Events
Conferences
L’anthroponymie osque : un bilan, un demi-siècle après Michel Lejeune
Participating as : Invité
https://www.hisoma.mom.fr/recherche-et-activites/seminaires-de-recherche/NHOMA-2023-2024
UMR 5189 – Laboratoire Hisoma Histoire et sources des mondes antiques
Lyon
France
Symposium
Language and Identity in Antiquity
Participating as : Co-organisateur
https://wp.unil.ch/languageidentity/
Language and identity have historically been interlinked in deterministic discourses such as ‘one language – one nation’ or ‘multilingualism as a problem’ which no longer reflect our modern understanding of language in society (Bennett and Fisher 2022: 18). Rather, we must view identity as ‘multifaceted, fluid and dynamic, and thus constantly being constructed and (re)negotiated, and as both an individual and social phenomenon’ (Bennett and Fisher 2022: 16). This approach reflects, broadly speaking, a post-structuralist idea of identity: As a semiotic system, language is, on the one hand, a tool to construct identity, and, on the other hand, among a number of emblems of identity choices (Halliday and Webster 2007: 255). However, not all language choices are intentional and not all identity cues are interpreted by one’s environment in the way the individual desires (Block 2022: 187; Foucault 1981).
While production and perception experiments, interviews assessing attitudes, and longitudinal studies are possible for modern spoken languages, these approaches and the type and detail of information they provide are often not available for corpus languages. This conference aims to explore the relationship(s) between language(s) and identity for individuals and groups of people (of any size and shape) in the polities bordering on the Mediterranean Sea and their neighbours. Since correlations between language and identity are prone to changing diachronically and being highly variable synchronically, we have chosen a purposefully wide timeframe of between 2000 BCE and 1000 CE.
Université de Lausanne
Lausanne
Switzerland
