13.–14.06.2024, Giessen: Workshop Language Ideologies in the Successor States of the USSR – Soviet Legacies and New Developments
Organised by Prof. Dr. Monica Wingender und Dr. Liudmyla Pidkuimukha in the frame of the DFG-funded project “Comparison of language ideologies in the Soviet Union and the current Russian Federation – Continuity, ruptures, and new orientations” / "Vergleich der Sprachideologien in der Sowjetunion und der heutigen Russischen Föderation - Kontinuität, Brüche, Neuorientierungen"
Language policy as well as concepts of bilingualism and multilingualism continue to be the subject of intense societal debates in the successor states of the Soviet Union. Here, language ideologies with their references to the Soviet Union on the one hand, and new developments on the other play an important role. To what extent the language ideologies of the successor states of the USSR can be classified as continuity, break, reinterpretation or reorientation in comparison with those of the Soviet Union is the aim of the analyses at the planned workshop.
Language ideologies as “sets of beliefs (or ideas/conceptualizations) about language” (Ajsic / McGroarty (2015, 182), Kroskrity (2010, 192)) have been examined for the past four decades to a greater extent, and various studies have recently emerged investigating “the sum of all values with which linguistic reality is discursively constructed by social actors” (Spitzmüller 2013, 264), how ‘language matters’ and ‘language does not matter’ in wartime (Bilaniuk 2016), how language ideologies vary from the understanding a language as a national and state symbol to the ideology of plurilingualism and internal diversity (Nedashkivska 2020). Language ideology has been broadened “from a marginalized topic to
an issue of central concern” (Kroskrity 2004, 501).