Op 25 en 26 juni 2015 aanstaande is het Leids Universitair Centrum voor Linguïstiek (LUCL) gastheer van een tweedaags congres over Buitenlands taal- en cultuurbeleid van Europese Landen in de 18e tot en met de 20ste eeuw. Dit congres wordt georganiseerd door Dr. K. Sanchez en Dr. M.C. Kok-Escalle. Een uitgebreidere beschrijving van dit congres treft u hieronder in het Engels aan.
Language Policies
Historians have published extensively on language policy as pursued by European monarchies and states within the territories they controlled. However, their linguistic and cultural policies in territories outside their own borders and beyond their control have, to date, been relatively under-researched. Such policies did not tend to be officially proclaimed, whether linguistic (dissemination of a royal or national language outside its area of mandated use) or cultural (dissemination of beliefs and values, arts, manners, fashions, courtly values, and so on). Indeed they often seem to have been secretly conducted. Hence, there are historiographical difficulties in uncovering and analysing relevant sources.
Several types of such ‘linguistic and cultural foreign policies’ need to be distinguished:
1. Policies that relied on non-state institutions spreading the language and culture of a State, often supported or subsidized by the government of that State (the 19th century Italian, British and German cases have been under-researched in this regard in comparison with the French case);
2. Language and cultural policies in the first period of colonisation (16th to 18th centuries) as well as in the 19thcentury, and in countries beyond the European powers’ direct control, whether in Europe or outside Europe (China, Japan, Siam, and so on);
3. Informal policies (more or less secretly conducted) such as Tsar Alexander I’s policy of sending to France, after 1815, various unofficial emissaries to influence French public opinion, or Bismarck’s, after 1871. Political historians have been interested by this kind of external activity, but historians of language policy and of language teaching have so far not studied these phonomena;
4. The spread of a language and culture outside their area of initial influence has been, in some cases, a late and unintended consequence of purely domestic policies. For example the expulsion of Protestants from France (16th to 18th centuries) played a big role in the “universalisation” of French in Europe, as did the expulsion of Catholic religious congregations from secular France in the early 20th century.
5. Finally, how did missionaries spread the European languages and cultures, and what kinds of interaction took place in the countries where they operated?
Programme
25 June 2015
13.15 – 14.30 Prof. dr. Willem Frijhoff, Erasmus University Rotterdam
Prof. dr. Konrad Schröder, University of Augsburg
External Linguistic Politics and Policies in the German-Speaking
Countries of Central Europe in the 18th and 19th Centuries
14.30 – 15.30 Prof. dr. Henri Besse, ENS de Lyon
Diffusion du français hors de France au XVIIIe siècle: résultat d’une
politique extérieure ou effet d’un certain “soft power”?
15.30 – 16.00 Coffee break
16.00 – 17.00 Prof. Lucien Bély, Paris-Sorbonne University
L’usage diplomatique de la langue française, instrument de la
puissance: mythe et réalités
17.00 – 18.00 Dr. Richard Smith, The University of Warwick
British language in education policy and cultural diplomacy in India:
from Colony to Commonwealth
26 June 2015
9.30 – 10.30 Prof. dr. Gilles Siouffi, Paris-Sorbonne University
Implications politique de l’idée de “génie de la langue” aux XVIIe et
XVIIIe siècles
10.30 – 10.45 Coffee break
10.45 – 11.45 Dr. Paolo Pierraccini, Rome
Politique linguistique et culturelle extérieure italienne en
Méditerranée. Les enjeux de la Société d’aide aux missionnaires
italiens
11.45 – 12.45 Prof. dr. Aline Gohard Radenkovitch, University of Fribourg,
Switzerland
Écoles internationales privées avec éducation plurilingue: réseau
ancien et fabrique des élites
12.45 – 14.00 Lunch
14.00 – 15.00 Prof. dr. Derek Offord, Bristol University
French as a polemical language for Russian writers in the first half
of the nineteenth century
15.00 – 16.00 Dr. Vladislav Rjeoutski, Deutsches Historisches Institut Moskau
Translation as a linguistic and cultural policy tool: the case of Russia,
middle of the 18th – early 19th centuries
16.00 – 16.30 Coffee break
16.30 – 17.30 Prof. dr. Nicola McLelland, The University of Nottingham
Soft and hard power? German language policy and the geographical,
political, cultural and scientific reach of German, 1700-1920
Conclusion, perspectives
Discussant: Dr. Pascale Rabault-Feuerhahn, ENS-Paris, CNRS
Conference venue
The conference will be held in the University Library conference room, the Vossius room, on the second floor of the University Library of Leiden University. The address is: Witte Singel 27, Leiden.