In collaboration with the UNESCO Francophone Chair in Language Planning
linguistic planning at the University of Mons, and as part of their interdisciplinary
interdisciplinary research project Languages in the Mediterranean, the flexSem (Fonètica, Lexicologia i Semàntica) flexSem (Fonètica, Lexicologia i Semàntica) research group at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, the Barcelona branch of CIPA (Centre International de Phonétique Appliquée), and the TTN (Théories, Textes, Numérique) team at the Université Paris 13 are organising first Study Day on this topic, on 6 May 2019, at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB).
Since the dawn of time, the Mediterranean region has been a privileged place for
for exchanges and encounters between cultures. This strong and constant tradition of contact has never wavered and has resulted in a rich shared intercultural heritage (tangible and intangible). heritage (both tangible and intangible). The Mediterranean area has seen the birth of the true lingua franca, the language of the Mediterranean ports, which included words from Arabic, Berber, Catalan, Spanish, French, Greek, Italian, Maltese Occitan, Turkish… This Mare Nostrum echoes with ‘travelling words’ that tell us about the history, the culture and the people of the Mediterranean.
history, art, cuisine, religion, navigation, trade, life and death; life and death, peace and war. Words rooted in the languages of the riparian countries and can be studied from the historical legal, commercial, religious, literary and, of course, linguistic.
linguistic.
Today, the Mediterranean basin is still the scene of constant exchanges and
relations that are often friendly, sometimes conflictual, but which have forged
shared and inescapable communicative links. These communicative links
established and manifested primarily through contact between the languages of the
countries. And if languages are both a sign of identity and an opening to otherness
to otherness, among these languages, French currently plays the role of an intangible bridge between the northern and southern shores.
From this perspective, French in its different diasystematic varieties
diasystematic varieties (including French as a foreign language) will be the central focus of first in a series of study days designed to bring together phoneticians, semanticists bring together phoneticians, semanticists, lexicologists, lexicographers and translators, (as well as historians, anthropologists, sociologists and, why not?
doctors, lawyers, journalists, etc.) to discuss the issue of languages in the
the Mediterranean area. The theme of this first workshop will be:
‘French as an international language (France, Spain, Tunisia)’.