monika Schmid, Professor of Linguistics, is critical of European authorities’ use of language analyses to determine the place of origin of asylum seekers. She claims that it is impossible to determine a person’s origin by analysing his or her language.
Knowledge of the sociolinguistic situation of the minority language – and attitudes towards the language – is vital for our planning processes to secure minority languages, says State Secretary Anders Bals.
James Costa and Pia Lane from the STANDARDS project organised a panel on minority language standardisation at Sociolinguistic Symposium 20 (SS20) in Jyväskylä, Finland.
The Centre for Research on Bilingualism at Stockholm University marked its 25+ anniversary on April 29, 2014. Researchers associated with the Centre have been close collaborators with members of MultiLing.