Jewish varieties of contemporary languages

[Mark.Mandel at LHSL.COM]

>From LINGUIST List #12-2951,
http://linguistlist.org/issues/12/12-2951.html#1

     ==================

Date: Sun, 25 Nov 2001 19:01:34 -0800 (PST)
From: Sarah Bunin Benor <sbenor at stanford.edu>
Subject: Call for papers: Jewish varieties of contemporary languages

Jews often have unique ways of speaking their local language.  Jewish
varieties of English, French, Spanish, Russian, and Turkish, for
example, include influences in lexicon, syntax, phonology, and
discourse from Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino, and/or Judeo-Arabic.  I am
coordinating a panel on this phenomenon for the first Annual Meeting
of the Israeli Association for the Study of Language and Society.

Questions to be addressed by this panel include:

- What can contemporary Jewish varieties of English, French, etc.,
tell us about the development of Jewish languages?
- What can they tell us about the communities that speak them?
- What role does ideology play in the development of these varieties?
- What social factors (e.g., religiosity, learnedness, gender,
interaction with non-Jews, generation since immigration) affect
variation within these varieties?
- Can these varieties be considered Jewish languages?

The conference will take place May 5-6, 2002, at Tel-Aviv University
in Israel.  The general theme of the conference is Language and
Identity in a Multicultural Society.  Conference papers may be
presented in Hebrew or English.

To submit a paper to this panel, please send a preliminary description
of your paper to Sarah Bunin Benor <sbenor at stanford.edu> by December
20, 2001.  Final abstracts will be due to the Association in February.

If you research the way Jews speak or write a contemporary language,
but cannot attend this conference, please contact me for information
on future events and to be added to the Jewish-Languages listserv.

Sarah Bunin Benor
Stanford University