Symposium Luxembourg Studies in Honour of Professor Gerald Newton
Language, Society and the Individual in a Multilingual Space
University of Sheffield, Wednesday 14 July 2010
This colloquium took place in honour of Professor Gerald Newton, who is retiring in September 2010 after 39 years of teaching at the University of Sheffield. The Pro Vice Chancellor of the Faculty of Arts, Professor Mike Braddick (Sheffield) opened the event with acknowledgements for Gerald Newton and welcomed the participants. Kristine Horner (Incoming Director of the Centre for Luxembourg Studies) and Roel Vismans (Sheffield) began proceedings by introducing the main themes of the symposium and provided a brief outline of the developments in Luxembourg Studies over the past few decades, with particular reference to the input from Gerald Newton in this field.
Anne Rohstock (Luxembourg) held the first presentation on "Writing for Identity: Publications on School History and National Discourse in Luxembourg". The publications mentioned in the title offer a national narrative on the meaning of "being Luxembourgish" and how this is depicted in descriptions of school history in Luxembourg. Three narratives in particular emerged which show the ways in which Luxembourg sought an identity over the past 200 years. The narratives generally portray a linear trend towards a continually improving school system, a pattern that also arises in other European countries.
Following this, Daniel Redinger (York) presented the results of research into "Language Attitudes and Code-Switching Behaviour in Luxembourg's Multilingual Education System". Using a magnitude continuum rather than the more traditional Likert scale to measure the informants' responses to statements about Luxembourgish, this study investigated the motivations behind code-switching of both secondary school students and their teachers during lessons. The subsequent analysis of the results reveals a wide range of interconnected factors that influence language behaviour.
Cedric Krummes (Bangor) investigated the Luxembourgish discourse marker ma by analysing data from two corpora, the Luxembourgish email word corpus and the Luxembourgish plays and film scripts corpus. The occurrence of ma in these corpora shows that it is found to play a variety of roles, more than the two functions (emphatic and exclamative) attributed to ma in earlier publications. Ma can additionally be expressive, an answer, a directive or a conjunction.
The final paper of the colloquium by Anne Franziskus (Luxembourg) was a discourse analytic and ethnographic study of three workplaces (IT company, distribution firm and a supermarket) with the aim of investigating the linguistic practices of the 'frontaliers', the cross-border workers who live outside of Luxembourg but commute into the country every day to work there. Although often monolingual, the frontaliers are faced with the linguistic diversity of their respective workplace. One particularly striking finding is that contrary to popular belief, these cross-border workers sometimes show passive and even active competence in Luxembourgish to varying degrees. The workers themselves were left to decide when they wished to let themselves be recorded in order to collect samples of naturally occuring language.
The colloquium drew to a close with a presentation of gifts to Gerald Newton on the occasion of his retirement.