Nicoline van Harskamp’s presentation explores how the use of English as a global link language affects everyday speech and professional language. Nicoline van Harskamp is an artist whose work considers acts of language and solidarity. Her installations and the performances she put into scene deal with the meaning and implications of language and speech. We use language without being aware of the implications though it mirrors and shapes ourselves and our society. Language is a cultural construct. Language is taught, following the conditions and politics of a certain time. In what way we can choose to adapt, resist and reform, is the underlying question in the work of Nicoline van Harskamp.

With globalization Global English has become the means of communication between people from different backgrounds. But the way we learn to speak English, Oxford English, is natively spoken by a very small amount of people. A lot of effort is spent on learning the correct accent and on deleting all traces of personal backgrounds while this is not necessary for communicating with each other. Wouldn’t it be more interesting and much more rich to create a language that respects our differences?

PDGN The work PDGN speculates about a future language in a post-capitalist society. The video presents a future in which the world order as we know it has been disbanded. Global trade has disappeared and the world population lives in a number of post-capitalist communities. These communities build their new living environments by recycling old buildings that have lost their function, helped by activists. Like the remains of buildings, words in this new community are recycled too into new constructions in which global English is mixed with local languages and linguistic attitudes. As part of the installation, another video work shows the scripting of PDGN. The dialogue was composed of the ‘Englishes’ that was actually spoken during group meetings. It was then fast-forwarded into a future language form through the application of ‘distorters’, strategies used by English speakers world-wide to make themselves understood. These were extracted from (over-) heard speech as well as existing linguistic research in the fields of creolization, language acquisition and constructed language.

Survey VU language Through a survey prepared with VU linguist Laura Rupp, Van Harskamp questions the working language and jargon within VU Amsterdam. The survey raises question about the of use normative language in our professional lives. The answers will become input for a group discussion in which participants can reflect on their our own relation with global English.
One of the statements : My language is a technology has been printed and mounted on the windows of the gallery, on the most common office paper - A4- but in a deviant letter type. The statement is readable from outside and as such it has become part of the public domain.

Nicoline van Harskamp