Bio

Abhimanyu Sharma is an Assistant Professor in German Linguistics at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. He graduated with a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge in 2019. His dissertation was on a comparative analysis of language policies in the European Union and India. Prior to joining Cambridge, he completed an MA in German Linguistics at the University of Bern and another in Medieval German Literature at the University of Bremen. He has received several scholarships, including Cambridge International Scholarship and Swiss Excellence Scholarship, and been invited for Fellowships at Pennsylvania and Prague in the past. He is currently working on developing his dissertation into a monograph under the tentative title “Reconceptualising Power. Lessons from Comparative Language Policy Research”. In addition to comparative language policy, he has worked on language rights in Luxembourg and India, and the role of English as a facilitator of social mobility in India.

Project

During my stay at Faber, I plan to work on language rights in Northern Ireland. The devolution of powers in the UK has benefitted two of its autochthonous languages, namely Welsh and Scottish Gaelic, through the creation of separate language acts dedicated to them. However, there is no such act for Irish in the UK even though it is an equally important indigenous language. In light of this discrepancy, I will investigate the language rights of Irish language speakers in Northern Ireland and examine the possibility of an ‘Irish Language Act’ in the near future.