On Monday morning, 9 December 2024, more than 500 linguists and students of linguistics met in the prestigious President Hotel, the former secret Central Committee hotel, in the centre of Moscow. This large crowd gathered for the opening of the First Eurasian Congress of Linguists. Another 150 people watched the ceremony online. The congress was organized on the occasion of the 300th anniversary of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Both content leadership and scientific leadership were therefore in the hands of Dr. Andrey Kibrik, director of the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
The motto of the congress was ‘Linguistics without borders’ and that goal was more than achieved with a total of more than 200 speakers from abroad (some online) and more than 450 speakers from all over Russia. There were huge delegations from China and India, scholars from Brazil, Nigeria, Australia, Pakistan, Iran and Israel but also a few from the USA and Western Europe and Scandinavia. All together more than 45 nationalities were represented. Frieda Steurs, Secretary-General of CIPL, addressed the audience during the opening session online. Camiel Hamans, Associate Secretary-General of CIPL, took part in the conference.
The aim of the congress was to serve as a platform for discussing issues in linguistics related to all language groups of Eurasia in particular, but also of languages and language groups of other regions worldwide.
A second objective of the conference was to introduce young scholars to the latest advances in the language sciences in all their diversity. Apart from the scholarly program the organizers set up a General Audience Program aimed at attracting young people to scientific research and popularizing linguistic knowledge.
The program, which included 8 plenary lectures by renowned Russian and international scholars, 18 sections, 22 round tables, 3 poster sessions, of which one was online, and 6 public lectures, ran from language diversity, sociolinguistics, endangered languages of Eurasia to Caucasian and Siberian languages, multimodality and computational linguistics in relation to AI.
Many of the lectures were given in English with simultaneous translation into Russian.
Quite a few Russian papers were translated into English. Plenary lectures were also translated into Russian Sign Language and International Sign Language.
Foreign guests from the Russian Academy also gave special, very well-attended, guest lectures to students from the various Moscow universities.
In addition to the motto, the congress also presented two key aphorisms: the first from the Russian poet Gavrila Derzhavin (1743-1816), which says ‘Language is the key to all knowledge and nature’; the second from the English medieval philosopher and polymath Roger Bacon (c. 1219-c.1292):‘Knowledge of languages is the doorway to wisdom’. One may wish for these wise and true words to be heard more widely and more clearly in these difficult times.
Camiel Hamans, Associate Secretary-General CIPL
