Annual Honorary Dashkova Lecture: The hosts who learned immigrants' tongues (Aneta Pavlenko)

A dramatic increase in the numbers of international migrants, experienced in London and other Western European capitals, has given rise to the sociolinguistics of superdiversity that brands itself as a new global approach for the new age of “mobility, complexity and unpredictability” (Blommaert, 2013, p. 6). Yet the diversification of existing diversity, observed in modern-day societies, is far from being a novel phenomenon and its linguistic consequences for host societies are both predictable and banal (Pavlenko, 2018).

The purpose of this talk is to discuss a society that did something truly unpredictable from the point of view of multilingualism. Backtracking past Catherine II and Peter I, I will start with the third ruler often labelled the Great, Ivan III (1462-1505), and use a variety of published and archival data to trace the metamorphosis of Muscovy from the land where foreign visitors had to master Russian to the place where the hosts learned the tongues of their immigrants and prisoners of war.

_{Blommaert, J. (2013). Ethnography, superdiversity, and linguistic landscapes: Chronicles of complexity. Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters.}

_{Pavlenko, A. (2018, in press) Superdiversity and why it isn’t. In Breidbach, S., Kuster, L. & B. Schmenk (eds.) Sloganization in language education discourses. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.}

Reserve your free ticket: https://dashkovalecture-pavlenko.eventbrite.co.uk

The lecture will be followed by an informal wine reception.

Prof. Aneta Pavlenko is a Research Professor at the Center for Multilingualism at the University of Oslo. Her work examines the relationship between multilingualism, cognition, and emotions. She has lectured widely in North America, Europe and Asia and has authored more than a hundred articles and ten books, the most recent of which is The bilingual mind and what it tells us about language and thought (Cambridge University Press, 2014). She is Past President of the American Association for Applied Linguistics and winner of the 2006 BAAL Book of the Year award and the 2009 TESOL Award for Distinguished Research.