Our Member of the Month of December must be the youngest recipient ever. She is just 18 and she is the Public Relation Responsible of AEGEE-Bakı. We chose her because she was in charge of the “Love has no language” project, in the framework of AEGEE-Bakı’s Language Working Group.

The AEGEEan: Who is Shams?
Shams: I am Shams Mammadli, an 18 years old girl studying my third year of university in the World Economy Department. At the university we have a charity club and I’m involved in its projects. Usually in the mornings I have my classes, then I visit AEGEE-Bakı’s office. But in my leisure time I like walking, singing, meeting friends, reading and writing, making wishes and plans, watching movies and animations and so on.

When and why did joined AEGEE-Baki?
I joined AEGEE-Bakı in April of last year. I was looking for an organisation in order to be more active and a friend of mine, who is the current president of AEGEE-Bakı, suggested to become a member. At first, it was just an interesting place, yet soon I felt the famous AEGEE spirit and quickly it became a part of my life.

You are the Member of the Month of December. How does it feel?
Actually, I was not expecting this. When friends started to tag me in a Facebook post, I just couldn’t understand what was going on. And when I realized it, I jumped for joy. It felt good!

You are in the Language Working Group (LWG) of AEGEE-Baki and coordinated the “Love has no language” project. What is the project about?
When I first became the LWG coordinator, I was thinking about something new and beneficial. So suddenly I had an idea about this project. As I have always believed in peace in love and its power, I came up with this idea. We worked for four months with our WG and visited different institutions for negotiations, luckily, most of them were supportive and we made it. The main point of our project was to demonstrate that we don’t actually need any words to share our love. We didn’t communicate by words with people having down syndrome, children with hearing disabilities or rescued street animals. All we did was just share our love and care and this made all sides happy. This way we all felt that we were doing exactly the right thing since we couldn’t find words to express our feelings after the visits. That’s how the final video was made.

You organised a sign language course. How important is the inclusion?
Before coming up with this idea, I had seen some social videos of this kind and always wanted to learn some sign language in order to understand the hearing and speech impaired people and their silence. We all knew that some people try to ignore or exclude them from society. But actually we didn’t do it for the ignorant, we did it for the hearing and speech impaired ones to show them we care. So we found trainers and they taught us a lot of things. It was not just the alphabet and common words in sign language, but also the feelings, lifestyle and standpoints of people communicating through this language. So, after the trainings, we made a final video and by sign language we told that we hear them.

What are your future projects in AEGEE?
As a member I want to make a project transferring complicated facts into simple and interesting videos with the help of our interested members. So that it will be beneficial for many people. Nonetheless, now I’m the new PR responsible in AEGEE-Bakı and most of my future plans are about this field. Actually it’s quite a different task, yet I’m trying to do my best for my local.

Last but not least, let’s do a small game. Explain you and your personality using the letters that compose your name.
Since we have one letter for ‘sh’ in our language, I’ll take it as one. Shams means Sun, so…

SHining
Ambitious
Merry
Smiling

 
Written by Erika Bettin, AEGEE-Verona

The aim of promoting good relations among nationalities, fighting stereotypes and prejudices has always been a worthy one. It is even more now, in a world that is becoming smaller every year. The members of the Language Working Group (LWG) are proud to be part of this work. You will probably ask how the LWG does that, since its primary concern in AEGEE (as the name suggests) is just languages. Actually, the group’s work goes far beyond that.

AEGEE-Praha is fighting against stereotypes

Last year, from October to December, the European Day of Languages (EDL) was held in thirteen AEGEE locals. The Council of Europe celebrates this day in September but since many students still have holidays at that time, a new date was agreed upon which was November 20th. Still, locals could choose any other close date suitable. In fact, some of the locals held several events, like AEGEE-Voronezh and AEGEE-Baki. It looks like it has become a tradition to celebrate this day over weeks (the same happened last year), and as long as the tradition is likely to go into 2015, even more events can be expected this year.

Many locals, supporting the cause of bringing nations together, chose to hold intercultural events, where many languages were spoken and people from different cultures came closer to each other. For example, AEGEE-Catania and AEGEE-Coruña invited participants from other countries to share their food, as well as languages. Native languages and cultures of the participants were also the central point of other antennae’s events, like those by AEGEE-Voronezh, AEGEE-Praha, AEGEE-Napoli, AEGEE-Oviedo, AEGEE-Beograd, AEGEE-Baki and AEGEE-Aachen.

At AEGEE-Kyiv’s event the participants talked about stereotypes and the way you should behave in their countries, AEGEE-Baki, AEGEE-Oviedo and AEGEE-Napoli discussed about language issues and played language games, while AEGEE-Zagreb focused on the French language. In total, the number of nationalities taking part in the events was more than twenty-five. Still, other locals, like AEGEE-Pisa and AEGEE-Minsk opted for the issue of endangered languages. They looked into the problem and tried to find solutions in open discussions. AEGEE-Pisa also used the opportunity to present AEGEE to a broad audience. Still, the EDL is not only about serious talks! Pubs, clubs and movie nights were perfect endings to many of the locals’ events.

AEGEE-Pisa repeated the workshop about endangered languages held at Agora-Cagliari

Antennae later posted photos and descriptions of their events in the EDL Facebook group, which was the place to ask for help during the organisation of the events and to share the success after. The group also helped to enlarge the pool of ideas, ready to be used at any other event, as well as it helped to establish a closer community and to show the readiness of the LWG members to help with language issues and language-related events.

