29.3544, Calls: History of Linguistics, Sociolinguistics/New Zealand

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-29-3544. Fri Sep 14 2018. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 29.3544, Calls: History of Linguistics, Sociolinguistics/New Zealand

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Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2018 01:11:11
From: Alexander Maxwell [alexander.maxwell at vuw.ac.nz]
Subject: ''The Politics of Classifying Linguistic Varieties''

 
Full Title: "The Politics of Classifying Linguistic Varieties" 

Date: 13-Jul-2019 - 14-Jul-2019
Location: Wellington, New Zealand 
Contact Person: Alexander Maxwell
Meeting Email: alexander.maxwell at vuw.ac.nz
Web Site: https://www.victoria.ac.nz/hppi/centres/antipodean/our-activities#19-Linguistic-Classification 

Linguistic Field(s): History of Linguistics; Sociolinguistics 

Call Deadline: 15-Jun-2019 

Meeting Description:

With growing scholarly interest in the process of categorization, it is timely
to situate linguistic categorization within the broader history of ideas. 
This conference invites case studies in the politics of linguistic
classification that place linguistic debates within the broader context of
political struggles.  Selective reading of linguistic evidence can justify
fanciful theories: what theories have caught the fancy of scholars?  Since the
politics of linguistic categorization has many dimensions, its study can be
pursued on several levels.


Call for Papers:

First, heated debate has often taken place as to how a given variety relates
to others: the politics of cladistics and/or language trees is often hotly
contested.  Sumerian, for example, has inspired numerous claims, many of them
outlandish, regarding its relationship to other languages; some apparently
derive from the desire to claim a connection with the people who first
invented literacy.  During the nineteenth century, scholars debated whether
Hungarian was closer to Turkish or Finnish, with many Hungarian scholars
preferring to imagine their distant linguistic relatives as steppe-dwelling
conquerors on horseback, rather than forest-dwelling hunter-gatherers.  Claims
to linguistic relationship are often taken to imply claims to kinship, and
thus influence claims to indigeneity or distinctness.

A second type of debate has centered on the status of a given variety within a
language family. The quintessential debate of this type is the 'language vs.
dialect' controversy, where one group argues for the distinct languagehood of
a variety, while another denies it: the first Czechoslovak Republic insisted,
for example, that Slovak, now recognized as a separate language, was a dialect
of a 'Czechoslovak language', and many scholars agreed.  More exotic debates
exist: during the heyday of Panslavism, scholars debated whether Slovak was a
'dialect' of Slavic, or a 'sub-dialect' of the Czech dialect of the 'Slavic
language'.  Such debates often serve as proxies for debates about official
recognition: many states mandate certain rights and resources to minority
communities with distinct 'languages'; few states assign the same rights and
resources to minority 'dialects', 'idioms', 'accents', and so forth.  Efforts
to Romanize Chinese, Soviet language policy in Turkic central Asia, and
missionary Bantu linguistics all offer particularly rich fields for examining
the bestowal or withholding of prestigious linguistic status.

Finally, the debate may revolve around the applicability of descriptive
categories. While some linguists once emphasized the Dutch origins of
Afrikaans, in order to emphasize its European origins, recent scholars have
preferred to emphasize its creole aspects, in order to mirror the diversity of
post-Apartheid South Africa. We particularly invite investigations of
political claims to linguistic categories we have not anticipated. Is there,
for example, a politics of tonal language pride or agglutinative language
chauvinism?

Send a one-paragraph abstract of 80-100 words by 15 June 2019 to: Alexander
Maxwell: alexander.maxwell at vuw.ac.nz

The conference will take place at the Kelburn Campus of Victoria University in
Wellington, New Zealand. We regret that we have no funds to support travel
costs.




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