Lorenza Mondada, DYLAN partenaire de l'université Lyon, est nommée professeure ordinaire à l'Université de Bâle. Félicitations!

DYLAN WP2 manager Ruth Wodak and WP5 manager Michal Krzyzanowski were at the 42nd Poznań Linguistic Meeting to disseminate DYLAN findings. You can find more information online or downloading this document.

Lancaster University is looking for a lecturer in Digital Language Learning and teaching. More information is available online.

Closing date: 26 May 2011

EACEA, the education, audiovisuel and culture executive agency supports European cooperation in Education and Training. The current call for proposals comprises two separate parts:

- Part A - Raising national awareness of lifelong learning strategies and of European cooperation in education and training
- Part B - Support for transnational cooperation in the development and implementation of national and regional lifelong learning strategies.

Deadline: 30 June 2011. More information.

An interesting alternative for funding mobility in research: The European Institutes for Advanced Study (EURIAS) Fellowship Programme is an international researcher mobility programme offering 10-month residencies in one of the 14 participating Institutes: Berlin, Bologna, Brussels, Bucharest, Budapest, Cambridge, Helsinki, Jerusalem, Lyons, Nantes, Paris, Uppsala, Vienna, Wassenaar.

Their fellowships support the "focused, self-directed work of outstanding researchers".

Application deadline: 31 May 11, more information.

Ce numéro de la revue Intercompreensaõ-Redinter acceptera, entre autres, des contributions autour des questions suivantes:
• Grandes orientations théoriques et pratiques en matière de politique linguistiques
• Épistémologie du plurilinguisme comme objet de politique linguistique
• Place du plurilinguisme dans les politiques linguistiques intérieures et extérieures
• Situations géopolitiques et politiques linguistiques de plurilinguisme
• Relation(s) entre politiques linguistiques et didactique
• L’intercompréhension dans les politiques linguistiques

Ce numéro de la revue est coordonné par
• Patrick Chardenet, Université de Franche Comté
• Christian Ollivier, Université de La Réunion
Merci de les contacter pour plus d'information.

How to improve conditions for SSH researchers in FP7 and beyond?

Last year NET4SOCIETY, a network of the 44 National Contact Points (NCPs) for Socio-economic Sciences and Humanities (SSH), carried out a survey about the experiences of researchers from the scoio-economic sciences and humanities with FP7.

The full results of the survey have recently been published and presented to the European Commission.

A summary of results and the report are available for download here.

La Confédération helvétique a mandaté l’Institut de plurilinguisme de l’Université de Fribourg et de la Haute Ecole pédagogique de Fribourg pour mettre sur pied le Centre de compétence scientifique sur le plurilinguisme.

Afin de réaliser les tâches dans le domaine de la recherche appliquée, l’Institut met au concours des postes de chef-fe-s de projets pour les domaines de recherches suivants : « Plurilinguisme individuel », « Enseignement et apprentissage des langues – évaluation des compétences langagières » et « Plurilinguisme institutionnel et sociétal ». Détails

Applications for the 4th programme of the European Centre for Modern Languages of the Council of Europe “LEARNING THROUGH LANGUAGES: Promoting inclusive, plurilingual and intercultural education” (2012-2015) can still be submitted up until 1 May 2011.

Within the Call, the ECML is seeking two kinds of submissions: proposals for projects relating to one or more of the working areas of the programme and tenders, individual expressions of interest in leading or contributing to projects outlined by the ECML. Applicants should normally be living and working in a member state of the ECML. In certain cases, applications from non-member states as team members (not as coordinators) can be accepted.
Also the Road Show for the promotion for the Call is in its final month. After presentations in Armenia, Austria, Belgium, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the ECML is promoting the call in the Netherlands (Leeuwarden, 7-8 April) and the Czech Republic (Prague, 8 April).

