Skip to main content

Happy Birthday, Linguis Europae

by Zsuzsanna Fagyal, Eda Derhemi, Jessica Nicholas, Jui Namjoshi, and Alessia Zulato, bloggers and editors of this site

 Latin is not a dead language, Croatian is the newest official state language of the European Union, there are many sides to Catalan identity in Spain, Albanian is still spoken in some villages in Italy and Greece, and Maltese is also a language, not just a type of dog!

In case you’ve ever wondered where all this kind of information can be found and how they fit together, you’ve just found the ideal blog site: log on to read us every other week!

Today, on European Multilingual Blogging Day, we have the privilege of writing about ourselves, as Linguis Europae is celebrating its one-year anniversary. The idea of this site was born from the stubborn determination of getting students to write something fresh and new about European languages and cultures in the foreign language that they study. We are grateful to the EUC for the Foreign Languages Across the Curriculum grant that we received for trying our luck with blog posts because they did the job: students did want to write in a language other than their native language
! What we found to be challenging is that blog posts are a genre that is not necessarily practiced with equal skills and frequency by all those bright students who come to learn more about languages in Europe from us. So, we’ve asked ourselves the question: “How are we going to teach this”?

After more than forty selected blog posts written in five languages in the first year, we can share our trade secret: we did not teach anyone how to write a good blog post because just like writing any other genre from poetry to an inauguration speech, there is no single recipe for it. “Keep it short and lively (pictures and all)” and “Having fun writing the blog is a sign that others might like it” are the best pieces of advice we could give them. The contributing editors of this site (from left to right) on this picture, Eda Derhemi (Italian), Jui Namjoshi, Zsuzsanna Fagyal, Alessia Zulato, and Jessica Nicholas (French) invite *you* to submit comments to our site and wish to thank all of you who have been able to contribute with their insights and questions. Matt, Sebnem, Mike, and Lauren at the EU Center: thank you for your continued support!

Happy Birthday, Bon Anniversaire, Feliz Cumpleaños, Buon Compleanno, Alles Gute zum Geburtstag, Boldog Születésnapot, Gëzuar Ditëlindjen, Linguis Europae!

Comments

Post a Comment

The moderators of the Linguis Europae blog reserve the right to delete any comments that they deem inappropriate. This may include, but is not limited to, spam, racist or disrespectful comments about other cultures/groups or directed at other commenters, and explicit language.

Popular posts from this blog

A New EU Member State, a New EU Language

by Mike Nelson I will begin with a riddle. Most people know the famous phrase “a dime a dozen.” Keeping that phrase in mind, the European Union will soon have twenty cents. What is the meaning of this riddle? A plaque in Croatian The answer is twenty-four official languages. When Croatia joins the EU on July 1, 2013, Croatian will become the twenty-fourth official language. Croatia is the first country to accede to the EU since Bulgaria and Romania in 2007. With two dozen official languages, there are many questions regarding the efficiency and practicality of so many languages, as well as the expense. In particular, there was a tense debate on whether or not Croatian should become an EU official language. According to an article in EU Observer , the main concern of adopting Croatian as an official language is the similarity between the various Western Balkan languages. Augustin Palokaj, the author of the article, notes that the United Nation's International Criminal Tribu...
11 comments
Read more

Are you not Greek?! On Arvanitika, a dying language in Greece

Image Source: http://www.studio52.gr/info_en.asp?infoID=00000cxv by Eda Derhemi | Bio: Eda Derhemi (PhD in Communication, 2003) is an adjunct assistant professor of Communications and lecturer of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. She completed her undergraduate studies in Linguistics and Literature at the University of Tirana, Albania and her graduate studies in Illinois. She has extensive teaching and research experience in Language and Media Studies. She worked for many years as a correspondent journalist for Deutsche Welle, and is a regular writer of opinion pieces in the main Albanian media. Her interests are: linguistic endangerment and language death, minority languages and ethnicity in the EU, language of the media and propaganda, Balkan and Mediterranean studies, Arbëresh and Arvanitika. Image Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arvanitika This is the second year I have traveled to Greece to study Arvanites, a population of Albanian origin that has lived in Gree...
7 comments
Read more

Inside Hydra

by Eda Derhemi | Editor: Jessica Nicholas (PhD Candidate in French); photos: Kathryn Nicholas This is Part Two of a two-part series.  Click here to read Part One! Bio: Eda Derhemi (PhD in Communication, 2003) is a lecturer in the department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, and an adjunct assistant professor of Communications in the ICR. She completed her undergraduate studies in Linguistics and Literature at the University of Tirana, Albania, and her graduate studies in Illinois. She has extensive teaching and research experience in Italian Language, Linguistics and Media Studies. She worked as a correspondent journalist for Deutsche Welle, and is a regular writer of opinion pieces in the main Albanian media. Her interests are: linguistic endangerment and language death, minority languages and ethnicity in the EU, language of the media and propaganda, Balkan and Mediterranean studies, Arbëresh and Arvanitika. Breathless, I enter in the main area of Hydra’s p...
8 comments
Read more