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10-11 July, Language and Power: Exploring New Global Histories of Language

The workshop explores the role of language, broadly conceived, in globalising processes of the long twentieth century. Although they are often unacknowledged or even invisible, issues of language speak to central tensions in global history. They are tied to overarching power structures – colonial, national, or economic – and, at the same time, intensely personal in their relation to identity-building and individual expression. Since the late nineteenth century and, increasingly, during the 1920s and beyond, national languages were standardised, vernaculars came under threat, world languages were hotly debated, and experiments with artificial languages emerged in very diverse contexts. Studies that consider the varieties of human expression and the homogenising influences they face are well placed to advance a global history approach that takes global forces, social fabrics, and individual agency seriously.

What is more, language and its relation to the ‘global’ is also particularly topical at this present moment. Conceptions of language and globalisation are changing rapidly in the age of AI, and, for the first time, we can imagine a world without language barriers. Yet, while language barriers may seem finally surmountable, new rifts are emerging. At a time when English has achieved an unprecedented dominance in popular culture, trade, teaching, and publishing, questions of standardisation and linguistic diversity are increasingly being discussed. When it comes to the practice of global history, a passionate debate has erupted in relation to the dominance of English as a vehicle of (uneven) communication.

Research on global languages has consequently developed into a thriving but not yet consolidated subfield of global history. This workshop takes these recent individual explorations as its point of departure. Its goal is to move language history to the centre of global history research and to initiate a larger interdisciplinary conversation about language that speaks to the broad themes of standardisation and diversity, elitism and accessibility, simplification and complexity and to the tension between the social and the global at large.

 

Please register here by 1 July.