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Faculty of Arts and HumanitiesLingCologne

Seminars at the University of Cologne in the summer semester 2021

As part of the LingCologne conference, two seminars will be offered to students of the University of Cologne, dealing with the topic of multilingualism. The seminars are aimed at Bachelor students and will be held in German.

Mehrsprachigkeit (Multilingualism), taught by Giuseppina Di Bartolo

The seminar deals with the topic of multilingualism, which is considered a fundamental phenomenon for the analysis of both ancient and modern societies. After an introduction to multilingualism with an explanation of the main concepts linked to it (e.g. diglossia, language change), the topic will be deepened from a sociolinguistic, a cognitive, and a diachronic or historical-comparative perspective, respectively. Relevant examples will be discussed within the seminar.
The seminar is linked to the LingCologne2021 Multilingualism conference, which is part of the course.

Schlüsselqualifikation: Linguistische Grundlagen für mehrsprachiges Recht (Key qualification: Linguistic foundations for multilingual law), taught by Johanna Mattissen-Piaszenski

Lawmaking as well as legal interpretation are subject to the rules of language, the non-observance of which may lead to unintended legal consequences. This is all the more true for multilingual law, such as EU or international law, which, despite translations into structurally different languages and despite different legal traditions, must meet all mutilateral linguistic requirements both in grammatical form and content.

Linguistics as a scientific discipline deals with the analysis and description of languages and human linguistic faculty. The seminar offers an introduction to the basics of linguistics and works out which areas are relevant to jurisprudence and in what way. Special attention will be paid to the similarities and differences between the European languages in which the multilingually binding legal acts exist, which are supposed to establish equal law in all EU member states.

Awareness of general linguistic pitfalls, the interaction of legal terminology on the national and supranational level with the terminology of the field to be regulated, and of convergences, divergences, and pseudo-divergences in multilingual law leads to more informed confidence in legal analysis.