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"Multilingualism in Germany". Lecture by Antje Hansen, University of Hamburg

06.04.2018 08:30

Friday, April 6, 8:30 am, 8th Academic building of KNRTU-KAI, room 505.

Dr. Antje Hansen is the Research Associate in the Institute for Intercultural and International Comparative Education, University of Hamburg, Germany.

The lecture is an excellent opportunity to learn more about Germany and to get closer to the country's rich language culture.

The University of Hamburg (Universität Hamburg) is one of the largest educational and research centers in Germany. Universität Hamburg was founded in 1919 by local citizens. Important founding figures include Senator Werner von Melle and the merchant Edmund Siemers. Nobel prize winnters such as Otto Stern, Wolfgang Pauli and Isidor Rabi were active at the University. Other well-known scholars, such as Ernst Cassirer, Erwin Panofsky, Aby Warburg, William Stern, Agathe Lasch, Magdalene Schoch, Emil Artin, Ralf Dahrendorf, and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, to name but a few, also taught here. Nowadays, the University of Hamburg is the largest educational institution in the northern part of Germany.

Russian is an important language in Germany – as a foreign language taught in schools and as a “heritage language” that people migrating from the territory of the former Soviet Union have brought with them to Germany. As a foreign language Russian is taught in schools in Germany for nearly 70 years. It has an interesting history, developing much differently in Eastern and Western Germany. Today it takes fifth place in learner numbers (after English, French, Latin and Spanish). Russian is thus firmly integrated as a foreign language in the German education system (Bergmann 2017), a status that other languages such as Turkish, Polish etc. don’t have. However there are much more speakers of Russian in Germany than just foreign language learners: as a “heritage language” Russian is spoken and preserved in families and communities by migrants and their descendants from the former Soviet Union. Through communication in the family, Russian is passed on to the second generation – children that were born in Germany and might have never lived in a Russian speaking country themselves. However preserving a heritage language in a German dominated country is not an easy task. This leads to a huge range of competencies of heritage speakers in the heritage language. And Russian is not the only heritage language in Germany. People from over 190 countries live here. Since not only one language is spoken in a respective country, the number of languages spoken in Germany is much higher. This entails potentials but also challenges to a country and especially to its education system. The talk will give an overview of the situation of multilingualism in Germany with a special focus on the situation of Russian. It will then present latest results from research on multilingualism in Germany – which tries to minimize the risks and facilitate the potential of multilingual speakers in Germany so that multilingualism can be used as a resource in our globalized society in which it is needed more than ever.

Antje Hansen, M.A. (University of Hamburg)

Antje Hansen studied Economics and European Studies in Hamburg (Germany), Lille (France) and Istanbul (Turkey). Currently she’s doing her doctorate on the conditions of successfulmigration induced multilingualism and biliteracy at the University of Hamburg. Antje is also working for the coordination office of multilingualism and language education, a coordination body of a research cluster on multilingualism. The research cluster is funded by the Germany ministry for education and research. It comprised of twelve research projects located at different German universities that investigate the conditions and obstacles of multilingual development. The cluster presents a good overview of research on multilingualism in Germany and its results will be presented during the talk.

Antje’s research interests are successful multilingual development, heritage language education and transfer of research results to the general public.

Source:
International Affairs Office