Useful addresses
Call for submissions website
For questions concerning the Call

If you agree that languages are important in UK Higher Education and oppose the cuts in Modern Languages (Czech, Polish, Russian, Italian, French, German) proposed by the University of Glasgow management, please sign the petition below. The decision will be made very soon, so this is urgent.

It's free to sign the petition and takes only a few seconds. To do so, just click here.

For up-to-date information about the proposed cuts, please see the Facebook page.

Please remember to click 'like' if you approve of both the petition and the Facebook page.

Thank you! And please pass the message on.

SUCU Office

The European Commission's directorate general for translation (DGT) recently published a study entitled "Lingua Franca: Chimera or Reality?" It includes three interviews, one with Phliippe van Parijs, one with François Grin (DYLAN deputy coordinator), and one with Wolfgang Mackiewicz (Chair of the DYLAN advisory board). The study can be downloaded here.

ELDIA (European Language Diversity for All) is an interdisciplinary research project for reconceptualizing, promoting and re-evaluating individual and societal multilingualism. Experts on applied linguistics and sociolinguistics, law, social studies and statistics, drawn from eight universities in six European countries, work together to contribute to a better understanding of how local, “national” and “international” (vehicular) languages interact in contemporary Europe.
The first newsletter of this project is now available and can be downloaded by clicking here.

L’appel à manifestations d’intérêt pour le programme d’activités 2012-2015 du CELV (Centre européen pour les langues vivantes du Conseil de l’Europe) a été lancé sur le site Internet http://www.ecml.at/call

The EU-funded project entitled 'Intercultural Dialogue & Linguistic Diversity via MobLang' will aim at teaching basic language skills in Albanian, Basque, Greek, Irish, and Turkish through the mobile phone. More information can be found in the project's newsletter, available here.

The Journal of Language and Politics (JLP) represents a forum for analysing and discussing the various dimensions in the interplay of language and politics. DYLAN WP2 Manager Ruth Wodak is the co-editor while WP5 Manager Michal Krzyżanowski is co-associated editor.
If you whish to contribute to this publications or if you just want more information, the new flyer is now available and can be downloaded here.

We would like to inform you that a new issue of the trilingual journal "Sociolinguistica" is out. You will find more information on the publisher's website.

We would like to congratulate on behalf of DYLAN WP2 Manager Ruth Wodak who has just become a member of the prestigious Academia Europea. The latter is a functioning European Academy of Humanities, Letters and Sciences, composed of individual members, and membership is by invitation.

We are pleased to announce that the second DYLAN doctoral school is now open for applications. Aiming at fostering the dialogue on multilingualism and linguistic diversity in Europe and beyond, it will explore the following topics:

The 40th conference of the German Applied Linguistics association (Dt. Gesellschaft für Angewandte Linguistik) will take place in Leipzig, D on 15-17 Sep 2010.

The theme of section 9 on Intercultural communication and multilingual discourse concerns the analysis of intercultural communication and multilingual discourse. The main focus of this workshop is on presentations of empirical research results, theoretical as well as methodological inquiries into intercultural communication along with multilingual discourse and aspects dealing with its practical use.

More information and registration.

The international symposium "Migrations: Interdisciplinary Perspectives" is dedicated to the discussion of the multiple interdisciplinary dimensions of ‘migrations’, both from the viewpoints of the Social Sciences and Humanities as well as from the manifold perspectives of the Natural Sciences.

It will take place on 1-3 July 2010 at the University of Vienna.

More information and registration.

Diese Woche ist in der deutschen Wochenzeitung "Die Zeit" eine Stelle der Universität Bozen ausgeschrieben, mit der das Bozener DYLAN Team als Verstärkung für das Kompetenzzentrum Sprachen eine/n Forscher/in im Bereich Germanistik sucht.

Je nach Curriculum ist die Einstellung als doc oder post-doc möglich.

Einsendeschluss für Bewerbungen ist der 31. Mai 2010. Weitere Informationen finden Sie auf der Webseite der Universität Bozen.

