Professor Karina Vamling; Malmö University, has been awarded for her “Contribution to the promotion of the Georgian Language abroad”. From the ceremony at the Biltmore hotel, Tbilisi, on December 26, 2019, together with Ambassador Malkhaz Kakabadze (center; Georgia’s Ambasssador to Sweden) and Professor Merab Chukhua.
A roundtable discussion with translators of Georgian literature into Swedish and Swedish literature into Georgian was organized on March 7. Panel participants:
– Dr. Manana Kock Kobaidze, Senior lecturer in Georgian, Malmö University, and also translator and writer
– Dimitri Gogolashvili, based in Tbilisi and working as a translator in Swedish/Georgian
– Tamara Tchikovani, based in Sweden and working as a translator in Swedish/Georgian, specializing on children’s literature and Astrid Lindgren
– Kristian Carlsson, publisher (at publishing house Smockadoll) and writer, translator English/Swedish and also working on translations from Georgian into Swedish.
The discussion was moderted by Teresa Tomasevic, Malmö University
Prof. Kakhaber Loria, Tbilisi Sate University, has visited Malmö University within the Linnaeus-Palme exchange programme. Kakhaber Loria is professor in comparative literature and head of the Centre for Scandinavian Studies at Tbilisi State University, which is the only centre in the Caucasus that offers courses in Swedish and Norwegian languages and cultures.
Thank you for the lecture on central lines of development in the Georgian literature from earlier periods up to today – Hovedlinjer i den georgiske literaere prossesen fra de eldste tider til og med dagens literatur (the lecture was given in Norwegian).
Revaz Tchantouria, Section for Caucasus Studies (Malmö University) had meetings with Prof. Mamia Paghava (to the left), Head of Department of Kartvelian Studies at Batumi State University, and with Dr. Omar Memishishi (below, to the right), a prominent expert on Chan and also a native speaker of the language. Chan is closely related to Megrelian and is mainly spoken close to Batumi in the village of Sarpi on the border to Turkey. Among other things, Dr. Memishishi has collected and published a number of Chan texts.
Thank you to all presenters and participants at the conference “Linguistic Dominance and Inequality” for great papers and very stimulating discussions! The conference was hosted by the Department of Language and Linguistics, Malmö University, November 15-16, 2017.
Read the abstracts here.
Photos: Karina Vamling & Elnur Aliyev
Prof Karina Vamling, Caucasus Studies (Malmö University) had two meetings with colleagues at Ilia State University during her visit to Tbilisi.
Prof Nino Doborjginidze, Director of the Institute of Linguistic Studies and Dr. Irina Lobzhanidze showed the Georgian language corpus: http://corpora.iliauni.edu.ge
Digital humanities is a profile of the University, and this was also one of the topics discussed at the meeting with Prof. Oliver Reisner.
Professor Jens Erland Braarvig (right), Dept. of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages at Oslo University demonstrated his ongoing project Bibliotheca Polyglotta to Karina Vamling and Revaz Tchantouria, Caucasus Studies, Malmö University. The database includes a large number of parallel religious and other texts and can be searched and read in various ways.
The two ancient literary languages of the Caucasus, Armenian and Georgian, are of particular interest here, as many antique and medieval texts were translated into these languages and in some cases the originals were subsequently lost.
Old Armenian texts are already well represented in the database and the inclusion of Georgian texts is in the planning phase, which was one of the topics discussed during this informal meeting.
The database Bibliotheca Polyglotta is open and can be accessed at: https://www2.hf.uio.no/polyglotta/index.php?page=main
Photo to the right: From Dionysius Thrax: Grammar
The pilot project “Mobile language learning” is approaching its goal: developing a prototype of a language app for Beginners’ Swedish to be used by asylum seekers.
Nils Ehrenberg (Department of Media Technology and Product Development) and Maria Wiktorsson (Department of Language and Linguistics) at a recent project meeting at Niagara. 
Read more about the project: https://blogg.mah.se/sps/research/mobil-sprakinlarning/
Recently published: Endangered Languages of the Caucasus and Beyond, edited by Ramazan Korkmaz and Gürkan Doğan. Brill Publishing , 2016.
The volume is based on the 2014 International CUA Conference on Endangered Languages, organized by the Caucasus University Association (CUA) at Ardahan University, Turkrey. Prof. Karina Vamling, Malmö University, contributes with an article on Megrelian.
Read more about the publication:
http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/…/9789004328693;jse…
The recently published volume New Approaches to English Linguistics. Building Bridges (John Benjamins, 2016), includes the chapter “Building interdisciplinary bridges: MUCH: The Malmö University–Chalmers Corpus of Academic Writing as a Process”, with Maria Wiktorsson (Department of Language and Linguistics, Malmö University) as one of the authors. Co-authors are Anna Wärnsby, Asko Kauppinen, Andreas Eriksson, Eckhard Bick and Leif-Jöran Olsson.
Read the abstract:
https://benjamins.com/#catalog/books/slcs.177.08war/details