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:

• Concert
• Welcome
• “Waltzing Matilda” sung in Esperanto
• Esperanto
• Fitusa

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.

The Adelaide delegation at this year’s Esperanto conference. Indrani is in the front right.

When we meet new people we often ask straight away: where are you from? For many people this is an easy to answer question, but that’s not always the case.

I’ve just come back from the Australian Esperanto Conference in Melbourne and among many interesting talks one stood out for me in particular. In “Where are you from?” Indrani Beharry-Lall, a well-traveled Esperanto speaker who currently lives in Adelaide, spoke about her personal experience of people trying to put her in a box.

Indrani looks Indian, but she has never been to India, doesn’t speak any Indian language. In fact, she doesn’t really know much about India. She was born on the island of Aruba, a Dutch island off the coast of Venezuela. She spent her whole childhood there, with Dutch as her native language. Later she studied in the Netherlands and England, then lived in Guyana and Canada before finally moving to Australia.

However, this is too much complexity for most people. People like to be able to put new people they meet into a box: he is American, she is French, etc. When people see Indrani, they think it is easy to put her in a box: she looks Indian and so they expect her to be Indian. They can’t understand why a person who looks Indian is not Indian.

When someone asks Indrani where she comes from she says that she is from Aruba. People then look at her in a strange way “Aruba, what’s that?” She tries to explain where Aruba is, but most people lose interest, they have never heard about Aruba and don’t really want to know about it. People she meets are often frustrated because even after a number of questions they still can’t really put her in a box.

However, for Indrani it’s easy: she is a world citizen, who speaks several languages, including Esperanto. Indrani finished her illuminating talk with the advice to treat people as individuals and not to try to put them into a box.

The next World Esperanto conference will be held in July in Iceland.