When BILD joined the CCERBAL conference, which was held in the University of Ottawa back in May of this year, we were all very excited. We (BILD members) had organized a workshop on activities that teachers can use to celebrate linguistic pluralism in the classroom and make all students feel that their linguistic repertoires are equally important and relevant. In the workshop, we prompted the audience members to try out the tools we introduced; we felt that the best way to advocate for an educational tool is none other than to offer people the time and place to use it and see for themselves whether it would be a good addition to their toolkit.
linguistic pluralism
Back to Bangla: Rediscovering translanguaging (by Dr. Mela Sarkar)
Bengali, properly called Bangla, is the language of Bangladesh and of the Indian state of West Bengal. It’s one of the languages I would have grown up speaking if my parents had settled in India in the late 1950s. They planned to. After I was born in Kolkata (Calcutta until 2001), my father looked hard for a faculty post in an Indian university, one that would have made it possible to raise a family of half-and-half children in India with his Ukrainian-Canadian wife (my Manitoba Ukrainian family appeared in this blog a while back).
Is there such a thing as too much linguistic pluralism? (by Emmanouela Tisizi)
‘‘It is not my idiosyncrasy to be ironic or sarcastic but my diagnosis would be that politicians are rather cryptoplethorists. Although they emphatically stigmatize numismatic plethora, they energize it through their tactics and practices. Our policies have to be based more on economic and less on political criteria. Our gnomon has to be a metron between political, strategic and philanthropic scopes. Political magic has always been antieconomic (…). I apologize for having tyrannized you with my Hellenic phraseology. In my epilogue, I emphasize my eulogy to the philoxenous autochthons of this cosmopolitan metropolis and my encomium to you, Kyrie, and the stenographers.’’ (Zolotas, 1959).
