Linguae Europaeae

by Bethany Wages Bethany Wages is graduate student in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (R.E.E.S) at the University of Illinois. When she wrote this blog post in 418 ‘Language and Minorities in Europe’ in the spring of 2015, she was planning on getting her M.A. in R.E.E.S and her MS in Library and Information Science. She is interested in Slavic reference librarianship and pre-Revolutionary Russian history. The Cyrillic alphabet is most commonly associated with the Slavic languages of Russia and Eastern Europe. According to the online encyclopedia of writing systems and languages, Omniglot.com: The Cyrillic script is named after Saint Cyril, a missionary from Byzantium who, along with his brother, Saint Methodius, created the Glagolitic script. Modern Cyrillic alphabets developed from the Early Cyrillic script, which was developed during the 9th century in the First Bulgarian Empire (AD 681-1018) by a decree of Boris I of Bulgaria (Борис I). It is thought that St. Klim...

by Katherine Stegman-Frey Katherine Stegman-Frey is a graduate student in Hispanic Linguistics at the University of Illinois. She is planning on teaching English and Spanish as a second language and is interested in language and culture and how humans use them. She wrote this blog entry as a student in 418 ‘Language and Minorities in Europe.' En 2015, du 14 au 22 mars, on a fêté la 20e semaine de la langue française et de la Francophonie.  Comme contribution, le CSA (le Conseil Supérieur de l’Audiovisuel) a affiché un clip sur Youtube où il s’agit du code-switching et de l’emprunt lexical de l’anglais au français. Il va sans dire que le sujet de l’utilisation des mots anglais, des anglicismes, dans les interactions françaises est vraiment vivant et toujours disputé.  En même temps, l’emprunt des mots n’est pas un nouveau phénomène pour les deux côtés de la Manche.  Il existe depuis longtemps et il y a beaucoup d’exemples dans l’histoire.  On trouve quelques n...

by María Elena Guitiérrez María Elena Guitiérrez is a graduate student in Spanish Linguistics at the University of Illinois. She is completing her Masters degree and is interested in bilingualism and second-language acquisition research. She wrote this blog entry as a student in 418 ‘Language and Minorities in Europe.' The name of a language is never neutral. There are many social and political implications involved when naming a language, according to Smitherman who examines language and ideology surrounding African American English in her 1991 paper. A language name represents important social information about the group of people who speak that language, especially where minority languages are concerned. Sometimes in language naming practices, language activists create a single name for several different language varieties that historically and politically have several different names. For instance, in the case of “Serbo-Croatian,” it can either be said that it consists ...