The 11th International conference of "CercleS" will take place in Helsinki, on 2-4 September 2010.

The call for papers as well as further information is available at the conference website.

The DYLAN coordinator, Prof. Anne-Claude Berthoud, participates to "Oh my god!", a Lausanne based exhibition commemorating the Darwin Year 2009, with the film "Le language et l'évolution" by David Monti.

The exhibition at Palais Rumine in Lausanne will be open until Sep 2010, for more information please refer to the exhibition website. Prof. Berthoud's film may also be downloaded here.

An expert Seminar on the “Added Value of Multilingualism and Multilingual Education”Call for Papers will take place on 3 – 4 June 2010, Leeuwarden/Ljouwert, Fryslân, The Netherlands.

The seminar will be organised by the Mercator Research Centre and the Basque Government. The project “Added value of multilingualism and multilingual education” will be the central focus of the seminar. This multi-annual project is carried out by the Mercator Research Centre in collaboration with the University of the Basque Country. It is a comparative study of the Basque Autonomous Community and the province of Fryslân. It aims at:

1) analyzing bilingualism and multilingualism as a resource for the individual and society
2) analyzing bilingualism and multilingualism as a resource at school

Abstracts should be send to mhanenburg@fryske-akademy.nl by Monday 1st March 2010.

More information can be found on the event website.

We would like to congratulate Professor Rita Franceschini of Libera Università di Bolzano / Freie Universität Bozen on contributing a chapter on "The genesis and development of research in multilingualism" to the book "The Exploration of Multilingualism", edited by Larissa Aronin (University of Haifa) and Britta Hufeisen (Danmarks Tekniske Universitet). The chapter draws on the work of the European Commission's High Level Group on Multilingualism, of which Professor Franceschini was a member.

The 4th International Seminar Series "Language and Migration" will take place in Fribourg (Switzerland) on the 28-29 January 2010. More information regarding conference, accommodation and travel arrangements are available on this website.

"Vor überfüllten Rängen hat Georges Lüdi, DYLAN deputy coordinator und Leiter des Baseler DYLAN Teams, am 10 Dezember 2009 seine abwechslungsreiche und amüsante Abschiedsvorlesung zum Thema „Le plurilinguisme comme source d’innovation et de créativité“ gegeben. Wir wünschen einen rundum gelungenen, kreativen und produktiven (Un-)Ruhestand!"

An EU-funded team of researchers is targeting the development of a vitality barometer for European languages. This barometer would offer Europeans a reliable method to determine which languages are in danger of becoming extinct. The ELDIA ('European language diversity for all') project has received EUR 2.7 million in EU support.

The researchers from 8 universities in 6 EU Member States are gearing up to launch investigations of 14 Finno-Ugric languages. 'These languages are particularly well suited to the investigations as they cover the entire spectrum of the different minority languages, starting with autochthonous languages such as Meänkieli in Sweden right through to the language of new migrant workers such as Estonians in Germany,' said project coordinator Professor Anneli Sarhimaa of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany.

More information are available on the project's website.

La coordinatrice du Projet, Anne-Claude Berthoud a été interviewé par le quotidien suisse "Le Temps". Cet article - au titre "diversité des langues, un label de qualité de la pensée" - peut être téléchargé directement ici (en format PDF).

Dylan first deputy Coordinator and WP4 leader François Grin was interviewed by the Guardian Weekly about the emergence of English as a new cross-region language in a multilingual nation such as Switzerland. The full article is available on the Guardian Weekly website.

Integrating results from different disciplines is often a challenge. Within the University of Helsinki research task of the DYLAN project, the researchers in the different fields of linguistics and policy research have faced this problem in a very concrete way. In our practical study relating to the outcomes of language policies in higher education we have experienced that sufficient background knowledge in a field that is not your own requires teamwork: linguists and political scientists need to work side by side in order to gain theoretical and methodological advances in both disciplines. While linguists can analyze language dynamics in great detail by using for instance conversation analysis or sociopragmatics, political scientists can analyze the content and output of policies by for instance different types of evaluation analysis and policy analysis. Both, however, seem to have a blind spot. On the one hand, linguists tend to disregard the macro-level of why a specific policy decision was made and how it related to the myriad of other policies. On the other hand, political scientists tend to disregard the micro-level of what the actual output of a policy entails and what possible covert messages might exist in the policy formulation process. The multidisciplinary nature of the DYLAN project has highlighted issues relating to how language relates to society and how society relates to language by enhancing a much needed dialogue across the two disciplines. This dialogue was presented and enacted by Jan-Ola Östman and Sebastian Godenhjelm at the conference Svenskan i Finland (The Swedish language in Finland) in Joensuu, Finland, 15-16 October 2009.