Multilingualism:
Reflecting on a Global Reality through Time, Space, Mind and Text.
Our seminar invites everyone - students, faculty, and the general public - to engage with one, some, or all of a series of ten events throughout the fall and winter sessions at UTM addressing topics on multilingualism from diverse vantage points, including linguistics, language education, literature, culture, and lived experiences. Running from September to April, this series features events such as exhibitions, lectures, workshops, panels, reading groups, and a student research symposium and collaborates with local, national, and international experts.
The faculty organizers of this seminar all hail from the Department of Language Studies:
Marie-Paule LoryMihaela Pirvulescu,
Adrien Rannaud
Katherine Rehner
Jeff Steele
Ai Taniguchi
Michelle Troberg
September 20/23:
L'IMAGE Comics Exhibit: Language, Identity, Multiculturalism and Global Empowerment
October 5/23:
Acquisition of Verbal Inflection in Advanced Students in Ontario
November 13/23:
Language Learning Experiences of Adult Migrants: A Comparative Study
December 8/23:
Student Research Symposium on Multilingualism
January 25/24:
Hearing Employability, Hearing Race
March 6/24:
Assessing Individual Differences in Multilinguals
March 7/24:
Plurilingual Education in Canada
March 20/24:
Can language policies affect language vitality?
April 5/24:
New Approaches to Multilingualism in the Distant Past
Find out more about past and upcoming events by clicking on the tabs above.
The aim of the UTM / Jackman Humanities Institute Annual Seminar is to create an intellectual community that vigorously addresses a topic of scholarly importance, and which includes a public humanities component. Find out more about the Jackman Humanities Institute here
The Ideas Behind The Seminar
Literature and the co-presence of multilingualism:
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Multilingualism/dialectalism emerges naturally from human experience, whether it be a minority language child raised in a majority-language environment then schooled in another language, an adult worker in a bilingual context who also requires other languages for international business exchange, or any of the other situations of multiple language contact that have arisen since time immemorial. Language is one of the only cognitive faculties unique to humans, but the existence of a single language in the brain and a single language in one’s community is rather exceptional; it is the multilingual experience that is the norm. The basic challenge that multilingualism poses for scholars in the Humanities is that, although the norm, the monolingual model for theory building and research methods still dominates; the multilingual reality must therefore be more adequately reflected in theory, method, and practice. The themes and questions that guide this seminar are the following: |
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- The current vitality of Indigenous iteratures written in French rests on several strategies of reappropriation, including the resurgence of the ancestral language. One can argue that the integration of words, sentences, and whole pages in Indigenous language can be a form of empowerment and re-placement for Native writers. What does this intertwining of Indigenous and French languages change to the form and the meaning of a literary text? How can a poem, a piece based on the power of image and recreation, be affected and reinvented by the co-presence of multilingualism? How can a settler reader engage with this unfamiliarity?
Multilingualism, power, and identity:
- How do multilingual youth in Canada navigate their complex linguistic identities in their daily lives? How does accentism and other language-based discrimination impact young people’s lives? How can we empower young people who do not feel confident about their language(s)?
Multilingual language development and maintenance:
- Contrary to the popular belief that children learn their native language(s) fast and effortlessly, research has shown that most grammatical properties take between 6 to almost 12 years of robust language exposure to become consolidated. How can we encourage the development and maintenance of all native languages in the context of a majority language and of monolingual norms? What role do factors such as the following play in this development: the ethnolinguistic vitality of a minority language community; the extent of language exposure and use at home as well as within and outside of the classroom; a speaker’s own social background, identity, and agency? With adult learners, current research seeks to determine, among other things, how language acquisition is shaped by a wide range of linguistic and learner variables. Which factors are most relevant to effective language learning for a given learner group? What factors must effective language teaching pedagogy be sensitive to when working with multilinguals?
Sociolinguistic development and integration in multilingual contexts:
- Unilingual speakers of societally dominant languages seem to develop effortlessly a wide socio-stylistic repertoire of register markers and the knowledge of how to deploy them. At the same time, with increasing levels of global migration giving no signs of slowing, unprecedented numbers of migrants are confronting linguistically alien terrains and are faced with challenges of integrating into host societies. How do sociolinguistic abilities develop for speakers of minority languages or for learners of additional languages in contexts of societal multilingualism? What language learning opportunities await them when they arrive?
Multilingualism through time:
- What kinds of artifacts reveal multilingual realities from antiquity through the Middle Ages, and how can modern linguistic theory and methods be used to better understand them? How does it align with or challenge long-held assumptions about the communities that produced these artifacts?