Why do Lithuanians never ring a bicycle bell? Some notes on Lithuanian day-to-day life culture

Next Tuesday, 23rd February, at 4 pm CET,  Dr Inga Hilbig, from Vilnius University, will tell us a bit about Lithuanians and their culture.

“Lithuanians were always famous for not being known at all” (Beresnevičius, 2001). In my lecture, I would like unwrap our small “Central Eastern Northern European Baltic” country for you a little bit. I will concentrate on some local people’s behaviour patterns, while trying to explain them by our patterns of thought and mentality. The most general aim is to spark your curiosity for more and encourage you to experience Lithuania and Lithuanians’ live personally one day!   

Inga Hilbig is a research assistant at the Department of Lithuanian Studies, Institute of Applied Linguistics, Vilnius University. Her research interests are sociolinguistics of childhood bilingualism, linguistic (im)politeness and cross-cultural communication. She teaches Lithuanian as a foreign language, offers a course “Lithuania and Lithuanians Today: Socio-Cultural Matters”, introductory lectures for exchange students, and is passionate when speaking about Lithuanian day-to-day life culture on various other occasions as well.

This is the second of a series of guest lectures (“Seven months, seven universities”) to be offered in the framework of the Action Line 4 of Arqus, Multilingual and Multicultural University (sub-line 4.8). These lectures focus on specific topics related to language and culture, and target mainly graduate and post-graduate students as well as early-stage researchers interested in those topics. The lectures are not intended to replace the actions foreseen for this sub-line (exchange of language assistants for partner universities) but rather to fill in the mobility gap existing due to the current pandemic situation.

The session will be broadcast on the Arqus YouTube channel.