Yuen Speaker Series — New Neighbors? Migration, Multilingualism and the Modern City

The Hong Kong Jockey Club University of Chicago Academic Complex | The University of Chicago Francis and Rose Yuen Campus in Hong Kong
168 Victoria Road, Mount Davis
Hong Kong

Human migrations and relocations have been taking place for centuries, but the last 75 years have seen major population shifts from rural areas to urban centers. Urbanization comes from both in-migration and transnational migrations due to an array of social and economic factors. Although cities have long been hotbeds of multilingualism, the nature of urban multilingualism has changed in recent decades, resulting in what is sometimes called super diversity or metrolingualism.

In this talk Professor Yuen Visiting Scholar Lenore Grenoble from UChicago will discuss the causes of urban multilingualism, and how questions of linguistic diversity play into issues of identity and nationalism in the home, across social networks, in local neighborhoods, and the larger context of the city as a whole.

Lenore A. Grenoble (PhD,  University of California, Berkeley) is the John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Chicago.  Her research focuses on the study of contact linguistics, language shift and vitality, and language documentation, and the study of language practices as contextually and culturally situated. She is currently studying multilingualism and the impact of urbanization, cultural and climate change in the Arctic, with fieldwork in Greenland, Norway, and the Sakha Republic in the Russian Federation. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and her current projects are supported by the National Science Foundation’s program in Documenting Endangered Languages, the Fulbright Arctic Chair Norway, and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Program Rundown:

2:00pm                Registration
2:15pm                 Welcome and Introduction
2:30pm                Presentation 
3:15pm                 Discussion/ Q&A
4:00pm                End

Registration:

Please CLICK HERE
 

Shuttle Service to Campus

Pick-up time:     1:45pm (** Please kindly note the change of pick up time for those who have registered to take shuttle earlier**)
Pick-up point:    Admiralty MTR Station (outside Café de Coral at Admiralty Centre: Unit C, Shop 42-68, G/F, Admiralty Centre, 18 Harcourt Road, Admiralty). Please find the map here.