31.2820, Calls: Anthro Ling, Hist Ling, Typology/Greece

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-31-2820. Thu Sep 17 2020. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 31.2820, Calls: Anthro Ling, Hist Ling, Typology/Greece

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Date: Thu, 17 Sep 2020 21:20:09
From: Matthias Urban [matthias.urban at uni-tuebingen.de]
Subject: Mountain Linguistics

 
Full Title: Mountain Linguistics 

Date: 31-Aug-2021 - 03-Sep-2021
Location: Athens, Greece 
Contact Person: Matthias Urban
Meeting Email: matthias.urban at uni-tuebingen.de
Web Site: http://www.sle2021.eu/downloads/workshops/Mountain%20linguistics.pdf 

Linguistic Field(s): Anthropological Linguistics; Historical Linguistics; Typology 

Call Deadline: 10-Nov-2020 

Meeting Description:

For some mountain regions of the world, these are rather well described. For
instance, linguistic diversity in the Caucasus exists on the basis of
“asymmetrical vertical bilingualism:” there is a social and economic division
between transhumant pastoralist highlanders and lowlanders, who are
agriculturalists and traders. Since markets and winter pastures are in the
lowlands, highlanders typically learn lowland languages, but lowlanders do not
learn highland languages (Nichols 2004, 2013, cf. Dobrushina 2013).
Similarsocioeconomic opposition between highlanders and lowlanders, with
linguistic dimensions, are also in evidence in other mountain regions of the
world (Scott 2009 for mainland Southeast Asia, Urban forthcoming for the
Central Andes). However, for other mountain areas of the world, detailed
sociolinguistic and anthropological descriptions of the conditions on which
language use is predicated are thin on the ground. 

Accumulated over long time, such patterns of use yield particular –often
discontinuous and dense–distributions of languages and language families in
geographical space, with rich linguistic diversity in many (e.g. the Caucasus
and the Himalayas, cf. Comrie 2008, Turin 2017), but not all mountain areas
(e.g. the Altai). In addition, in some parts of the world, linguistic
diversity tends to build up at the foots of mountain areas more than in the
mountains themselves (e.g. MacEachern 2003). Perhaps for this reason,
large-scale quantitative comparative studies (Axelsen & Manrubia 2014, Hua et
al. 2019) reach contradictory results on the relationship between mountain
environments and linguistic
diversity. 

Furthermore, it is conventional wisdom that languages spoken in peripheral,
inaccessible areas such as mountains tend towards conservativism (e.g. Mańczak
1988) and the maintenance or even further accruement of complex structures
(Baechler 2016, Nichols 2013, 2015, 2016, Bentz 2018). This is often
attributed to sociolinguistic isolation and the resulting inward-looking
“esoteric” orientation of speech communities. Since the precise
characteristics of language geography and language typology in mountain areas
therefore also depend on prevailing local sociolinguistic and socioeconomic
conditions, rich sociolinguistic work is vital for modelling and understanding
language distributions
and structures.

Finally, more direct influences of the environment on languages structure at
high altitudes have been proposed as well (Everett 2013).

In sum, there is a rich set of factors that potentially interact in bringing
about geographical and
structural linguistic distributions in mountain areas. Understanding these
dynamics systemically is as challenging as exciting.

Research communities who specialize on different mountain regions of the world
are usually not in interaction with one another on these topics. The result is
that broader commonalities as well as differences between different
high-altitude areas of the world remain poorly understood, to the detriment of
higher-level theorizing. Also, researchers engaged in large-scale quantitative
work on language geography and diversity are not usually in touch with any of
these communities, but could benefit from the on-ground experience of
descriptive and historical linguists in fine-tuning models and explanatory
frameworks for their findings.


Call for Papers: 

This workshop aims to provide a forum for exchange, interaction and knowledge
exchange between these different communities, with the overarching aim to gain
a better general understanding of the linguistics of mountain areas in all its
interdependent aspects. 

Contributions addressing the following topics are welcome, but the list is not
exhaustive:
 - how does the mountain environment and socioeconomic organization in
mountain areas
influence patterns of bi- and multilingualism and language attitudes?
 - how does the integration of mountain areas into national states and
economies influence
or disrupt traditional patterns of language use?
 - how do such patterns of usage and attitude influence language geography in
the long run
in diachronic terms? What are the dynamics of language spread or spread of
innovations
within languages/dialect (e.g. uphill, downhill, or transversal), and how does
this related to
language use?
 - what broader patterns of language distribution in mountains are there, and
how are they
generated? E.g., is there a correlation between language boundaries and
boundaries of
ecozones? Are languages spoken in discontinuous enclaves, and how can we
account for this
diachronically?
 - how can overall levels of linguistic diversity/language density and
different mountain areas
of the world be best explained? What drives high or low diversity in
mountains, and what
drives high or low diversity in the surrounding lowlands?
 - how can such detailed sociolinguistic or anthropological descriptions of
language ecologies
in mountain areas most fruitfully inform or refine quantitative modelling of
language
diversity and language density?
 - can claims as to special structural-typological characteristics of
languages spoken at high
altitudes be corroborated on a worldwide comparative basis, and are there more
such
characteristics that have not yet been discussed widely? If so, are the
characteristics best
accounted for by social/sociolinguistic or directly environmental factors, and
how do we
decide between these explanatory options methodologically?
 - how is the notion “mountain” or “mountain area”, which is left deliberately
vague here,
best defined for linguistic purposes?
 - In addition to papers addressing these questions, contributions that survey
mountain areas
on a general level with regard to language use, language geography, and
language history,
especially areas where these are not widely discussed in print (e.g. the
Altai, the Hindukush),
are highly welcome, too.

As per the SLE procedures for workshop organization, I invite short abstracts
of max. 300 words (excluding references) related to the questions outlined
above. These should be submitted to matthias.urban at uni-tuebingen, mentioning
in the abstract author’s names and affiliations. The deadline for this initial
submission of abstracts to the workshop convener is November 10, 2020.
Notification of preliminary acceptance of abstracts will be given by the
convener by November 20, and notification of the acceptance of the workshop as
a whole will be given in mid-December. In case of a positive decision, authors
will be invited to submit full 500-word abstracts by January 15, 2021. Like
general session papers, these will be assessed by the SLE scientific
committee, too.




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