Keynote Speakers
Dra. Lorena Córdova-Hernández is Professor at the Faculty of Languages, Universidad Autónoma Benito Juárez de Oaxaca (Mexico). Her collaborative research focuses on cultural and language policies, indigenous language revitalization, and semiotic/linguistic landscapes (SLL). She has collaborated with Chuj and Q’anjob’al communities from the Mexico-Guatemala border and indigenous communities from Oaxaca. She also develops local actions and strategies to strengthen indigenous languages and cultures by coordinating and teaching theoretical and practical workshops for indigenous teachers, municipal authorities, and local governments.
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Dr. Vini Olsen-Reeder (Ngā Pōtiki a Tamapahore, Ngāti Pūkenga, Ngāi Te Rangi, Te Arawa) is a language revitalist and language planner in Aotearoa New Zealand. He is the founder of Mind Your Tongue - giving families the tools they need for heritage language development in the home. As an academic, he is a te reo Māori lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington, specialising in sociolinguistics and language revival. He is a published historical fiction and fiction author, poet, songwriter and translator.
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Prof. Christopher Stroud is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at the University of the Western Cape (where he directed the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research, CMDR) and Professor of Transnational Bilingualism at Stockholm University. His current research focuses on practices and ideologies of multilingualism in Southern Africa, specifically Linguistic Citizenship, as a way of rethinking the role of language in brokering diversity in a decolonial framework. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Science in South Africa (ASSAf), and a Member of the UNESCO Chair in Multilingualism and Language Planning.
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Dr. Stefania Tufi is Professor of Italian Studies and Sociolinguistics at the University of Liverpool (UK). Her research is situated at the intersection of language and spatial constructions of identity from multiple perspectives, such as minoritised languages, language and memorialisation, transnational spaces, and border and peripheral areas. Her current project is on Borderscapes, focusing on the border as engendered by language practices and other semiotic processes, and providing a multidisciplinary perspective on the de/construction of borders as an everyday practice.
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Keynote Abstracts
Production, circulation, and consumption of linguistic landscape for indigenous language revitalisation
Dra. Lorena Córdova-Hernández (Universidad Autónoma Benito Juárez de Oaxaca)
Worldwide, the production of Linguistic Landscape (LL) in indigenous languages has been steadily increasing both in communities of origin (e.g. historical or ancestral territories) and in communities of destination (e.g. tourist cities, cities with high migrant populations, digital communities, among others). This production evidences that, despite high levels of displacement of these languages, their speakers and learners reclaim their cultural and linguistic identities through a new visual culture. Likewise, the circulation of this LL has become increasingly diverse, from being produced and circulated as on-site signage to an audiovisual and digital circulation that crosses political boundaries and builds important communicative bridges between speech communities and their diverse membership or speakers. This transition has also allowed for faster, more widespread and cheaper production. While it is essential to recognise the production and circulation of LL in indigenous languages as processes of linguistic reclamation and that this has potential in the development of multiliteracies, there is still a need to reflect on how the consumption of the linguistic landscape affects the revitalisation of indigenous languages. The present intervention aims to analyse, from the experience of southern Mexico, how LL in indigenous languages motivates the revitalisation of indigenous languages. That is, how the production of LL can and should move from linguistic reclamation (production-circulation) to consumption (circulation-appropriation) of language and culture to re-establish the intergenerational transmission and use of indigenous languages. It is also essential to ask: Who are the direct consumers of this growing production? Remarkably, how does this lead to the formation of new speakers?
Dra. Lorena Córdova-Hernández (Universidad Autónoma Benito Juárez de Oaxaca)
Worldwide, the production of Linguistic Landscape (LL) in indigenous languages has been steadily increasing both in communities of origin (e.g. historical or ancestral territories) and in communities of destination (e.g. tourist cities, cities with high migrant populations, digital communities, among others). This production evidences that, despite high levels of displacement of these languages, their speakers and learners reclaim their cultural and linguistic identities through a new visual culture. Likewise, the circulation of this LL has become increasingly diverse, from being produced and circulated as on-site signage to an audiovisual and digital circulation that crosses political boundaries and builds important communicative bridges between speech communities and their diverse membership or speakers. This transition has also allowed for faster, more widespread and cheaper production. While it is essential to recognise the production and circulation of LL in indigenous languages as processes of linguistic reclamation and that this has potential in the development of multiliteracies, there is still a need to reflect on how the consumption of the linguistic landscape affects the revitalisation of indigenous languages. The present intervention aims to analyse, from the experience of southern Mexico, how LL in indigenous languages motivates the revitalisation of indigenous languages. That is, how the production of LL can and should move from linguistic reclamation (production-circulation) to consumption (circulation-appropriation) of language and culture to re-establish the intergenerational transmission and use of indigenous languages. It is also essential to ask: Who are the direct consumers of this growing production? Remarkably, how does this lead to the formation of new speakers?
