Workshops by Professor Yaron Matras from University of Manchester

During three days on April 8-10, 2019, first-year students of the Master program "Language Policy in the Context of Ethnocultural Diversity" took part in a series of workshops by Professor Y. Matras (University of Manchester, UK)

Manchester University Professor, Yaron Matras, held series of workshops for the Master students. As part of these workshops, he offered students new optics to consider the main issues of sociolinguistics. The seminar participants departed from the usual study of state institutions of influence on the language and considered the formation of language policy through private interactions between people, NGOs, trans-national and international organizations.
 
As a leading specialist in the language of European Romani, Yaron Matras spoke about the sociolinguistic history of this language, which first codification took place in the 1920s in the USSR. Using the example of Roma language, he demonstrated how a new, but very large-scale and significant phenomenon works - multilingualism on the Internet, and the role of social networks in its formation.
 
One of the main projects of Prof. Matras is Multilingual Manchester. The application LinguaSnapp was developed especially for this project: it allows users to upload photos of road signs, announcements and posters written in various languages. By "connecting" these photos with points on the map, users put together the linguistic landscape of large modern cities. LinguaSnapp works in Manchester, Melbourne, Hamburg, Jerusalem and St. Petersburg. It is about to appear in Moscow, the largest European metropolitan area. Master programme's teachers had already started to conduct researches about Moscow language landscape.
 
In the final series of lectures and seminars Professor explained how Universities can interact with the cities where they are located and opened conversation about the current situation of urban multilingualism in the UK.