Join us at 7pm on Thursday 3 October as we celebrate the Week van het Nederlands 2024 (Dutch Language Week) with a talk (in English) by renowned Dutch language expert, journalist, and author, Gaston Dorren.
Gaston Dorren is known around the world for his entertaining and enlightening books on languages and language-learning. He has also regularly contributed to Onze Taal, a popular Dutch linguistics magazine. A linguistic virtuoso (the Dutch would say he has a talenknobbel, or “language lump”), he speaks Dutch, Limburgish, English, German and Spanish, and reads French, Afrikaans, Frisian, Portuguese, Italian, Catalan, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Luxembourgish and Esperanto.
Over the past decade, Dorren has achieved international success as an author, with Lingo: A Language Spotter’s Guide to Europe (2014) being published in 12 different languages and Babel: Around The World in Twenty Languages (2018) in 15. He first wrote Babel in English and then wrote the Dutch version himself. The book was awarded the Dutch Language Book Prize 2019 by Onze Taal and the Belgian-Dutch cultural association ANV.
Dorren’s most recent work is Zeven Talen in Zeven Dagen: Een Avonturenboek (Seven Languages in Seven Days: An Adventure Book), a language guide for Dutch speakers demonstrating how easy – and fun! – it is to learn how to read seven European languages (Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish and Frisian) building on your rusty school knowledge of English, French and German and revealing the remarkable, and indeed, growing similarities between many of the languages of our continent.
Dorren blogs irregularly about language on his website languagewriter.com (English) / https://taaljournalist.blog/ (Dutch).
About this event: “We All Speak European”
When languages are similar, we tend to explain it in terms of relatedness: English and Dutch being Germanic, French and Spanish being Romance, et cetera. In this talk, Gaston Dorren will focus on another rich source of similarities: shared history. Most of Europe has participated in the same linguistic and other cultural processes for well over a thousand years, resulting in a unique Eurosphere. In terms of grammar, lexicon, idioms, script and even phonology, its languages reflect a common heritage.
As a result, most Europeans have it relatively easy when studying or translating each other’s languages. They often do not fully appreciate that until they try their hand at a more remote language, e.g. from East or South Asia. Gaston himself felt the contrast when he tried to learn first Vietnamese, then Polish.
This talk was presented earlier this year at the European Parliament’s Jean Monnet House in Bazoches and at the Mundolingua museum in Paris. It will be 45 to 50 minutes long, including some interactive elements, followed by a Q&A.
More info and tickets: www.dutchcentre.com