Plenary Speakers
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Joshua R. BrownMurder most multilingual: At the crossroads of forensic linguistics & historical sociolinguistics
Through the 1682 Great Law of Pennsylvania, William Penn mandated that all court proceedings were to be held in English. In practice, though, some Pennsylvanians were not particularly proficient in English. A great number of rural Pennsylvanians, descendants of between 60-100,000 immigrants from the Rhineland and Palatinate regions of central Europe, spoke Pennsylvania Dutch both alongside and to the exclusion of English. When Duke de La Rochefoucauld travelled to the “Dutch Country” in the late eighteenth century, he ridiculed the commonwealth’s justice system, because no one could understand English and, by extension, the legal proceedings that occurred. Thus, the multilingualism of Pennsylvania’s residents was a critical piece of their social and legal realities. In this presentation, I will share three nineteenth century murder trials from Pennsylvania’s “Dutch Country” in which language complicated the administration of justice. These complications show that language in multilingual contexts can be negotiated, nonnegotiable, or not negotiated. They also show that historic multilingualism is significantly relevant to the present, though it is often overlooked in contemporary studies of multilingual societies. Joshua R. Brown is professor of German and linguistics, as well as affiliate faculty in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. He is primarily interested in heritage languages, language maintenance and shift, and historical sociolinguistics. His recent publications include "Pennsylvania Germans: An Interpretive Encyclopedia" with Simon Bronner and a special issue of the Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics on heritage language ego-documents. His forthcoming edited volume "The Verticalization Model of Language Shift: The Great Change in American Communities" will appear through Oxford University Press. |
Jackson CrawfordGetting it Right While Getting it Out There: Germanic Cultural Studies in the 21st Century
The subject matter of our field has never loomed larger in the public eye than it does today. Yet expertise in this field is nearly absent in the places that the public looks for it--which are chiefly online--and in that absence, bad information abounds. With the benefit of about seven years of experience in trying to educate using the internet, my limited successes and even my serious failures point out a path of public engagement that neither cedes that battlefield to miscreants nor requires compromising one's academic integrity. If you're distressed about the fantasies about everything from runes to language acquisition that sweep away the popular imagination, I want to encourage you to put better information where people can find it in their Google searches. By making the right choices in tone, forum, depth, and focus, you can help clear up some very muddy waters and do a good turn for more people than you probably realize. In different ways, it's ultimately the public that pays all our salaries, and their interest in our field is at its peak. Let the experts be the ones who explain it to them, not the cranks and wannabe Vikings. Jackson Crawford is Resident Scholar at The Center of the American West, at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is a pioneer in using new technologies to communicate scholarly expertise to the interested public, using his Youtube channel and website to reach hundreds of thousands of people with accurate, up-to-date information about old Germanic languages and the literature and mythology preserved therein. His published translations include The Poetic Edda (2015), The Saga of the Volsungs (2017), the dual-language edition The Wanderer’s Hávamál (2019), and Two Sagas of Mythical Heroes: Hervor and Heidrek and Hrólf Kraki and His Champions (2021). |
Conference Program
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