Media Library

LANGUAGE ARCHIPELAGO I

FORMER-YU – Our language(s)

A conversation among neighbours

The question as to whether Bosnian, Montenegrin, Croatian and Serbian are ultimately just variants of a ‘common’, pluricentric language or languages in their own right is one that can probably only be answered in political terms. What is plain is that everyone in the region understands each other’s languages 99 % of the time. Everyone agrees on that.

LANGUAGE ARCHIPELAGO II

Lust for Languages and Language War in Spain

Spain’s multilingualism is a result of its history and is lived in the densely-populated regions of Catalonia and the Basque Country as well as in Galicia, and has been increasingly instrumentalised for political purposes.

LANGUAGE ARCHIPELAGO III

Minorities, languages and representations in Romania

Together with Radu Vancu, Claudiu Komartin and Teodora Coman, Romanian poets who are also citizen activists prominent for their political writing, the Romanian-German writer Ernest Wichner looks into the question of the state of minority languages (including Ukrainian, Hungarian, Romani and Russian) in Romania before and after 1990 in view of the conservative nationalist tendencies in politics and society.

LANGUAGE ARCHIPELAGO IV

Caspian Sea – Is that even Europe still?

Neo-Orientalism and queer Islamic Poetry

Is Usbekistan Europe? Of course it is – if we define Europe as a cultural space and take the Poetic School of Fergana into consideration. Does Islamic-influenced feminist poetry belong to the cultural space of Europe? Sure, if we take the poetry of the Russian-Azerbaijani poet Egana Djabbarova as an example.

LANGUAGE ARCHIPELAGO V

Poetry and self-perception in the Baltic

Where does Europe’s cultural space start and where does it end, if you are looking eastwards from Berlin? In Narva? Yekaterinburg? Vladivostok? What is the cultural self-perception in the north-eastern Baltic?