A concern for the Sociolinguistics of Dell Hymes and the Cultural Linguistics of Gary Palmer in North America, and for Ethnolinguistics in Europe has led scholars in Rouen, Paris, Berlin, Belfast, Lublin, and Prague to engage in debates in order to establish whether it is possible to set up a shared methodological approach to the questions we are interested in. This has already led to a series of encounters, and REP and its partners regularly meet up at International Conferences and Workshops and informal meetings.
The question of whether we can develop a European approach to Cultural Linguistics is not designed to exclude scholars from outside Europe. It is part of a project which has two dimensions. On the one hand, we are trying to establish to what extent our European traditions stem from the great American linguistic anthropologists (Boas, Sapir, Whorf and Hymes). And on the other, we want to establish what our approaches owe to European traditions; Humboldt, for the German tradition, or Mukařovský and Jakobson from Slavic Linguistics. How do our paradigms for understanding the relationship between culture and language to fit into the French tradition beginning with Saussure and leading to Benveniste? These questions will be addressed in our 2016 meeting in Prague and in the ongoing series of Workshops and Conferences in Poland and elsewhere.
