Dear SSJ Forum members,

Earlier this year Japanese language teaching was stopped from being shut down at NTNU(Norwegian University for Science and Technology) in Trondheim, Norway, much due to the kind support of the subscribers to SSJ-Forum to the online petition posted by Paul Midford. Once again languages are threatened in Scandinavia, this time at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. Last year among others the teaching of Dutch, Polish, Czech and Bulgarian was cancelled. On Wednesday, June 20, the Board of the Faculty of Humanities will take a decision on a proposal that will stop the teaching of Greek, Italian, Old Church Slavonic and Russian, but also to move Arabic, Latin and Chinese to a “larger environment”. The latter will most likely lead to these languages being not more than a decoration to some other subjects. As a teacher and researcher of Japanese language and culture I am horrified at the short-sightedness of this proposal.
If Chinese will be reduced to being somebody’s sidekick, it is not hard to guess that next in turn will be Japanese. The plans we had of extensive cooperation between Chinese and Japanese will now come to naught. The importance of languages must be emphasized, both teaching and research. Therefore I would truly appreciate the support of all of you in signing the online petition below.

http://namninsamling.se/index.php?sida=2&nid=6686

It is in Swedish so for those of you who do not read Swedish here are some explanations:

Namn: Name

Stad/Ort: City

Verifieringskod: Verification code.

Ange här: write here

Visa mitt namn på denna sida också! Show my name on this page as well.

Skicka: Send

Yours sincerely,

Martin Nordeborg
Assistant Professor, Department of Languages and Literatures University of Gothenburg