1 January 2018
Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Faculty of Modern Languages and Literatures, Poland
Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań (AMU), and in particular its Faculty of Modern Languages and Literatures, has a well-established position and experience in studying minority languages from linguistic, sociolinguistic, ethnolinguistic, and glottopolitical perspectives, including community-based and community-oriented fieldwork in Europe, Asia and the Americas.
The AMU team brings together specialists in Hellenic, Romance, and Baltic languages, in Mexican studies, in phonetics and speech processing, crosscultural translation studies, sociolinguistic dialectology, participatory pedagogy, language-&-culture learning-&-teaching methods, comparative studies on language standardization and language ideologies, sociolinguistics of writing, literacy and identity, as well as language rights and their implementation in various constellations of linguo-cultural factors.
Activities thematically related to COLING conducted in recent years include the Polish project Poland’s Linguistic Heritage – Documentation Base for Endangered Languages and participation in the international project INNET Innovative Networking in Infrastructure for Endangered Languages, where the AMU team developed the educational platform languagesindanger.eu for learning and teaching about linguistic diversity, language endangerment and language documentation and organized the INNET Summer School on Technological Approaches to the Documentation of Lesser-Used Languages (Gniezno/Poland, 2013). A two-year master program in Empirical Linguistics and Language Documentation was launched at the Faculty in 2016.
It is at AMU where Poland’s first analyses and expertise on the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages were made and disseminated. AMU partners initiated research in Wilamowice and its unique microlanguage in the 1980/1990s, and on other European microlanguages (such as Griko, Karaim, Mirandes, Saterfrisian). AMU researchers also initiated the first comparative studies on sociolinguistics of and language policy for Frisian in the Netherlands and Germany and Kashubian in Poland. The tradition of Baltic studies at AMU resulted in individual and joint projects concerning Latgalian as a regional language in Latvia’s language policy, on Latvia’s minority languages as well as Baltic-Slavic language contacts. The AMU team has elaborated a community-based and community-oriented model of sociolinguistic and linguistic research.
