On Thursday, September 28 and Friday, September 29, 2006, the Max Kade Institute, in conjunction with the Center for German and European Studies, will sponsor a conference on the topic “The German Language and Immigration in International Perspective.” This will take place in the Memorial Union on the UW–Madison campus. All presentations are free and open to the entire campus community and the general public.

This conference will explore the German language within the context of global migration, past and present. The empirical focus will be two-pronged. On the one hand, we will consider the social and linguistic consequences of the migration of German-speakers beyond Central Europe, especially to North America, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. On the other hand, we also examine the situation of migrants to Germany after the Second World War and also German unification, especially Turks and ethnic Germans from the East and former Soviet Union. The goal of the conference is to examine the parallels between history and the present to understand better the diverse sociolinguistic situation of German around the globe.

The foundation for “The German Language and Immigration in International Perspective” was laid in a collaborative seminar on the topic sponsored by the Center for German and European Studies, which took place during the spring of 2006. In that seminar, approximately fifty colleagues and students were linked live via video at four universities: the UW–Madison, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Free University of Berlin, and the Europa-Universität Viadrina in Frankfurt/Oder, Germany. An important goal of the conference is to link instruction with international scholarship and local outreach, which will afford the students from the four partner universities a unique educational opportunity.

The schedule for the two-day conference is given below. Two events of special interest include a keynote address on Thursday, Sept. 28, 7:30–9:00 p.m., by Prof. Jack Thiessen (U Winnipeg) on the topic of Mennonite Low German. The following evening, also from 7:30–9:00 p.m., Dr. Peter Wagener, Director of the German Language Archive at the Institute for the German Language in Mannheim, Germany, will coordinate an evening workshop and special outreach event titled “In Their Own Words: Migration and Identity in Interviews with German Dialect-Speakers.” This event will feature presentation and analysis of recordings made with German dialect-speakers from Eastern Europe and North America drawn from the German Language Archive and the MKI's North American German Dialect Archive. All materials will be translated into English.

Acknowledgments

The conference organizing committee gratefully acknowledges the following institutions for their generous support of this conference: Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany (Chicago); Free University of Berlin; Europa-Universität Viadrina (Frankfurt/Oder); Anonymous Fund, Center for German and European Studies, Department of German, and the Max Kade Institute (all from the UW–Madison); Max Kade Foundation (New York).

Organizing Committee

Rob Howell, Julie Larson-Guenette, Mark Louden, and Joe Salmons (UW–Madison); Paul Roberge (UNC–Chapel Hill); Carol W. Pfaff (John F. Kennedy Institute, Free University of Berlin); and Peter Rosenberg and Harald Weydt (Europa-Universität Viadrina, Frankfurt/Oder).

Schedule

Please check Today in the Union for room locations.

(All presenters from Berlin are affiliated with the Free University; those from Frankfurt/Oder are affiliated with the Europa-Universität Viadrina)

Thursday, September 28

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Friday, Sept. 29

Invited Speakers

Jack Thiessen is Professor Emeritus of German at the University of Winnipeg, where he taught from 1961 to 1988. He received his Ph.D. in Germanic Philology and Dialectology at the University of Marburg, Germany, in 1963. A native speaker of Mennonite Low German (Plautdietsch), he is the author of numerous publications in and on Mennonite Low German, including A Sackful of Plautdietsch, Low German, and English (1983) and the Mennonite Low German Dictionary (2003). He has also conducted extensive research on Yiddish, culminating in his 1974 monograph Yiddish in Canada . Since retiring from full-time teaching, he has continued to publish and lecture for scholarly and general audiences around the world. In Canada he has advised the national and provincial governments on cross-cultural affairs, including work related to culturally sensitive translation and interpretation in governmental and commercial projects.

Peter Wagener is a Research Scientist at the Institute for the German Language (Institut für Deutsche Sprache) in Mannheim, Germany, where he directs the German Language Archive (Deutsches Spracharchiv), the largest sound archive of spoken German in the world. His published research deals primarily with regional variation in German (especially Low German dialects), language change, and corpus linguistics. In 2001 he was Max Kade Visiting Professor in the Department of German at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.