Welcome to Linguis Europae, the EUC's language blog!

Linguis Europae is dedicated to a range of topics involving official state, regional, and minority languages in the EU. Posts are written in five languages by UI students and faculty! Check back regularly for updates!

Karelian: Caught Between the Father- and the Motherland

Linguistics PhD student Walther Glodstaf discusses the status of Karelian, a language spoken around the region of lakes Ladoga and Onega in what is now primarily Russia and Finland.

When Borders Overlap: Spanish and Moroccan in Melilla

Camila Martinica (BA in Global Studies, 2022) looks at the history behind the trilingual nature of Melilla, an autonomous city of Spain located on the Moroccan border.

French and Tamil in Pondicherry-South India

Maithreyi Parthasarathy (BA in Linguistics, expected 2023) writes about Pondicherry, a "mini France" located on the southern tip of the Indian subcontinent.

Italian in Puerto Rico? Exploring Italian and Corsican Immigration to Southern Puerto Rico

Erin Trybulec, an MA student in Hispanic Linguistics, shares findings from her ongoing research project on the influence of Italian and Corsican immigration on Puerto Rico's linguistic landscape during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Friday, February 20, 2015

Happy International Mother Language Day!

Little girl at Shreeshitalacom Lower Secondary School in Kaski, Nepal leads class in pronunciation of alphabet.
Image Source
Saturday, February 21, 2015 is the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)'s International Mother Language Day Celebration. A special event will be held this year in Paris, France, including opening ceremony speeches and debates and the theme for this year's celebration is "Inclusion In and Through Education: Language Counts."

From the event's webpage:
As the EFA Goals are far from attained due, in part, to the difficulties of reaching the worst-off segments of the population, the debate around language and education becomes more central. Linguistic minorities are often among the most marginalized populations, with little or poor access to quality education. When they do have access to education, learners from these communities are often either excluded from opportunities to pursue their educational career beyond primary or pushed out of education because the language of instruction is not their own.
UNESCO's Mother Language Day has been observed on February 21 since 2000 and was created with the intention "to promote the preservation and protection of all languages used by peoples of the world." The date is in honor of the 1952 deaths of student demonstrators fighting for Bangla to be recognized as one of the two national languages of (then) Pakistan in Dhaka, the capital of what is now Bangladesh.

More information can be found on UNESCO's Mother Language Day page.
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