Beyond the mother tongue: Rethinking languages, identity and belonging
MultiBEING researcher Maria Fedina will present her research at the Comparing and Contrasting Languages and Culture (CoCoLaC) community workshop on 27 August at the University of Helsinki.
Event description
On 27 August, the Comparing and Contrasting Languages and Cultures (CoCoLaC) community will host the workshop ’All my Tongues: Replacing the Concept of Mother Tongue with Empirically Grounded Values for the Roles of Languages in Repertoires’ at the University of Helsinki. The event brings together researchers from Finland and beyond to explore new ways of understanding multilingualism, language use and linguistic identification.
Among the speakers is MultiBEING researcher Maria Fedina (University of Helsinki). In her presentation, Fedina will discuss how the notion of a native language functions both as a legal category and as an ideological construct. She will examine how the concept can reinforce hierarchies between languages and shape the ways people describe their linguistic repertoires and express group belonging.
The workshop aims to move beyond critiques of the concepts of mother tongue and native speaker by developing empirically grounded alternatives for understanding the roles and values of languages in people’s lives. Participants will consider how language repertoires can be described in ways that reflect lived multilingual realities rather than relying on predefined categories.
The event will bring together members of the CoCoLaC community, sociolinguists, language acquisition researchers, and language education scholars. Organised by Grégoire Andreo, Friederike Lüpke and Katharina Tyran, the workshop seeks to foster discussion on how language, identity and belonging can be conceptualised in more nuanced and context-sensitive ways.
More information about the workshop is available on the University of Helsinki website here.
