[Lecture] Sleeping Beauties Awake: Language Revival and Cultural Diversity, 26 Nov.

Last updated:2014-11-11

Topic: Sleeping Beauties Awake: Language Revival and Cultural Diversity

Speaker: Professor Ghil‘ad Zuckermann, 
Chair of Linguistics and Endangered Languages, University of Adelaide, Australia
Distinguished Visiting Professor, East China Normal University
Oriental Scholar, Shanghai International Studies University

Time: 9:00 - 10:30 AM, Wednesday, November 26, 2014
Venue: Lecture Hall 315, School of Foreign Languages, Sun Yat-sen University

Abstract:
This fascinating and multifaceted lecture will analyse the moral, aesthetic, epistemological, psychological and economic benefits of language diversity. With coca-colonization and homogenization there will be more and more groups added to the forlorn club of the lost-heritage peoples. Language revival will become increasingly relevant as people seek to recover their cultural autonomy, empower their spiritual and intellectual sovereignty, and improve their wellbeing and mental health. There is an urgent need to offer perspicacious comparative insights, for example from the Hebrew revival, which is so far the most successful known linguistic reclamation. The lecture will explore current attempts to reclaim Australian Aboriginal languages such as Barngarla.

About Professor Zuckermann
Professor Ghil‘ad Zuckermann (DPhil, Oxford; PhD, Cambridge, titular; MA Tel Aviv, summa cum laude) is Chair of Linguistics and Endangered Languages at the University of Adelaide, Australia. He is also Distinguished Visiting Professor at East China Normal University, Oriental Scholar at Shanghai International Studies University, and Visiting Professorial Scientist at the Department of Molecular Genetics of the Weizmann Institute of Science. He is the author of the revolutionary bestseller Israelit Safa Yafa (Israeli – A Beautiful Language, Am Oved, 2008), Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), three chapters of the Israeli Tingo (Keren, 2011). He is the editor of Burning Issues in Afro-Asiatic Linguistics (2012), Jewish Language Contact (2014), a special issue of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language, and the co-editor of Endangered Words, Signs of Revival (2014). He is currently establishing ‘Revivalistics’, a new trans-disciplinary field of enquiry, and has launched, with the Barngarla Aboriginal communities of Port Lincoln, Whyalla and Port Augusta, the reclamation of the Barngarla language of Eyre Peninsula, South Australia.
Professor Zuckermann is President of AustraLex and elected member of AIATSIS and the Foundation for Endangered Languages. He was an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Fellow in 2007–2011 and Gulbenkian Research Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge in 2000-2004. He has taught inter alia at the University of Queensland, University of Cambridge and National University of Singapore, and has been a Research Fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Study and Conference Center, Villa Serbelloni, Bellagio, Italy; Israel Institute for Advanced Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Research Centre for Linguistic Typology (RCLT), Institute for Advanced Study, La Trobe University; Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin; and Kokuritsu Kokugo Kenkyūjo, National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, Tokyo. He is Internationalization Adviser at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.