*With apologies for cross-postings*
Dear colleagues,
You are warmly invited to the next WUN virtual seminar in the Germanic Languages and Migration series on Thursday, 6 May 2010 at 4 pm in the Roger Stevens Building LT19, University of Leeds:
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'The Times of Their Lives: Time, Place and Space in Central European Language Biographies,' Professor Patrick Stevenson (University of Southampton)
Two kinds of story are typically told about language in the complex and volatile region of Central Europe. One involves small-scale language contact phenomena studied by sociolinguists working on linguistic variation and change. The other, studied by sociologists and historians, concerns ways in which language myths are worked and re-worked in support of competing national interests. Both kinds of story - about the history of language and about language in history - rest on tensions between movement and stasis and are built around variables of time, place and space: how do linguistic variants travel and re-shape linguistic landscapes? how do the ebbs and flows of human migrations impact on the linguistic configuration of societies and communities?
However, in the search for generalizations both kinds of story tend to neglect both the agency and the experiences of individual language users, who themselves have their own stories to tell. Focusing on German-speakers in eastern Central Europe, I will try in this talk to show how such language (auto)biographies can contribute to our understanding of the dynamics of language in social life and how they serve to arrange individual lives in temporal and spatial terms.
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The WUN seminar, live from Southampton, will be streamed in Bristol, Sheffield and Wisconsin-Madison, in addition to Leeds. If you'd like venue details for any participating WUN partner institution please drop me a line ([log in to unmask]). All welcome!
best wishes,
Kristine
Dr Kristine Horner
Lecturer in German and Sociolinguistics
Director of Postgraduate Studies in German/Russian
Department of German, Russian and Slavonic Studies
University of Leeds
Leeds LS2 9JT
www.leeds.ac.uk/german/staff/kristine_horner.htm
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