26 Jan UNESCO International Mother Language Day
Viola Miglio, Björn Birnir, Astradur Eysteinsson, Ander Caballero (UCSB, University of Iceland, Basque Government)
Monday, January 26 / 1:00 PM
HSSB McCune Room
This event is an instantiation of UNESCO’s International Mother Language Day, which officially takes place every year on February 21st commemorating the anniversary of the Bengali language movement riots in Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) on that day in 1952, when Dhaka university students were killed for demonstrating against the imposition of Urdu as the official language on a mostly Bengali-speaking population.
UCSB organizes a symposium on language rights and linguistic minorities sponsored by the IHC, Barandiaran Chair for Basque Studies, and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese every year around that date – this year it will be on January 26th, from 1 to 3 pm. Speakers will be addressing the importance/sustainability of national languages with fewer than one million speakers as vehicles for academic and non-academic work in a globalized world.
Speakers are: Viola Miglio, Associate Professor of linguistics and holder of the Barandiaran Endowed Chair of Basque Studies at UCSB; Björn Birninr, Professor of Mathematics and Director of the Center for Complex & Nonlinear Science, UCSB; Ástráður Eysteinsson, Professor of Comparative Literature and Dean of the School of Humanities at the University of Iceland; and Ander Caballero, Representative of the Basque Government in New York.
Sponsored by IHC, Spanish and Portuguese, Dept. of Linguistics, Barandiaran Chair of Basque Studies, Etxepare Basque Institute
Website: spanport.ucsb.edu