Linguae Europaeae

Graffiti in Moldova, which reads: “I am Moldovan! I speak Moldovan!” Image source: "What language do they speak in Moldova?" . by Morgan Fox Morgan Fox is in the second year of the dual MA Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies and MS Library and Information Science degrees. She works in Acquisitions and Cataloging Services in the Main Library, where she catalogs Slavic and other area-related language materials, and hopes to continue working in Slavic cataloging after graduating. Previously she received a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing (2021) from the Ohio State University. She wrote this blog post in 418 “Languages and Minorities in Europe” in Spring 2023. In a world where national boundaries are often drawn and conceptualized around titular ethnolinguistic majorities (French people and the French language in France, etc.), what is to be made of nations that share a language, albeit with certain regional or dialectical differences, such as German in Germany a...

Poster  image from the Ukrainian Taras Sevchenko association, pointing out the risks with using Surzhyk. В.Радчук, В.Білецький ( Source) by Camille Dolce Camille Dolce is a rising junior majoring in Political Science and Statistics and minoring in Russian at the University of Illinois. Camille’s future plans include pursuing graduate studies in Political Science. She wrote this blog post for 418 “Languages and Minorities in Europe” in Spring 2023. Ukraine has come to have a complex history regarding language use in the country. Due to the long standing history of conflict with Russia, the debate over the use of Russian in the country has been a complicated one. This discourse extends to the use of Surzhyk, the term for mixed language composing of Ukrainian and Russian vocabulary and grammar. There are no strict defining rules for what the language looks like, and a lot of times it refers to dialects that differ on the individual level, with the only unifying trait being that it is...

by Ash Carter Ash Carter is a graduate student in French sociolinguistics at the University of Illinois.  She wrote this blog post in 418 'Language and Minorities' in Spring 2019. In late February of this year, France became the last country in the French-speaking Western world to add feminine working-titles to their language repertoire after centuries of masculine-dominated professional titles. The French Academy, which serves as the executive body of French language policy and planning in France, decided to accept feminine work titles as ‘correct’ and suitable for ‘standard’ French. And this is news because…? Well, this is news because Belgium, Switzerland, and Canada all adopted feminization as early as 1979. The reluctance of the French to follow in the footsteps of francophonie in this matter in earlier years is explained by the Academy’s belief that the proposed changes to the language were ‘barbaric’. While former French president Jacques Chirac encouraged the mov...