struggles and conflicts and rifts that continue to shape, characterize, and in some ways destabilize that part of the world.

Wow.

Thank you for the comments on identity and formation.

We've already discussed my interest in language and language choice and language movements of the attempt to bring about linguistic or language policies in favor of your own group's language or in the search for separation from the state based upon linguistic differences.

So these language movements throughout the world, whether it be in Canada, Belgium, or in Nigeria, were always on my mind.

In the late 1980s, because of events in the Soviet Union, the 14 non-Russian republics began passing legislation that which I like to say as denying the Russian speakers in their country their historic rights to be monolingual.

They had to learn the Republican language, which meant Kazakh in Kazakhstan or Estonian in Estonia.

Are my assumptions and inferences, how correct are they, number one? And number two, what do you see as the ways in which the trajectory of your career and research were most profoundly impacted by your CASBIS fellowship year?