‘Crats Got Your Tongue? – Language maintenance through the rollback
Dr. Vini Olsen-Reeder (Ngā Pōtiki a Tamapahore, Ngāti Pūkenga, Ngāi Te Rangi, Te Arawa)
“Does anyone need a law to tell them how to speak?
I wrote this statement innocently in 2021, while debating with myself over the “renaming” of New Zealand in favour of Aotearoa. I didn’t quite realise then that I would revisit this statement repeatedly in 2024, as I navigate my world as a language revivalist and planner.
It will not be news to LL15 that the halls of colonial-imagined power have created yet another new enemy for itself in Māori people and our language. It may surprise some that despite that, life for eager Māori language speakers remains relatively unchanged.
In this keynote, I will take some time to move us outside of the halls of academia into the coalface of a linguistic landscape that Ray Harlow once described as “doggedly monolingual.” I’ll touch on some of the recent anti-reo sentiments in political and public debate that are both unreal and, well, unreal. Ultimately, I hope to convey my optimism about the life of my language, and further impart a call-to-action to LL15 that we commit to protecting the recent groundswell of passion for learning Māori the nation has enjoyed. This is language maintenance through the rollback, from the eyes of a language revivalist.
Dr. Vini Olsen-Reeder (Ngā Pōtiki a Tamapahore, Ngāti Pūkenga, Ngāi Te Rangi, Te Arawa)
“Does anyone need a law to tell them how to speak?
I wrote this statement innocently in 2021, while debating with myself over the “renaming” of New Zealand in favour of Aotearoa. I didn’t quite realise then that I would revisit this statement repeatedly in 2024, as I navigate my world as a language revivalist and planner.
It will not be news to LL15 that the halls of colonial-imagined power have created yet another new enemy for itself in Māori people and our language. It may surprise some that despite that, life for eager Māori language speakers remains relatively unchanged.
In this keynote, I will take some time to move us outside of the halls of academia into the coalface of a linguistic landscape that Ray Harlow once described as “doggedly monolingual.” I’ll touch on some of the recent anti-reo sentiments in political and public debate that are both unreal and, well, unreal. Ultimately, I hope to convey my optimism about the life of my language, and further impart a call-to-action to LL15 that we commit to protecting the recent groundswell of passion for learning Māori the nation has enjoyed. This is language maintenance through the rollback, from the eyes of a language revivalist.
Navigating the shoals (borderlands): Between fixity and fluidity in S/LL research
Prof. Christopher Stroud (University of the Western Cape)
The ‘scape’ in linguistic landscape studies has been the terra firma of the discipline since its inception. With dogged determination, these grounds have been mapped and measured with Euclidean precision, with one scape populated after the other. But, as we move across scapes, mapping, classifying and counting, other topographies with other, non-euclidean topological characteristics have literally began to surface. These are semiotic topographies that shift shape over time in/as (unexpected) places and shapes (Peck and Stroud), at times violently washed away beyond recognition (turbulence), the full extent of earlier presence only imaginable from traces (Karlander) and deposits of sediment left behind (Volvach). This is a shifting terrain beyond the fixity of ‘scape’ but not yet full immersive fluidity. In geographical parlance, such topologies/topographies are ‘shoals’, “areas in which the sea or water becomes shallow” and points where “the movement of the ocean [flows] from greater to shallower depths” (King, 2023). Shoals can erode, drift and accumulate elsewhere, they are mobile, shape-shifting and in flux, their unpredictability comprising ‘a demonic ground’ (McKittrick, 2006) beyond cartographic certainty that requires new (conceptual) tools to navigate (King 2023).
In this talk, I explore the productivity of ‘shoal’ as a conceptual metaphor for contact and encounter and emerging spaces of becoming in S/LL research, departing from my own work and that of colleagues who, intentionally or not, find themselves navigating the shoals and shallows of the ‘bed’ of S/LL research, Following King’s original research on ‘The Black Shoal’ as an “analytical and a methodological location”, I speculate what implications this might carry for the field.
Prof. Christopher Stroud (University of the Western Cape)
The ‘scape’ in linguistic landscape studies has been the terra firma of the discipline since its inception. With dogged determination, these grounds have been mapped and measured with Euclidean precision, with one scape populated after the other. But, as we move across scapes, mapping, classifying and counting, other topographies with other, non-euclidean topological characteristics have literally began to surface. These are semiotic topographies that shift shape over time in/as (unexpected) places and shapes (Peck and Stroud), at times violently washed away beyond recognition (turbulence), the full extent of earlier presence only imaginable from traces (Karlander) and deposits of sediment left behind (Volvach). This is a shifting terrain beyond the fixity of ‘scape’ but not yet full immersive fluidity. In geographical parlance, such topologies/topographies are ‘shoals’, “areas in which the sea or water becomes shallow” and points where “the movement of the ocean [flows] from greater to shallower depths” (King, 2023). Shoals can erode, drift and accumulate elsewhere, they are mobile, shape-shifting and in flux, their unpredictability comprising ‘a demonic ground’ (McKittrick, 2006) beyond cartographic certainty that requires new (conceptual) tools to navigate (King 2023).
