Language Contact: The State of the Art

Call for papers

Language Contact: The State of the Art

Organized by the Linguistic Association of Finland, Helsinki Area & Language Studies and the CROSSLING research network in
Helsinki, August 28–30, 2014

The registration form is now available at this address. The deadline for registration and payment of registration fee is August, 3rd 2014.

Registration to the symposium dinner:
The symposium dinner takes place on Friday evening at 7 p.m. The restaurant can fit as many as 60 guests. The dinner costs 30 €. If you wish to participate in the dinner we kindly ask you to register by August 20 by using the e-form available at this address.

Contact linguistics is a field of study which investigates various phenomena relating to the encounters between two or more languages or varieties and their speakers both in the past and the present. Its core is in historical linguistics, but it interfaces with several other fields of study, e.g. sociolinguistics, the study of bi- and multilingualism and the study of second language acquisition. In addition, its research topics intersect with psychology, sociology and anthropology, which are also interested in the processes and effects of cross-linguistic and cross-cultural encounters.

The goal of this symposium is to bring together linguists from these different fields of study to discuss current developments and challenges in language contact research, whether in the past or the present. We encourage sociolinguistic papers relating to the processes and effects of language contact and papers advancing the psycholinguistic study of cross-linguistic influence in multilingual individuals. Papers investigating contact-induced language change and variation are equally welcome. The contact settings that are explored in the papers may range, e.g. from societal to individual multilingualism, from second language acquisition to first language attrition, from marriage to migration, and from military conflicts to institutional multilingualism. In sum, the symposium aims to offer a thematically broad forum for scholars interested in combining and learning about the viewpoints of various fields in the study of the multifaceted phenomenon of language contact.

Possible topics for talks may relate to (but are not restricted to) the following:

The confirmed invited speakers of the symposium are:

The keynotes abstracts are available at this page.

Abstract submission

Anonymous abstracts of no more than 500 words, excluding data and references, should be submitted by March 2, 2014. They will be evaluated by the organizing committee and by the members of the scientific committee. Notifications of acceptance will be announced by April 13, 2014. The talks will be 30 minutes long: 20 min for presentation and 10 min for discussion. In addition, there will be a poster section.

Please submit your abstract by: http://linguistlist.org/easyabs/contact-2014.

For all correspondence concerning the symposium, please contact: contact-2014@helsinki.fi.

Last modified: Monday, 18-Aug-2014 22:11:50 EEST