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Sydney Language Festival

By June 29, 2014No Comments2 min read2,524 views
Sydney Language Festival 2014

Sydney Language Festival 2014

The Sydney Language Festival will take place in Redfern on Saturday 5th July.

For details visit here.

What is a language festival?

A language festival is a cultural and educational event held in different countries of the world. The purpose of language festivals is to provide information about as many different languages of the world as possible to people who are interested in languages and show how great the variety of languages in the world is. Language festivals also try to demonstrate that all languages in the world are equally important and valuable and that there should be no “major” and “minor” languages. It is very unfair to judge a language by its number of speakers. The festival aims at encouraging people to learn foreign languages and not just the languages most widely spoken. Esperanto organisations initiated the idea of the festivals. They want to promote international communication on an equal footing and want to prevent major languages from swallowing up smaller ones.

Motto

Speak a regional language locally, a national language nationally, and an international language like Esperanto internationally.

History

The idea of the Language Festival originated with a US Esperanto speaker, Dennis Keefe, who initiated and organized the first Language Festival in 1995 in Tours, France. A report about the event was published in the international Esperanto magazine “Kontakto” and already the following year (1996) the first Russian Language Festival was held in Cheboksary. The biggest Language Festival so far was held at the University of Nanjing (China) in 2008 with 13,547 visitors and 72 languages or dialects presented.

The Sydney Language Festival is organised by the Sydney Language Festival Association, whose director Dmitry Lushnikov is a board member of the NSW Esperanto Federation.

Last year the Sydney language festival was held at Macquarie University and you can watch several videos from last year’s event:

I hope that many of you will attend this year’s festival and think about fairer ways to communicate internationally. If you can’t attend, it will be possible to watch parts of the festival online on Sydney’s IPTV Esperanto channel.

More information about Esperanto in Sydney is available here.

Nicole Else

Author Nicole Else

Nicole Else grew up in France and got a postgraduate diploma in translation. She is the author of a book for children called "Foreign languages: what they don’t often tell you." She now lives in Sydney and is the current vice-president of the NSW Esperanto Federation. Her website with more information about Esperanto is at www.worldlanguage.info She is very busy communicating and exchanging information in Esperanto with her many friends from Chile, Croatia, Japan, Hungary, etc. Recently she has translated over 10 stories into Esperanto for BookBox. Those animated stories can be watched on Youtube.

More posts by Nicole Else

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