Linguistic Awareness and Dissolution of Diglossia
Standard languages are in most cases based on culturally significant textual traditions. By virtue of representing the cultural heritage, standard written languages often differ from the contemporary spoken varieties. In cases of a strict functional differentiation between the written language and the spoken language, we encounter diglossia (in accordance with Fergusson’s definition). Although such functional differentiations may persist over centuries, many cases of dissolution of diglossia have been attested over the past centuries. The exact nature of these processes forms the topic of our coming conference on July 1-3, 2011 at the University of Heidelberg.
The organizers of this conference are members of the research project “Language and cultural translation” within the Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a global context: Shifting asymmetries in cultural flows” at the University of Heidelberg. So far, the main focus of our investigation has been on linguistic and cultural changes associated with the dissolution of the diglossic situation in Japan in the 19th century in comparison with other cultures of Asia and Europe, particularly Eastern Europe. Towards the end of the 19th century, the Japanese culture opened up to European influences and literary translation introduced new literary models which led to a new awareness of the functional possibilities of the spoken language. This was the background of the genbun-itchi movement in Japan, a language reform which promoted the spoken language to the status of the literary language. There were similar processes in Russia one century earlier.
The upcoming conference aims at comparing these processes of Japanese with similar processes in other Asian and in European languages. We have invited specialists from Asia, Europe, and the US to report on their research which focuses on the dissolution of diglossic situations in the cultures investigated by them.
The conference language is English.
Contact:
Prof. Judit Árokay
Institut für Japanologie
Akademiestr. 4-8
69117 Heidelberg
Tel. +49 (0) 6221 54 7662
E-Mail: arokay@zo.uni-heidelberg.de
