I am enjoying participating in a Mediterranean Seminar Workshop on The Multilingual Mediterranean this weekend at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

“The Mediterranean is not only the crossroads among continents, cultures, peoples, and religions; it is also, as Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Karla Mallette have put it, ‘a sea of languages.’ From the use of Romance rhyme words in the zajals of twelfth-century Iberia to the playful code-switching in twenty-first-century North African hip hop, writers and artists in the Mediterranean region have often mixed different languages to create new artistic forms, to provoke and perplex, and to test the borders of different identity categories. Multilingualism has also helped to forge networks of trade, diplomacy, exchange across the Mediterranean region, leading to the emergence of new koines, linguae francae, and pidgins. Indeed, we could say that multilingualism and different forms of multilingual creativity are constants of Mediterranean history, rather than sporadic exceptions to a monolingual norm or rule.

“The workshop’s aim is to bring together scholars working on the history of multilingualism in the Mediterranean region. Our theme, ‘the multilingual Mediterranean,’ encompasses such topics as language contact zones, multilingual art forms and media, and the relationships between language and identity. Our hope is to attract contributions from scholars working on several geographical contexts and historical periods in the Mediterranean world. We also hope to encourage contributions from a diverse range of disciplinary perspectives. To that end, we invite potential participants to consider our theme broadly, and even metaphorically, in order to engage with different forms of multilingualism —including the interplay and intersection of visual, musical, and material ‘languages’ in the Mediterranean world.

The Multilingual Mediterranean program is available at the Mediterranean Seminar.