Sun Hee Bae

What is the relationship between language and identity in societies that are multicultural, rapidly changing as a result of population flows, or seeking to differentiate themselves from other countries? Every country has a national language that encapsulates its unique history and culture. While many have more than one national language, others give pride of place to only one "national" language. Exploring interactions between languages spoken within countries (e.g., national, co-official, indigenous, minority, foreign languages) this course asks how individuals and societies preserve and promote linguistic identities while aiming to maintain social cohesion and national identity. Questions driving this inquiry include: What is the right balance between linguistic diversity and national unity? What are the challenges of multilingualism? Of global English? How should governments approach these issues from a policy standpoint? Can education systems handle the mandate to protect and promote linguistic identities? Students will reflect upon their own language trajectories and will research how a country or region of their choosing has tackled these challenges.

Prerequisite: Must be an NYU Abu Dhabi student and have not completed the Core: Colloquium requirement.

How does the language we speak influence our perception of the world? How do the languages we speak shape or reveal who we are? While many people take language for granted, this writing seminar will ask how spoken language differs from written communication. For example, do you expect this writing seminar to be about the LANGUAGES we speak, the languages WE speak, or the languages we SPEAK? While reading the previous interrogative sentence out loud, you would have been under the influence of the text in all caps and spoken with increased pitch, intensity, and/or duration of the accented word. But how might various cases of multilingualism--including sequential or simultaneous bilinguals, second-language or third-language learners, and foreign-language or heritage speakers--play into questions of language production? By looking first at mainstream media coverage of spoken language, then turning to scholarly debates about multilingualism, this writing seminar will explore how the study of language, especially spoken language, offers a key to an understanding of the self and the world, a world mediated through and organized by language.

Prerequisite: Must be a first-year Abu Dhabi student.

In this global era where one's ethnic background no longer coincides with nationality or race and oftentimes cannot be easily defined for many, one's linguistic identity becomes ever so complicated. Notably in the Gulf region, there is an environment of countless cases of bilingualism, multilingualism, and diglossia, that do not fit into the traditional classification of first or second language acquisition. How do we define a native speaker of a language? We will first explore the traditional way of defining the native and the non-native speakers of a language, including sequential or simultaneous bilinguals. Then, we will challenge the notions by turning our focus to the acquisition of non-traditional, linguistically marginalized, and oftentimes heterogeneous groups of non-native speakers of a language, including heritage language acquisition, which share some characteristics with first language acquisition and others with second language acquisition and sometimes neither. Through guided class discussions based on reading materials ranging from popular magazines to scholarly articles, students will be invited to make sense of the linguistic identities of people around them.

Prerequisite: Must be a first-year Abu Dhabi student.