From Singapore to Dubai: Students‘ multilingual language repertoires and attitudes

VeranstaltungsortN.0.42Veranstalter Institut für Anglistik und AmerikanistikBeschreibungAlthough Arabic is the official language of Dubai and the other emirates of the UAE, English is the de facto lingua franca in the area since the local economies rely extensively on foreign labor. In Dubai, a mere ten to fifteen per cent of the population have local roots and speak Arabic as their native tongue. The international workforce is primarily recruited from India, Pakistan, the Philippines as well as several Western countries. These expats speak different forms of English, namely as a native tongue, as a second, and as a foreign language. Some source areas of labor recruitment have developed their own distinct forms of English (e.g. Indian English). They all come together in Dubai and the UAE. The current situation in Dubai is reminiscent of Singapore and partly also Hong Kong, prosperous and globalized cities forged out of small local populations and extensive immigration, with large parts of the population adopting English as their main language, and English developing local norms. We recently studied the multilingual texture of Singapore using an extensive sample of students drawn from different educational institutions. We found strong convergence on a bilingual model of language use across all ethnic groups (English plus Mandarin/Malay/Tamil) and also the emergence of positive attitudes towards the local norm of English. Evidently, Colloquial Singapore English (Singlish) has developed into a marker of Singaporean identity. In this presentation, we will be reporting from our recent research on Singaporean multilingualism and develop ideas of how this line of research can be usefully applied in the context of Dubai and the UAE. We will also present initial findings from a new research project on the Language Attitudes and Repertoires in the Emirates (LARES). In comparison to Singapore, we expect students in the UAE to reveal more usage of English as a lingua franca and a stronger orientation towards their native tongues. Nevertheless, we do expect to find incipient traces of Gulf English, i.e. a newly emerging local norm.Vortragende(r)Univ. Prof. Dr Peter SiemundKontaktAlexander Onysko / Marta Degani (alexander.onysko@aau.at)

Popularna kultura kao poligon za učenje stranog jezika

VeranstaltungsortN.1.42Veranstalter Institut für SlawistikBeschreibungVortragende(r)dr. sc. Josipa KorljanFilozofski fakultet u Splitu Centar za hrvatske studije u svijetuKontaktMag. Sandra Husanovic (sandra.husanovic@aau.at)

Politolinguistics: The case of classical populism in Latin-America

VeranstaltungsortN.0.42Veranstalter Institut für Anglistik und AmerikanistikBeschreibungPolitolinguistics is a rather young and still quite unknown approach in the field of applied linguistics. Research has been done in many other fields of applied linguistics for decades, including sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, ecolinguistics etc. It seems obvious that interdisciplinary approaches like the above-mentioned in applied linguistics require competence in two or even more domains: sociology and linguistics for sociolinguistics, psychology and linguistics for psycholingistics, neurology and linguistics for neurolinguistics, and so on. But what about politolinguistics? The term politolinguistics was coined by Armin Burkhardt in 1996 and simply referred to the analysis of political texts, then. Yet, it appears necessary to question whether this is truly a sufficient criterion. As a result of this discussion, alternative concepts of politolinguistics will be taken into consideration which take due account of the historical, political and even philosophical dimensions in order to fully grasp the meaning of political texts. However, this is just one side of the politolinguistic coin. The other side is the linguistic or linguistico-rhetorical analysis of the political text. By linguistic or linguistico-rhetorical analysis we understand a comprehensive textual analysis at various levels from the morpho-syntactic, semantic, lexical and pragmatic to the rhetorical and argumentative ones. Finally, there will be a brief case study to illustrate our model of analysis, namely the politolinguistic analysis of the famous speech which the classical populist Juan Peron gave in Buenos Aires on August 31st, 1955.Vortragende(r)Univ. Prof. Dr. Paul DanlerKontaktAlexander Onysko / Marta Degani (alexander.onysko@aau.at)