27.4483, Confs: Sociolinguistics/UK

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LINGUIST List: Vol-27-4483. Thu Nov 03 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.4483, Confs: Sociolinguistics/UK

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Date: Thu, 03 Nov 2016 15:43:28
From: Christopher Lucas [cl39 at soas.ac.uk]
Subject: Small-scale Multilingualism and Linguistic Diversity

 
Small-scale Multilingualism and Linguistic Diversity 

Date: 02-Dec-2016 - 02-Dec-2016 
Location: London, United Kingdom 
Contact: Friederike Lüpke 
Contact Email: fl2 at soas.ac.uk 

Linguistic Field(s): Sociolinguistics 

Meeting Description: 

“Small-scale societies […] are economically self-sufficient, and proudly form
the center of their own social universe without needing to defer unduly to
more powerful outside groups. Their constructive fostering of variegation –
which holds social groupings to a small and manageable size, and keeps
outsiders at a suitable distance – is not offset by the need to align their
language with large numbers of other people in the world.” (Evans 2010: 14)

The social make up of small-scale multilingual situations, attested across the
globe and in all likelihood constituting “the primal human condition” (Evans
2010) that has sustained linguistic diversity for most of human history has
started to attract attention in the field of contact linguistics,
sociolinguistics, linguistic typology and multilingualism research.
Small-scale settings are those settings that pre-date colonialization of and
Western influx to the Americas, Oceania, Australia, Asia and Africa, and in
parts of these areas continue to thrive despite added layers of polyglossic
multilingualism, or that were exported in the wake of the translatlantic slave
trade and merged with indigenous practices. Detailed knowledge of all aspects
of these settings is crucial for advancing all fields concerned with the
interaction of languages in speakers’ brains and interactions and in
conventionalized practices in their societies. Since these language ecologies
are rapidly changing or vanishing, they deserve to be subject of detailed
investigations now.

This pre-conference session brings together speakers working on multilingual
settings in different geographical areas with the goal of comparing the social
exchange patterns that nurture multilingualism, the linguistic ideologies
underpinning them, patterns of multilingual language use and their interaction
with polyglossic planes of multilingualism in these constellations. The
methods and data needed to grasp the complexity of multilingual language use
will receive special attention.

Evans, Nicholas. 2010. Dying words: Endangered languages and what they have to
tell us. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
 






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