Seminar in Empirical Microeconomics Detail en

Speaker:
Tanja Kupisch (Lund University), Mulugeta Tarekegne Tsegaye (Addis Ababa University)

This event is part of an event series „In_equality Colloquium“.

Ethiopia has a rich linguistic diversity, with over 70 languages spoken nationwide. Language policies have played a significant role in the country's history. Before 1991, Amharic was the only official language that marginalized non-Amharic speakers and contributed to ethnic resistance. Non-Amhara politicians often propagated the idea that Amharic speakers considered other languages as "undeveloped" and even claimed that these languages could metaphorically "break" radios. This narrative was used to unite various ethnolinguistic groups against Amharic dominance and Amhara political control, fueling deep-seated resentment and serving as a rallying point for resistance. After 1991, Ethiopia's federal system introduced a more inclusive multilingual policy, granting official status to all languages and ethnic groups. However, this shift increased competition for resources and autonomy, intensifying inter-ethnic rivalries. This presentation explores how Ethiopian language policies have contributed to the conflict and civil wars in the country through asserting power, resisting domination, and mobilizing for war and conflict.

Tanja Kupisch is a Professor of General Linguistics at Lund University. Until 2024, she has been Professor of Romance Linguistics at the University of Konstanz. She has also served as a Professor II at UiT, The Arctic University of Norway, since 2015. She is involved as a Principal Investigator in the cluster’s project “Ethnic Policies”. Together with Holger Hopp, she co-edits the journal Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism. Her research focuses on child and adult bilingualism and trilingualism, as well as bidialectalism, with a primary emphasis on syntax and phonology. Additionally, she is interested in the connections between language and policy.

Mulugeta Tarekegne Tsegaye is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philology at Addis Ababa University (AAU). He earned his PhD in Psycholinguistics from Leiden University in 2017, focusing on the psychological reality of gender and number during speech production in Konso, a Cushitic language of Ethiopia, which has an intriguing property of grammatical categories. His current research interests include cross-linguistic study of language production in understudied languages and field-based psycholinguistics, the implication of linguistic and psycholinguistic theories to speech-language therapy, and the interaction between literacy and language processing. In 2024, he was External Senior Fellow at the Cluster “The Politics of Inequality”.

Max Heermann will chair this colloquium. He is a postdoctoral researcher in the “CONSOLI – Conditions of International Solidarity” project at the Cluster of Excellence “The Politics of Inequality”. Previously, he was a team member of the Horizon 2020 project “EU3D – Differentiation, Dominance and Democracy”.