International Conference
11th and 12th November, University of Bern, Switzerland
We invite PhD students and researchers who work in the fields of contact linguistics and language ideologies to submit an abstract for the conference 'Communication in the Country of Babel: Language Ideological Debates on Contact Varieties'. Our aim is to generate and discuss new ideas and advance our knowledge about the interface between the study of contact varieties and the interdisciplinary field of language ideologies.
The number of participants will be limited to 20, in order to facilitate a tightly structured conference that affords sufficient time for discussion.
Call for Abstracts: Language Ideological Debates and Contact Varieties (pdf, 96KB)
Language Ideologies and Contact Varieties
Language ideologies, or “cultural conceptions of the nature, form and purpose of language” (Gal and Woolard, 2001), often clash in metalinguistic debates, be it public or academic ones. Notions of how expedient, authentic, legitimate or even pure a given variety is – and ought to be – are particularly divergent when new (contact-induced) varieties evolve.
The conference, held at the University of Bern on 11th and 12th November 2015, aims at bringing together researchers who work in the fields of language ideologies and contact linguistics, in order to discuss recent findings in language development and spread, language attitudes and policies as well as trends in linguistic research on language ideological debates (Blommaert, 1999). There will be presentations by internationally renowned scholars, but we also want to give young researchers the opportunity to introduce their own projects.