If after reading this article you still do not know what the LWG is about, or want to learn more, head to the website or Facebook page. These enthusiastic people – language-lovers! – are willing to welcome you in their community. They constantly work on a number of projects which await YOUR participation!

Written by Inna Mezentseva, AEGEE-Minsk

Have you ever wondered how many languages are spoken throughout Europe? Do you enjoy listening to other foreign languages despite the fact that you don’t understand a word of them? Have you ever wanted to be involved in a linguistic tandem? If you answered yes to one of these questions, you would have enjoyed one of the events of the European Day of Languages (EDL). EDL is present in AEGEE since 2001, this year events were organised by 17 different AEGEE antennae thoughout our network.

“Learn 6 languages in 90 minutes” was the activity which was organized by AEGEE-Kaiserslautern.

This edition of the EDL had more than 22 languages involved, including 3 non-European languages, and more than 700 participants from 26 nationalities. If all these activities had been held in one place, it would have definitely been impossible to choose only one to attend: basic language presentations were carried out by AEGEE-Beograd, AEGEE-Voronezh and others; movies in original version were projected in AEGEE-Padova and AEGEE-Moskva; the typical APErasmus from AEGEE-Bergamo concluded with a native speaking video; language and cultural stereotype quizzes were held in AEGEE-Roma and AEGEE-Milano; typical food and drinks from each country plus linguistic tandems were organized by AEGEE-Las Palmas and AEGEE-A Coruña; “Learn 6 languages in 90 minutes” was the activity from AEGEE-Kaiserlautern; AEGEE-Torino decided to sing in different languages, and finally AEGEE-Kraków organized a city game with native speakers. So you see, it would have been difficult, to pick just one interesting workshop…

AEGEE-Voronezh organized some cultural and linguistic presentations.

It is great to see that the European Day of Languages has had this huge affluence of participants; above all, these events are a way of making people more aware of the linguistic stereotypes –and consequently the cultural ones– in order to break them and make people more tolerant towards each other. Looking back at all theese events, we can conclude that the 2013 edition of the EDL was a success.

We, the LWG, would like to thank locals who have joined EDL 2013 –you’ve been keeping this activity alive!– and we would like to encourage the whole Network to participate in the new edition in Autumn 2014.

If you are wondering why AEGEE celebrates the EDL in November instead of September – which is when the Council of Europe celebrates it – we’ll tell you: as many students are still having their holidays in September, AEGEE decided to change the dates to make sure that everybody could attend the activities. Even so, every local chooses their own dates and makes their activities last even for a week!

Then, what can you do if having read all this you realize that you are as passionate as we are about languages? You can get to know the Language Working Group! We can bring you in touch with people who are also crazily in love with this topic. So don’t hesitate; cheer up and join us!

Written by Núria Fenoll Domingo, AEGEE-Tarragona & Language Working Group member

It is hard to believe that already a week passed since the wonderful closure of the Autumn Agora Budapest. But all these great memories are still alive in our hearts and we are still so vigorously inspired and highly motivated to contribute to AEGEE goals and activities after participating in progress meetings, workshops, and simply talking to active and experienced AEGEE members. My colleagues from EDL team and I – now known as a new born Language Working Group (LWG) – hope fervently that our workshop, “EUROBabylon: Linguistic similarities and differences inEurope”, was also a drop of inspiration in your cup of AEGEE ideas.

Even though the workshop was scheduled for the last session on the last day of the Agora, we had a surprisingly high number of participants so there was no free place in the room at all! In total, there were 36 AEGEEans from 15 different countries, therefore we were able to cover a significant amount of European languages. And we would like to thank each and every one of you because, despite of the exhausting schedule at the Agora, we had a good dynamic workshop and a lot of fun together!

Besides presenting some facts about languages and language families in Europe, within the group we were trying to understand why we all speak different languages. Also we tried to find out the difference between “dialect” and “language” which is a point of numerous discussions and debates for many scientists nowadays. Based on our own experience we stated several influencing facts in order to define the boundary between these two sides: a possibility to get an education in a “language”, presence of publications and documentation in a “language”, defined and written grammar rules and people’s attitude towards the “language” that is often a historical matter.

As an experiment, in order to feel differences and similarities between languages in Europe, participants were given a small task that contained a text in a language they did not learn before and suggested to read it, guess the language and possible meaning of the text. The tasks were distributed according to the mother tongue of the participants in the way that around 30% received a text in the language from the same group as their mother tongue and the other 70% received a text from a different language group. 11 out of 18 formed groups guessed the language right, however only some could understand the meaning. Among hard-to-guess languages were Dutch, Hungarian, Ukrainian, Slovakian and Basque.

At the workshop we proved once again that Europe is a continent of huge linguistic diversity, a richness we should cherish and promote, despite of the fact it causes huge communication challenges. Learning foreign languages is very important for successful communication and integration as a result. And we as Language Working Group try to motivate young people to respect each of existing dialects and learn foreign languages because all of them are definitely worth it!

The LWG would like to thank Agora Budapest for giving us a trust to be a Working Group! We believe that AEGEE can make a difference and contribute to language learning and language policy in Europe!

Written by Nadia Shulga (Schneider), AEGEE-Berlin & member of the Language Working Group