The Importance of Digital Technologies in Family Language and Literacy Practices: Lessons from Covid-19 

This talk looks at the role of digital technologies in family language policy, with specific reference to the maintenance and revitalisation of minoritised languages. Digital technologies are transforming language and literacy education in the school context. During Covid-19 pandemic, we witnessed their impact on family language and literacy practices too. In this presentation, I will report some findings from a study of how bilingual families in the UK deal with technologies during the pandemic in their children’s learning, in family interaction, and in maintaining their family language policy, and what lessons can be drawn from it. I will also explore how school-based teaching and learning should respond to the technological transformation and how the affordances of digital technologies could be exploited further to support the learning, maintenance and revitalisation of minoritised languages. 

Language Revitalisation and Multilingualism: the New Literacies of Our Century 

Efforts to reinvigorate the endangered languages of the world require activity ‘in vitro’ and ‘in vivo’, meaning in the conceptual and theoretical space of imagining new kinds of communication and in the actual, concrete lived experience of speakers’ lives.  The complexity inherent in these ambitions is such that the theorisation of language policy and planning has been radically critiqued and re-imagined, at times abandoned and discarded.  However, today there is a new air of optimism about the prospects of language revitalisation and of the theoretical and practical tasks of language policy design, implementation, review and evaluation.  This keynote will survey the key phases of language policy and planning for minority language revitalisation and utilise the metaphor of the literacy of the 21st century to claim that multilingualism is central to contemporary modernity.  I will argue that language professionals need to develop greater levels of ‘policy literacy’ and incorporate serious treatment of the practicalities of implementation in the designs and plans of language policy writing. Bi and multilingual education, in step with community based language revitalisation, are the key instruments of building this new design. 

凡走過必留下痕跡：談客語的歷史與地理研究

Footprints Shows Where One Has Been: on the Historical Linguistics and Geolinguistics of Hakka

語言存在於時空之中，由人群使用而展現其生命力。語言會隨時間、空間及人群互動而發生變化，而語言的變化會透過各種方式留下可供追循的痕跡。本演講透過深入淺出的客語例子，展示語言演變如何在語音、詞彙、語法中留下線索，研究者又如何透過語言學中各領域的知識，從共時的語言現象中，尋找歷時的演變軌跡。語言變化也會在地理空間上展現其特色，本演講將指出地理語言學可以作為語言多樣性與語言標準化衝突的解方，是客語研究中亟待找回的一塊拼圖。

Language exists in space and time and is brought to life by the people who use it. Language changes with time, geography, and human contact. These changes can be tracked in a variety of ways. This talk will show how language evolution leaves traces in phonology, vocabulary, and grammar, and how linguistic knowledge from different fields can be used to infer diachronic evolution from synchronic phenomena of Hakka. Linguistic change is also shaped by geographical space. This talk will show how geolinguistics can help resolve the tension between linguistic standardization and diversity, and how it is a crucial piece of the puzzle to be found in Hakka research.