34.3130, Calls: Young Speakers of Indigenous Languages

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-34-3130. Sun Oct 22 2023. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 34.3130, Calls: Young Speakers of Indigenous Languages

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Date: 13-Oct-2023
From: Ksenia Shagal [ksenia.shagal at lmu.de]
Subject: Young Speakers of Indigenous Languages


Full Title: Young speakers of indigenous languages

Date: 21-Aug-2024 - 24-Aug-2024
Location: Helsinki, Finland
Contact Person: Ksenia Shagal
Meeting Email: ksenia.shagal at lmu.de
Web Site:
https://societaslinguistica.eu/sle2024/list-of-workshop-proposals/

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics; Language Acquisition;
Language Documentation; Sociolinguistics; Typology
Subject Language(s): English (eng)

Call Deadline: 13-Nov-2023

Meeting Description:

According to recent estimates, over 40 percent of the world’s
languages currently face endangerment (see
https://endangeredlanguages.com/about/), especially indigenous
languages in different parts of the world. Without intervention,
approximately one language a month will stop being spoken in the next
40 years (Bromham et al. 2022). This typically happens when a language
is not being learnt by children as their first language, or it is
gradually being replaced by another language, which becomes the
dominant one for the younger generation. In some cases, as a result,
the language falls into almost complete dormancy after several
decades. In other cases, language communities and linguists undertake
revitalization efforts that encourage particularly the younger
speakers to reclaim the language and support the intergenerational
transmission.

Language revitalization, however, encompasses an important paradox.
While it aims at re-establishing the language in the speech community,
in doing so, it often causes at least partial changes in the structure
of the language. The language production of the people who have not
previously used a minority language will differ from the traditional
competence. In our workshop, we would like to focus on the
peculiarities that the speech of these people might show, and on the
methods that allow to best document, describe, and analyse their
speech.

In terms of structure, more is known about the speech of people losing
the minority language, the so-called ‘semi-speakers’ (Dorian 1982;
Grinevald & Bert 2011). However, the documentation and revitalization
of a language can start at varying stages of the language shift, and
often it deals primarily with bilingual speakers whose competence was
very different to begin with. Many language activists are ‘new
speakers’, who did not acquire the minority language from the family
and learn it intendedly. Importantly, the non-family transmission
among new speakers does not prevent them from acquiring fluency,
choosing the minority language as their preferred medium of daily
communication, or raising their children as bilingual (see, e.g.,
O’Rourke & Nandi 2019 on the Galician parents’ community).

Although there have been many works on ‘new speakers’ in recent years
(O’Rourke et al. 2015; Smith-Christmas et al. 2018), they deal
primarily with attitudes to language and other sociolinguistic issues
but have little to do with linguistic analysis (though see
Rodríguez-Ordóñez 2021). At the moment some features seem to be
properties of the speech of the young, for example non-standard word
order in Kalmyk (Baranova 2023), but it is possible that these
features may be consolidated in the future. It can lead to structural
changes in the minority language: for example, the revived Cornish has
a new form to express possession with abstract nouns that differs from
traditional Cornish (Arbes 2019).

Naturally, among young speakers of indigenous languages facing
endangerment children are a special case. The study of their
linguistic competence is interesting from a variety of aspects,
including the ways they speak, the strategies they use, and the ways
they acquire their language(s), but also the methods with which these
issues can be addressed. Since there is no widely accepted methodology
for gathering child speech and child-directed speech, many
documentation projects either completely exclude working with children
or include non-systematic occasional cases of child speech recordings
(see Eisenbeiss 2005; Hellwig & Jung 2020). On the other hand, the
speech of child speakers of indigenous languages and the
child-directed speech are extremely valuable, as they are among the
components that are vital for understanding the functioning of a
language, and the respective materials can be helpful for
revitalization efforts.

The complete call for papers will soon be available on the conference
website:
https://societaslinguistica.eu/sle2024/list-of-workshop-proposals/

The topics that we plan to discuss at the workshop include but are not
limited to the following:
- Structural peculiarities in the speech of young speakers of
indigenous languages, possibly in connection with the sociolinguistic
status of the language;
- The role of new speakers and language revitalization in language
change;
- The speech of child speakers of indigenous languages;
- The methodology for documenting the speech of young indigenous
speakers, child speech, and child-directed speech.

Preliminary abstracts of no more than 300 words (excluding references)
in .doc, .docx, .rtf or .odt format should be sent before November 10,
2023 Preliminary abstracts (300 words, as DOC file) should be sent to
the workshop organizers:

ksenia.shagal at lmu.de (Ksenia Shagal)
daria.zhornik at yandex.ru (Daria Zhornik)
vladakharada at gmail.com (Vlada Baranova)
arzhaanas at yahoo.com (Arzhaana Syuryun)

Any questions or suggestions regarding the workshop are very welcome
as well.



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