In this talk, I explore the productivity of ‘shoal’ as a conceptual metaphor for contact and encounter and emerging spaces of becoming in S/LL research, departing from my own work and that of colleagues who, intentionally or not, find themselves navigating the shoals and shallows of the ‘bed’ of S/LL research, Following King’s original research on ‘The Black Shoal’ as an “analytical and a methodological location”, I speculate what implications this might carry for the field.
Borderscapes
Prof. Stefania Tufi (University of Liverpool)
Bordering practices are pervasive - they are routine actions that we perform on a regular basis. If we consider that we continuously engage with doing and undoing boundaries between the Self and the Other, and between a multiplicity of entities in the more-than-human world, the relevance of ‘drawing lines’ in existential terms becomes apparent. Temporal entities have boundaries, too, in that events and happenings tend to be defined through a beginning and an end, and assume a spatio-visual dimension when drawing timelines.
The ontological basis of drawing boundaries is linked to our sensory perception of the objects that surround us through edge detection - the identification of the natural boundaries that they seem to possess (Varzi 2016). Drawing lines helps us to make sense of reality and we tend to apply naturalised boundaries to human-induced spatial demarcations. This process is mutually reinforced by centuries-long binary thinking and a taxonomic understanding of reality that classifies rather than describes, and underpins othering processes and exclusionary practices.
LL could be conceptualised as inherently border-making, due to the power of the written word and of other semiotic devices enacting material and symbolic markings that actualise boundaries. However, boundaries are social and historical products and inherently changeable, unstable and mobile. They do not exist as essentialised entities, rather they are performed and co-constructed through interaction and discursive iterations. An LL perspective on bordering practices has the potential to challenge naturalised borders and internalised boundaries, and foster border thinking (Mignolo, 2011).
The paper will argue for a conceptualisation of borderscapes as an epistemologically valid framework to reconnect different experiences and understandings of the border. From this perspective, rather than enacting separation through the construction of difference, borderscapes can be deployed as resources to enact spaces of possibility, and prompt social change while countering perceptions, and self-perceptions, of peripherality and marginalisation.
Mignolo, W. D. (2011) Geopolitics of sensing and knowing: On (de) coloniality, border thinking and epistemic disobedience. Postcolonial studies, 14(3): 273-283.
Varzi, A. (2016) On drawing lines across the board. In Zaibert, L. (ed.) The Theory and Practice of Ontology. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 45-78.
Prof. Stefania Tufi (University of Liverpool)
Bordering practices are pervasive - they are routine actions that we perform on a regular basis. If we consider that we continuously engage with doing and undoing boundaries between the Self and the Other, and between a multiplicity of entities in the more-than-human world, the relevance of ‘drawing lines’ in existential terms becomes apparent. Temporal entities have boundaries, too, in that events and happenings tend to be defined through a beginning and an end, and assume a spatio-visual dimension when drawing timelines.
The ontological basis of drawing boundaries is linked to our sensory perception of the objects that surround us through edge detection - the identification of the natural boundaries that they seem to possess (Varzi 2016). Drawing lines helps us to make sense of reality and we tend to apply naturalised boundaries to human-induced spatial demarcations. This process is mutually reinforced by centuries-long binary thinking and a taxonomic understanding of reality that classifies rather than describes, and underpins othering processes and exclusionary practices.
LL could be conceptualised as inherently border-making, due to the power of the written word and of other semiotic devices enacting material and symbolic markings that actualise boundaries. However, boundaries are social and historical products and inherently changeable, unstable and mobile. They do not exist as essentialised entities, rather they are performed and co-constructed through interaction and discursive iterations. An LL perspective on bordering practices has the potential to challenge naturalised borders and internalised boundaries, and foster border thinking (Mignolo, 2011).
The paper will argue for a conceptualisation of borderscapes as an epistemologically valid framework to reconnect different experiences and understandings of the border. From this perspective, rather than enacting separation through the construction of difference, borderscapes can be deployed as resources to enact spaces of possibility, and prompt social change while countering perceptions, and self-perceptions, of peripherality and marginalisation.
Mignolo, W. D. (2011) Geopolitics of sensing and knowing: On (de) coloniality, border thinking and epistemic disobedience. Postcolonial studies, 14(3): 273-283.
Varzi, A. (2016) On drawing lines across the board. In Zaibert, L. (ed.) The Theory and Practice of Ontology. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 45-78.
