Presentation
Politically incorrect: does the world belong to polyglots?
3rd International Conference of Foreign Languages
(III CILE)
Date: 30-31 October 2019
Convener: Foreign Language Department, ESE-IPB
Venue: School of Education, Polytechnic Institute of Bragança, Portugal
3rd International Conference of Foreign Languages
(III CILE)
Date: 30-31 October 2019
Convener: Foreign Language Department, ESE-IPB
Venue: School of Education, Polytechnic Institute of Bragança, Portugal
Throughout history several languages have become lingua franca as a result of conquests, commerce or religious conversion (cf. Ostler, 2011), thus being inevitably associated with the building of empires. This happened with Greek, Latin, Portuguese, German, French and English, which has originated a linguistic, cultural and political uniformity, although other vernacular languages coexisted.
The value of national cultures, following Herder’s ideas on cultural diversity, has gained momentum through the restoration of traditions and customs, traditional literature (cf. Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Almeida Garrett’s Romanceiro, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer’s Rimas y Leyendas or Fernán Caballero’s Cuentos de Encantamiento) and language varieties which have been considered exotic. Conversely, the notion of standard or prestige becomes part of the discourse of several nations claiming sovereignty. This means that, on the one hand, linguistic peculiarities are defended, while, on the other, there is an attempt to silence them, in order to replace them for the emergent national languages. Through the development of the comparative method and the discovery of the language families (based on their relatedness), a process of linguistic prescriptivism is imposed, which will only be deconstructed throughout the 20th century.
Based on these new principles, there are mentions of social and cultural prestige languages and minority languages creating linguistic stigmas which do not favour the transcultural and translinguistic correlation.
The prestige inherent to certain varieties is not related to any moral or ethnic categories, but to the ideology they reflect. Presently, English, as one of the latest lingua franca, has imposed itself in international and multinational organisations as a preferential linguistic bridge, if not the only one. This sole use of a language leads us to question whether this is a politically incorrect attitude, too downgrading of a reality which is, by nature, multilinguistic. Bearing this idea in mind, we would like to challenge this monolinguistic and uniform trend, as well as to value all languages and cultures with no prejudice.
This will be the main assumption for the III CILE debate, since we believe that learning a set of foreign languages will open doors, overcome borders and enrich cultures. In today’s world, which asserts borders and reasserts identities to overcome both disconnection and incommunicability, we acknowledge the natural poliglotism of border regions, the century old cultural cosmopolitanism and their porosity.
Nowadays, it is not enough to master one foreign language. Globalization, deterritorialisation, the dislocation of migrations, from diaspora and exile, demand that we become poliglots able to express ourselves in order to establish intercultural relations. As Edward Said (2007) argues, it is fundamental to cultivate the perception of many worlds and their complex traditions. Benefits of multilingualism are paramount to enable us overcome the linguistic gap among cultures. The language is no longer the homeland because any homeland is only temporary (Said, 2003). Crossing borders breaks thought and experience barriers, leading us towards an awakening of plural language learning, thus the reconquest of the tower of Babel.
As such, topics and themes of interest include, but are not restricted to, the following:
● Foreign languages as an exclusion vs inclusion factor in migrations
● Polyglot writers
● Minority languages vs prestige languages
● The strength of dead languages
● Lingua Franca throughout history
● Monolingualism vs. Plurilingualism
● FL/culture, memory and identity
● Translation and FL teaching