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Celebrating Multilingual York: The OurLOTE project Becky Muradás-Taylor
Event details
What languages, other than English, are used in the City of York? And how can we create a more positive and vibrant multilingual environment?
Find out from Becky Muradás-Taylor, Professor of Languages and Linguistics at the University of Leeds.
Becky will introduce The OurLOTE Project, a collaborative social media project celebrating languages other than English used in the City of York.
The event will include a screening of a multilingual film, with English subtitles, and you will have the opportunity to join in a discussion about language use in our city.
The OurLOTE Project
The OurLOTE Project is a social media project celebrating languages other than English (LOTE). It is funded by the British Association for Applied Linguistics and the Universities of Leeds and York St John. Over the past few months, people who live in, or have connections to, the City of York have taken part by recording a short video of themselves in a language other than English. People were encouraged to submit in any language: oral, signed, written, modern, ancient, and constructed, however confident or fluent they were. And it could be their first, second (or third, etc.!) language.
The project aims to show the world how multilingual York is and to encourage people to use languages other than English. We rarely see people in government, media or business using languages other than English. Doing so can lead to difficult emotions or experiences - feeling embarrassed, feeling that your language isn’t good enough, or, worse, facing discrimination. The OurLOTE Project aims to change that.
About the speaker
Becky Muradás-Taylor is Professor of Languages and Linguistics at the University of Leeds. She speaks fluent but rusty Japanese (she wrote her PhD thesis in Japanese) and is getting better at Spanish. Two project coordinators work with her on the OurLOTE Project: Alfie Ball and Nooran Rahman, both students at York St John University.
Partners
