Browsing by Subject "Multilingualism"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Dos eygene Daytshland: Anthologizing Jewish Multilingualism in and beyond the Habsburg Empire
    (2022-05) Weinshel, Meyer
    For the past century, anthologies containing German poetic texts in Yiddish translation have appeared in and beyond the former Habsburg Empire. Broadly conceiving translations as a series of “unfinished” published and unpublished texts that appeared before and after the Second World War, this dissertation traces the circulation in and beyond Central Europe of German-language poetry in Yiddish, and points to a relatedness between two seemingly disparate Jewish language groups that fell victim to marginalization, genocide, and displacement. In so doing, this dissertation maps contiguities “between” the languages used by Yiddish readers, writers, and translators. Furthermore, these contiguities destabilize traditional definitions of Ashkenazi Yiddish-Hebrew bi-/multilingualism within Eastern European Jewry, by noting the prolonged engagement with German and German Jewish culture across space and time. What emerges instead, is a longer, still-unfolding history of multilingual, communal, Jewish textual memory (i.e., translation). Often overlooked in the monolingual environs of North America and Israel, these texts have the ability to challenge English- and Hebrew-language hegemony that continues to render encounters with Yiddish and other languages obsolete, to instead provide resilient, multilingual, and diasporic Jewish cultural models.
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    Tracing the Ideologies of State Language Roadmaps: A Discursive Analysis of Education, Economics and Equity in Language Policy
    (2021-05) Karlsson, Ashley
    Over the last fifteen years, the Language Flagship, an initiative of the National Security Education Program (NSEP), has been working with education, business, and government partners to draft state language roadmaps in support of advancing multilingualism. So far, Ohio, Oregon, Texas, Utah, Rhode Island, Hawai‘i, Wisconsin and Indiana have published roadmaps with the support of NSEP. While these language roadmaps ostensibly position multilingualism as a benefit to society, there has been limited research on the language ideologies that undergird the policy proposals present in these documents. This research study draws on several qualitative data sources, including the text of current language roadmaps, ancillary artifacts related to each state roadmap initiative, and interviews with key state actors who participated in the drafting of these roadmaps to conduct a critical discourse analysis of how particular language ideologies are reproduced in language education policy. The findings of this study demonstrate convergence across several themes, including sense-making around language awareness and conscientization, the reproduction of neoliberal discourse through the language of economics and the positioning of equity within the language roadmaps. The language ideologies and orientations present in these findings provide a point of reference for interpreting the policy proposals put forth in each roadmap. Ultimately, the recommendations offered by each state roadmap establishes a particular vision of multilingualism, including who is expected to benefit from specific policy efforts. This study is significant for its potential to guide language policy actors across multiple levels in drafting, revising and implementing state policies that respond to evolving discourse on equity and attend more directly to issues of language access and opportunity.
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    Unreading multilingualisms of the Korean diaspora
    (2013-07) Kim, Eun Joo
    This project critiques the impulse to read literature and culture of the Korean diaspora as representative of individual(s), culture(s), or community(ies), and the long-standing focus on what difference looks like. Each of my primary texts has been written or performed by Korean diasporic women in the past three decades. My primary materials also include both Korean and English, and most include a third or even a fourth language. While still attending to visual reading practices, my project privileges the sound of difference. I attend to how these different sounds are represented on the printed page, the cinematic screen, and the theatre stage. Each of these genres and media allows multilinguality to be expressed in different and very specific ways. My methodology consists of "unreading" contemporary texts. By unreading, I mean the practice of disrupting and deconstructing more dominant languages, vocabularies, and reading practices, guided by Rey Chow's discussion of "unlearning" and Kandice Chuh's work on deconstructing the "Asian American subject." With this approach, I investigate how relations of power are represented in cultural productions. I begin with a discussion of the modernization and democratization of the Korean language, particularly during the period of Japanese colonization. It is within this context that I read the historical traces that emerge in the language(s) of contemporary works. I then consider the grammatical, social, political, and cultural implications of eliciting a specific Western-derived first-person singular subject from a more (potentially deliberately) ambiguous Korean context. In the second half of this project, I turn to the media of film and television to argue that historical traces of the phenomena of early cinema, particularly during Korea's colonial period inform the translation and communication technologies featured in contemporary films of the Korean diaspora. The layering of subtitling in noraebang scenes enacts a doubling of both screens and subtitles, introducing rich layers of textuality while recalling the titles of early cinema. I conclude by considering the specific contributions of this project to the field of Asian American studies.