PT | EN | ES | FR
Etienne Damome (Université Bordeaux Montaigne, France)
Etienne Damome is Professor of Information and Communication Sciences at Montaigne University in Bordeaux. Member of the Media, Societies and Cultures research team at the MICA laboratory and member of the Groupe de recherches et d'étude sur la radio (GRER), whose work he coordinates, Etienne Damome analyses the place and social uses of radio in African societies..
« Radios locales en Afrique de l'Ouest et préservation des langues locales »
In sub-Saharan Africa, radio remains the most popular means of communication because it is often the only means of information accessible to all populations, including those living in rural areas. The law of proximity, inherent in all media, forces radio stations to adapt to their socio-cultural environment. In addition, the public policies of certain countries, which impose the promotion of national cultural heritage, reinforce the local roots of radio stations. This is achieved through the topics covered, but also and above all through the languages used to address the different populations present in the territories covered by the radio stations. Although they use the dominant language of the region, which they combine with the official language (French, English or Portuguese), local radio stations often program in most of the local languages spoken. In this way, radio stations sometimes, if not often, contribute to making certain languages heard that are confined to a limited geo-cultural space. Radio stations thus contribute to preserving certain languages that currently have only a few hundred speakers.
Ana Maria Costa (Instituto Politécnico de Viseu, ESEV, CIDEI, Portugal)
Retired Coordinating Professor of the Language Sciences Department at the School of Education (ESEV-IPV) in Viseu (Portugal). Collaborating member of the Centre for Studies in Education and Innovation. She was the coordinator of the Scientific Area of English and the FL Subject Area, as well as secretary and vice-president of the Technical-Scientific Council of ESEV. She was also responsible for curricular units in the field of English-speaking languages and cultures. She has been part of various projects (Foreign languages and employability. Active pedagogies. Multiculturalism and interculturality. Project-based learning. Use of digital tools as learning resources). She is the author of national and international scientific publications, as well as a member of the Editorial Board of several International Scientific Journals.
«Pluralidade cultural e extinção de línguas minoritárias: conflitos e possíveis soluções»
The disappearance of a language is not a recent phenomenon, although it is no less worrying for that reason. In fact, it is estimated that in around 100 years' time, of the 7,000 or so languages that exist in the world today, around 90 per cent will have disappeared, if we take a pessimistic view, and in a more optimistic view, only 50 per cent of the current 7,000, or 3,500, will remain. Is this disappearance cause for concern, or is it enough for us that the whole world dominates the same language (since the dominant language is invariably coupled with the language of a dominant people and its institutions)?
Considering the above, the question we will be looking into today is: to what extent is depriving a people of their language equivalent to depriving them of their culture and identity, and what consequences could come from this?
To this end and focusing essentially on North America - where the phenomenon is particularly notorious and disturbing - we will analyse how the various human languages have perished throughout history, whether as a result of acts of linguicide committed by dominant powers against indigenous peoples in the initial period of colonisation, or for other reasons. We will also take a brief look at how the phenomenon of neglecting minority languages is now widespread across the planet and highlight some examples of projects that are trying to counteract this trend.
Olga Domené-Painenao (El Colegio de la Frontera Sur, México)
Agroecologist with experience in designing and implementing educational programs from a participatory and popular education perspective. Researcher for Mexico in the research team on the Massification of Agroecology (Ecosur-Mexico), as well as in the National Specialisation in Community Well-being, mention of Agroecologies and Food Sovereignty, of the Interinstitutional Specialisation Program in Food Sovereignty and Strategic Management of Local Impact (PIES AGILES, Conahcyt, Mexico). She currently works with indigenous and peasant communities in Venezuela and south-eastern Mexico, Chile and Nicaragua, carrying out collective research into agroecology, subjects and educational processes.
«Tsikbalo'ob yéetel puksi'ik'al1: el caminar de experiencias educativas agroecológicas en la península de Yucatán, México»
One of the great challenges for educational processes that promote agroecology is that they need to be re-appropriated by communities. In particular, those that promote agroecological organisational processes, centred on the role of communities as collective subjects and where language plays a transcendental role. For this reason, this systematisation of 16 experiences in the Yucatán Peninsula seeks, in addition to sharing what has been experienced, to contribute to other methodologies that allow us to approach territorial educational processes. In general, this is a collective exercise of coming and going, which has added contributions from women and men who, from different places of enunciation, tell their story with one voice or with their learning communities. And above all because they made it possible to link the thinking of the Mayan Peoples to this vision that proposes an agroecology in which the material and the spiritual converge, the past with the present and the future, which unites the earth with the sky and thus creates a constellation of possibilities. As a result, the issues addressed are also plural but converge in common needs. As a result, multiple actions linked to diverse processes were determined, such as identifying and revaluing practices, ways of life (seeds, bees, weeds, among others) or knowledge from rural and urban communities, in the quest to find other ways of producing, feeding and/or teaching-learning. And that also involves understanding the centrality of intercultural bridges.
Eve Okura Koller (Brigham Young University-Hawaii, USA)
Eve Okura Koller: Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Linguist who worked as a member of the Catalogue of Endangered Languages (ELCat) team for three years. She also conducted language nest research internationally, funded by an MOU between the Smithsonian Institution’s Recovering Voices initiative and the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. She has taught linguistics at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and Brigham Young University–Hawaiʻi and has published on the endangerment of language isolates, methods of language revitalization, and languages of the Pacific.
“Language Vitality and Linguistic Diversity”
Eve Okura Koller discusses the factors that determine language vitality in the Language Endangerment Index (LEI). She explores the endangerment of language isolates, the state of language nests globally, and academia as a domain of use, with special attention paid to the situation in the Pacific.
