The Road Less Travelled

The view from Victoria College

Last weekend, we hosted The Road Less Travelled: An international conference on heritage languages and heritage language acquisition at Victoria College. This interdisciplinary conference was collaboratively organized by members of our department (Ana Pérez-Leroux and Keren Rice) the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature (Christina Kramer), and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese (Olivia Marasco, Joanne Markle LaMontagne, and Stephen Rupp). Several members of these, and other, departments also served as moderators or general volunteers during the conference.

Researchers from McGill discuss the language situation in Montreal

This conference was unique in using the pecha kucha format for presentations, where presenters showed twenty slides, speaking about each for twenty seconds, for a total of six minutes and forty seconds. It was amazing to see just how much information could be conveyed in this condensed format! Presenters used their twenty-second slides effectively to present their research quite creatively to the audience of anthropologists, language educators, psycholinguists, sociolinguistics, theoretical linguists, undergraduate students, and others.
In addition to the pecha kucha sessions, on the first day of the conference, several undergraduate students from our university shared their personal stories of heritage language acquisition and maintenance and the complexities of their identities as heritage language speakers.

Poster presentations in the Alumni Hall of Victoria College

Poster presentations took place over lunch on the second day of the conference, and throughout the conference, there were  a number of excellent plenary talks. In line with the interdisciplinary nature of the conference, the invited speakers shared their different perspectives at looking at heritage languages and the importance of further refining and developing the investigation of heritage languages.

Thank you to the organizers, volunteers, and attendees for helping make this conference a success!

Attendees enjoying the catered lunch

Photo credits: Eugenia Suh