Dr. Sheila Embleton is Distinguished Research Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics, Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, at York University, Toronto, Canada. Her academic background and graduate work is in both mathematics and linguistics, and her areas of scholarly interest are historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, dialectology, mathematical/statistical methods in linguistics, onomastics, Peircean semiotics, and women and language; she has published in all of these areas. Her current research is mostly on dialectometry (statistical methods applied to dialect study), with particular application to British, Finnish and Romanian dialects

Dr. Embleton served as Vice-President Academic & Provost at York from July 2000 to June 2009, having previously been Associate Dean of the Faculty of Arts from July 1994 to June 2000. She served as Chair of the Ontario Council of Academic Vice-Presidents from 2004-2008 and of the National Vice-Presidents Academic Council from 2006-2007. She is a Past-President of the Canadian Society for the Study of Names, the American Name Society, the Linguistics Association of Canada and the US (LACUS), and the International Quantitative Linguistics Association. She is the President of the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute, of the International Council of Onomastic Sciences, and of the Canadian Friends of Finland Education Foundation, as well as Executive Director of LACUS. She is a member of the Boards of the Canadian Bureau for International Education and MITACS (Mathematics of Information Technology and Complex Systems). She is associate editor, review editor, or member of the editorial board of numerous journals and book series. She has won several awards for her academic contributions, and is a Knight First Class of the Order of the White Rose of Finland, a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA), London, and an Invited Member of Suomaleisen kirjallisuuden seura (Finnish Literature Society).

Email: embleton@yorku.ca

“Congratulations to all the faculty, staff, students, and alumni of the University of Latvia as you celebrate your university’s 90^th anniversary! I hope you are proud of your many achievements. It has been my pleasure to be able to support your development over the past few years, ever since York University became your partner. This exchange has enabled several people to visit, in each direction, and I know it has enriched the experience of our faculty members immensely. I wish you every success for the future. May the next 90 years bring even greater success”

Canada as a Small Country

My title is designed to catch your attention, as the reaction is typically one of surprise. Canada is surely a large country, one of the very biggest. We all know that – the second largest land mass of any country in the world; our two official languages, English and French, are widely spoken in the world; we belong both to the Commonwealth and la francophonie, as well as the G8 (G20, etc.); we are a member of NATO, OECD, OAS, etc.; we have the world’s longest coastline; we share the world’s longest “unprotected” land-border; we have 9% of the world’s freshwater; and we have huge natural and agricultural resources. When I say I am from Canada, I never have to explain exactly where that is.

But we are also small: our population, 32 million, is only 0.5% of the world’s population, even if much larger than Latvia, and one tenth of the US; much of our land is very sparsely inhabited; we are also made of many much smaller communities (43 ethnic origins of at least 100,000 people in our “mosaic”); our 10 provinces and 3 territories are very autonomous (in many ways I am one of 11.4 million Ontarians, rather than one of 32 million Canadians); and the proverbial degrees of separation are far fewer than six.

From the point of view of education and the university in a globalizing world, we provide excellent higher education in English and French, are very attractive for political and social reasons, and have a long tradition and contemporary reality of advanced technology and many inventions (details to be provided). But our post-secondary “branding” abroad is seriously damaged by education being a provincial responsibility and hence fragmented, as well as much competition among ourselves. Thus functionally, Canada is a small country, not a large one, when it comes to the role we play on the global educational stage.