This workshop combines the perspectives of French Studies, African Studies, and Translation Studies to arrive at a nuanced and holistic understanding of the multiple factors shaping linguistic ecologies, literatures, and translation practices in which French plays a role. The goal is to approach francophone spaces as diverse, global, and connected through flows of migration of their inhabitants. A particular emphasis is placed on the complexity of the multilingual ecologies of francophone countries and the multilingual repertoires of francophone speakers, as well as the various modalities and registers in which the French language may be used: formal and informal or spoken, written, and multimodal.
Programme
9:30‒10:30
Invisible multilingualism: French as a lingua franca in public service interpreting in Finland (Simo Määttä, University of Helsinki)
10:30‒11:00
Coffee break
11:00-12:00
Beneath the surface: Unacknowledged multilingualism in officially francophone Senegal (Friederike Lüpke, University of Helsinki)
12:00‒13:30
Lunch break
13:30‒14:30
Mali: The shackles of monolingual and colonial ideologies on languages and language policy and the quest for a way out (Ibrahima Cissé, Institut de Pédagogie Universitaire du Mali and UNESCO Chair for Community Research on the Levers of Development: “Emergence through Innovation”, Bamako)
14:30‒15:30
Multilingualism in the French Colonial Archives. Beneath the official linguistic policy (Cécile van den Avenne, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Marseille)
15:30‒16:00
Coffee break
16:00‒17:00
Beyond the notion of “linguistic minority” in Acadia: The order of language in French Canada (Samuel Vernet, Université Aix-Marseille)
The organisers:
Sabine Kraenker, French Language and Culture
Friederike Lüpke, African Studies
Simo Määttä, Translation Studies
The event is organised by the Department of Languages, University of Helsinki, and funded by the CoCoLaC research community (Comparing and Contrasting Languages and Cultures) and the French donation.