By Alim Hosein
[In a follow-up to his essay last week on the 2024 Joint Conference of the Society for Caribbean Linguistics and the Society for Pidgin Languages set for August 5 – 9 at the University of Guyana Turkeyen and Berbice Campuses and hosted by the Department of Language and Cultural Studies, Alim Hosein looks at the study of these languages and oral literature at UG and the further relevance of the conference.
Alim Hosein is a leading linguist at the UG and one of the administrators of the conference. He has served as Dean of the Faculty of Education and Humanities and Head of the Language and Cultural Studies Department, and has contributed several times to this column]
Some readers of last week’s article on the Conference on pidgin, creole and Indigenous languages being hosted by the Turkeyen and Berbice campuses (August 5-9, 2024) might have thought that the study of these languages is a new thing at the University of Guyana. This is far from the truth. The university has a long and honourable record in research, publication, advocacy and teaching of these languages, with courses and programmes in the Faculty of Education and Humanities which includes the Division of Humanities at the Berbice Campus. To give a better idea of how we contribute to sustaining, creating, understanding about, promoting and studying the native languages of Guyana, I outline below some of our work, with inputs from my colleagues at both campuses. As I hope you will see, these programmes create a good grounding at the undergraduate level in these languages.