Oct. 7 - Writing Identity: Language Choice and Biscriptality in Belarus and Bosnia and Herzegovina: Digital Practices, Public Spaces, and the Symbolic Meaning of Script

Join us on Wednesday, October 7 from 2-4 p.m. in the 2-20A Visualization Lab (Digital Scholarship Centre, Cameron Library) for "Writing Identity: Language Choice and Biscriptality in Belarus and Bosnia and Herzegovina: Digital Practices, Public Spaces, and the Symbolic Meaning of Script", the next lecture in our MLCS Research Conference Series which will be given by Dr. Maria Katarzyna Prenner, University of Graz (Austria).

Organized in partnership between the Department of MLCS and The Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies, the talk will examine how multilingualism and biscriptality interact with identity, medium, and communicative context in Belarus and Bosnia and Herzegovina. In Belarus, it focuses on the asymmetrical relationship between Belarusian and Russian, the coexistence of competing orthographic traditions, and the symbolic role of Latinica in digital discourse as a marker of cultural affiliation, differentiation, and opposition. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the analysis considers how Latinica and Kyrillica are distributed across institutional communication, public space, online discourse, and individual language use. The comparison shows that script choice is strongly shaped by communicative setting and by the distinction between institutional top-down practices and individual bottom-up usage. At the same time, language choice and script choice do not necessarily coincide, but may index different forms of belonging and social positioning. The talk therefore approaches multilingualism and biscriptality as dynamic semiotic resources through which identity is negotiated across different media and social spaces.

Light refreshments will follow.

Register here