Rouen Ethnolinguistics Project

Contatcts:

James-william.underhill@univ-rouen.fr

Irena.vankova@ff.cuni.cz

Papers on :

• Europe

• The European Peoples

• Man and Europe

• Cultural Linguistics

• Ethnolinguistics

• Profiling

Papers in Czech, Polish, & English.

A bilingual synopsis will be provided, and English translations of the powerpoints will be sent to the other speakers one month before the event.

Cultural linguist, Linguistic Anthropologists, and Ethnnolinguists all affirm that language is central to culture and understanding. We are human beings together in language, as Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1935) reminds us. And as he explained language is ‘the organ of thinking and feeling’. All socialization and individualization takes place in speech and writing. Language is therefore a part of mankind and a condition for the human project. But language is also cultural in an aesthetic sense. Languages are the treasures to be cherished and protected. Europe has understood this, and knows that the riches of Europe are inseparable from its languages, its cultures and its traditions. While promoting English, Europe understands that language cannot be reduced to communication, and that promoting a single means of communication would mean a dramatic impoverishment of Europe’s culture and identity. The respect for multilingual Europe is expressed in the project A Language Rich Europe.

Nevertheless, at another level, Europe is searching for its own identity. Is there a European people? Does the EU protect and promote its peoples? Or is it not rather the case that Member States and linguistic communities often come second? The EU website and the EU laws are concerned with ‘individuals’, ‘citizens’, and ‘consumers’. But democracy must lift itself above individuals and selfish needs and desires. Democracy depends on the governance of the people, by the people, for the people. And, judging from the EU website and electronic corpora, ‘the people’ is not a major concern in Europe today in Czech, Polish, Spanish, German, French, or English.

How are we to advance with Cultural Linguistics in Europe if the idea of peoples and their languages are not held to be paramount? If linguistic communities, shared identities, shared cultures, and shared values are not held to be the central ideals of Europeans, how can they hope to survive in the Global arena? If they are not made the focus of academic study, how is the university to contribute to culture as a living and ongoing project?

Finding our way in the Europe of tomorrow, and approaching these questions as linguists, philologists, literary scholars, and cultural thinkers, is not going to prove any easy matter. Wonderful advances have been made in the field of psycholinguistics with the World Atlas of Linguistic Structures (www.wals.org), thanks to the Max Plannk Institute and Steven Levinson. Jerzy Bartmiński in Poland, Anna Wierzbicka, in Australia, and Irena Vaňková in Prague have provided exciting approaches that reinvigorate the Humboldtian project to investigate languages as worldviews. In Rouen and in Berlin the questions of how human kind evolves in language and how individuals take a stance in speech are major concerns. In the United States, and around the world, neowhorfian scholars and cognitive linguists open the door to such questions, and provide paradigms for comparing languages, and modes of thinking. The Metaphor theory of Lakoff and Johnson, and Turner and Fauconnier, and the Cultural Linguistics of Gary Palmer are only a few examples of the waves of contemporary scholars that are getting to grips with fundamental questions related to speech, language, translation, and cognition.

And yet, the sources of inspiration, the conceptual tools, and even the objectives of such schools and scholars are often very different. Often, even well-meaning specialists misunderstand and misrepresent the principles, and objectives of alternative approaches. There is no one single Cultural Linguistics, just as there is no one single language. Just as a language cannot be reduced to a single individual, no scholar or school has a monopoly on ethnolinguistic investigations. We all have our limits as individuals and schools of thought. At best, even what we know about our own mother tongue is fragmentary and insufficient. And how many of us perfectly ‘master’ the languages we study?

Irena Vaňková and Ladislav Janovec of the Charles University, and James W. Underhill, of the Rouen Ethnolinguistics Project invite speakers to discuss these questions: questions we believe will prove to be essential in the debates on culture, and language teaching over the coming decades. Researchers will come together to share their insights and juxtapose their fragmentary perceptions of what it means to think about thinking-in-language. And it is hoped that this will help us build a more lucid conception of the Language Rich Europe of Tomorrow. Perhaps this will help us provide the Cultural Linguistics that the European peoples deserve.

Ongoing Ethnolinguistic Projects

This project is a part of the ongoing series of international multilingual workshops and conferences organized by the Rouen Ethnolinguistics Project, of Rouen University, The Charles University, Prague, The Berlin Academy, and the Marie Curie University, of Lublin, Poland in collaboration with other European Universities and Institutions.

This conference may be filmed and put online on the websites of the partner-universities. It many also form the beginning of a partnership for a jointly published academic book of 150-180 pages to be published in English by the Normandy University Publishers Press, the PUHR.