Innovation in Language Learning

On a painted door in the Palazzo Vecchio, Stefano Bonsignori labelled the eastern Adriatic Schiavonia, the Balkans—the land of the Slavs—in the 1580s, in the same Italian in which sclavus had, through that coast's slave markets, long since become "slave." Florence already contains the entire argument: we do not simply use a language; languages make and unmake us. Drawing on linguistics, history, and a trilingual life across English, Serbian, and Italian, the talk reframes self-translation not as the transfer of meaning between containers, but as the assembly of a second self, capable of receiving it. It moves from the linguistic ideologies in every tongue, through Joshua Fishman's insight that identity survives only as it crosses the kitchen table, to "refugees without geography"—communities that lose a homeland without leaving the village, as borders, constitutions, and official selves migrate across the people who stay. It introduces transparent digraphia—one language in two interchangeable scripts and two distinct politics—and the category-shaped hole into which the in-between, twice-displaced self keeps falling: present everywhere, counted nowhere. For a conference on language innovation the stakes are practical. If language constitutes identity, then machine translation, standardisation, and identity-as-metadata risk optimising away the selves they claim to serve. The talk closes with a design brief—preserve productive friction, honour script and variety, build for intergenerational transmission, make room for the in-between—and a pedagogy that treats a new language not as a code to be cracked but as a self to be inhabited.