Variety across Subfields of Linguistics at AABS 2022: Interview with Inga Daraškienė

Mar 23, 2022

The AABS 2022 Conference will look toward the future to explore how the Baltic States will move forward into the next century, as a crossroads between Europe and Asia, Nordic and Eastern Europe. Similarly, the field of Baltic Studies is at a crossroads between new and old diaspora communities negotiating the implications of what it means to advance the study and research of the Baltic States into the next century. The conference will promote intersections of academic disciplines, scholarship, and community by focusing on the implications for the Baltic States in the future at the crossroads of different regions, cultures, religions, and historical perspectives. Please find more information here, and registration here.

Inga Daraškienė (MA, Vilnius University) is Visiting Lecturer of Lithuanian at University of Washington.

She is co-chair of the Literature and Linguistics division at AABS 2022. AABS met with her to discuss the division and what she’s looking forward to at the conference. The transcript of our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

AABS: To start, can you give us a brief overview of your division? ID: We have 45 proposals in our division. We have a large variety of people, with especially strong contingents from Latvia, Lithuania, and the United States, from many different institutions. AABS: What would you highlight as strengths of the panels in your division? ID: We had so many proposals, and a lot of variety: visions of literature, poetry, some writers – all sorts. Just to highlight a few, topics of the presentations vary from the language of expression in poetry to the dimensions of syncretic spirituality in prose, from the linguistic impoliteness and hate speech to language attrition, from contemporary film analysis to democratization of literature. Plenty of presentations analyze particular linguistic aspects and issues in the Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian, and Finnish languages. AABS: What are you excited for at the conference? ID: It will be the first conference for me at UW, so I’m excited for that! One of my interests is sociolinguistics, and I’m particularly looking forward to that panel, which has many engaging presentations.