Celebrating Multilingualism in Aberdeen
‘Aberlangs City of Languages’ is an exciting new initiative created by our colleagues in Modern Languages, Linguistics, and the Elphinstone Institute. Aberdeen is the first ‘City of Languages’ in Scotland and this project is a collaboration with the British Council and its City of Languages scheme, which celebrates multilingualism in all its diversity, particularly through a focus on community, home, and heritage languages.
University alumna, Andra Lilburn (MLitt Ethnology and Folklore, 2023), has been hired as a research assistant to create exhibition materials and to conduct interviews with people from around Aberdeen about the role of languages in their everyday lives. So far she has interviewed speakers of Doric/North-East Scots, English, Polish, Yoruba, Norwegian, Swedish, Lithuanian, Spanish, Farsi, and British Sign Language, with a few more interviews planned in this pilot form of the project.
Learn more about the project at the Aberlangs stall during the Tall Ships festival at the University’s Discovery Zone on Sunday, 20 July and Tuesday, 22 July at the Castlegate.