"Vor überfüllten Rängen hat Georges Lüdi, DYLAN deputy coordinator und Leiter des Baseler DYLAN Teams, am 10 Dezember 2009 seine abwechslungsreiche und amüsante Abschiedsvorlesung zum Thema „Le plurilinguisme comme source d’innovation et de créativité“ gegeben. Wir wünschen einen rundum gelungenen, kreativen und produktiven (Un-)Ruhestand!"

An EU-funded team of researchers is targeting the development of a vitality barometer for European languages. This barometer would offer Europeans a reliable method to determine which languages are in danger of becoming extinct. The ELDIA ('European language diversity for all') project has received EUR 2.7 million in EU support.

The researchers from 8 universities in 6 EU Member States are gearing up to launch investigations of 14 Finno-Ugric languages. 'These languages are particularly well suited to the investigations as they cover the entire spectrum of the different minority languages, starting with autochthonous languages such as Meänkieli in Sweden right through to the language of new migrant workers such as Estonians in Germany,' said project coordinator Professor Anneli Sarhimaa of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany.

More information are available on the project's website.

Integrating results from different disciplines is often a challenge. Within the University of Helsinki research task of the DYLAN project, the researchers in the different fields of linguistics and policy research have faced this problem in a very concrete way. In our practical study relating to the outcomes of language policies in higher education we have experienced that sufficient background knowledge in a field that is not your own requires teamwork: linguists and political scientists need to work side by side in order to gain theoretical and methodological advances in both disciplines. While linguists can analyze language dynamics in great detail by using for instance conversation analysis or sociopragmatics, political scientists can analyze the content and output of policies by for instance different types of evaluation analysis and policy analysis. Both, however, seem to have a blind spot. On the one hand, linguists tend to disregard the macro-level of why a specific policy decision was made and how it related to the myriad of other policies. On the other hand, political scientists tend to disregard the micro-level of what the actual output of a policy entails and what possible covert messages might exist in the policy formulation process. The multidisciplinary nature of the DYLAN project has highlighted issues relating to how language relates to society and how society relates to language by enhancing a much needed dialogue across the two disciplines. This dialogue was presented and enacted by Jan-Ola Östman and Sebastian Godenhjelm at the conference Svenskan i Finland (The Swedish language in Finland) in Joensuu, Finland, 15-16 October 2009.

ForumSprache ist eine neue Online-Fachzeitschrift für das Lehren und Lernen neuerer Fremdsprachen. Sie wendet sich an Wissenschaftler, Studierende und Lehrende und liefert sowohl aktuelle wissenschaftliche Beiträge zur Fremdsprachenforschung als auch Arbeiten aus der Praxis des Fremdsprachenunterrichts.

ForumSprache erscheint zweimal jährlich und ist ausschließlich als Download erhältlich.

Weitere Informationen finden Sie auf der website des ForumSprache. 

Ingrid Piller and Kimie Takahashi, from the University of Macquarie, Australia, found that there is a real need for a collaborative space where research on language and communication in multicultural and transnational contexts can be shared, brainstormed, discussed and disseminated. That's why they decided to build this portal, dedicated to issues of language and communication in multicultural and transnational contexts and open to anyone interested in language learning, multilingualism and intercultural communication.

In 2008 the European Commission asked an international team of researches, cooridnated by the Jyväskylä University, to carry on a study on the effects that multilingualism can have for brain. Findings are available on the CORDIS website and can be downloaded in french and in english.

The study was conducted between May 2008 and June 2009 across the 27 EU Member States as well as Norway and Turkey. It takes into account scientific literature from Europe and beyond, plus input from 30 experts in the studied countries and a core scientific team.

The analysis was set against five hypotheses previously formulated by the Commission. These assume that there is a link between multilingualism and creativity: multilingualism broadens access to information and offers alternative ways of organising thought as well as of perceiving the surrounding world. Finally, it was surmised that learning a new language increases the potential for creative thought.

Enjoy reading!