Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Kultur-, Sozial- und Bildungswissenschaftliche Fakultät - Institut für Asien- und Afrikawissenschaften

Wikibooks release as part of the Off Festival:

“Multilingual Dictionary: Living Together in a Refugee Camp”

ON SATURDAY, MARCH 25, 2023, the “Multilingual Dictionary: Living Together in a Refugee Camp” will be presented as part of the Off-Festival event and made available to the public as Wikibooks. The dictionary documents the everyday life and shared language of refugees in the camps of Moria and Mavrovouni in Greece, enabling them to live together multilingually.

Dr. Nagehan Uskan, RePLITO visiting scholar and lecturer at the department for Gender and Media Studies for the South Asian Region (GAMS) of the Institute for Asian and African Studies (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) implemented the project in Lesvos together with Hadis Yakubi, Shahram Ahmadi and Mehdi Darif. She says: “The dictionary documents in an extraordinary and very direct way the multilingual everyday life of refugees and their enormous competence to live together peacefully despite all adversities. Since the first presentation of the dictionary, we noticed that this vocabulary is used far beyond Lesvos by refugees to communicate. To collect and document more terms, we are using the tools of Wikipedia and inviting people to contribute their own words.”

The dictionary was originally created and first presented to the public by migrants and activists on the island of Lesvos on International Mother Language Day 2022 under the motto “Living Together in Multilingual Societies”. It is supported by the collaborative research project Beyond Social Cohesion - Global Repertoires of Living Together (RePLITO).

RePLITO takes marginalized and neglected repertoires of living together as a starting point to rethink social cohesion from a transregional perspective. These repertoires and associated knowledge archives of coexistence will be further negotiated and transformed in the context of dynamic interactions beyond nation-states and regions. RePLITO is funded by the Berlin University Alliance (2021-2024) in the framework of the Excellence Strategy of the German federal and state governments

For further inquiries, please contact Prof. Nadja-Christina Schneider by email: nadja-christina.schneider@hu-berlin.de