This year, the annual conference for the Association canadienne de linquistique appliquée/ Canadian Association of Applied Linguistics (CALL/ACLA) was held in Calgary, Alberta. I participated in my capacity as an RA and a member of BILD. It was wonderful to support one another during our presentations and to debrief afterwards. After squeezing in a visit with my sister, I’m ready to head back to Montreal. As I wait for a green tea in the Calgary airport, feeling slightly grouchy due a half-hour delay before take off, my eyes wander up to a large and very colourful mural that covers the entire upper archway and wall. Continue reading
indigenous language revitalization
Language revitalisation from the ground up in Mexico (by Dr. Josep Cru)
Josep Cru holds a BA in Linguistics from the University of Barcelona and an MA in Language, Literacy and Culture from the University of California at Berkeley. From 2001 to 2007, he worked for Linguapax, an international NGO based in Barcelona which promotes language diversity worldwide. Since 2007, he has taught Spanish, Catalan and Sociolinguistics at Newcastle University in the UK. In 2013, he finished a PhD thesis on language ideologies and revitalization in Yucatan, Mexico. His publications can be found here and his profile, here. Continue reading
On being an outsider, or not (by Dr. Mela Sarkar)
The Canadian Anthropology Society / Société canadienne de l’anthropologie (known to its members as CASCA) had its annual conference a few days ago at Université Laval in Quebec City, and although I am not usually a member of CASCA or a presenter at this conference, it happened that this year I got asked to be on not one but two panels, so off I went. My research energy over the past few years has gone into into two main projects, one still funded (on Indigenous language revitalization), the other not any more (on Hip-Hop language in Montreal), and I got to talk about both. In the unfunded category, I was part of a panel on multilingualism as play, which is (as it should be!) such a fun idea. In academic-ese, people say “ludic” instead of “playful”, quite a lot. And sometimes they say “carnavalesque”. But this was a very relaxed panel where people did feel free to say they were being playful.
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