CFP for Languages in contact-- second call

[Janina Fenigsen]

Below follows a call for papers for a panel Paul Garrett and I are organizing for  the upcoming AAA  Annual Meetings, November 16-20, 2011 in Montreal.

Please submit your proposals to Janina Fenigsen,  fenigsen at uwm.edu by February 28.  We intend to apply for an invited session status, the deadline for which is March 15.  

Forty Years After: Tidemarks, Legacies and Futures of Research on Contact Languages 

This year marks forty years since the publication of Pidginization and Creolization of Languages.  Edited by Dell Hymes, the volume has become foundational for research on language contact and creolization. Furthermore, in forshadowing our intellectual engagements with the shifting realities of today, many of its insights and implications have entered intellectual traffic with other fields and disciplines. The field of research charted by Hymes and DeCamp in their introductory remarks in the volume, was as much concerned with questions of population flows, of the linguistic and communicative continuities and emergencies these flows entailed, and of historical and social forces they carried,  as it was driven by the questions of formal linguistic processes that emerged to confront and attenuate these emergencies.  We would like to reflect on the trajectories of the research on contact languages and linguistic contact over the past few decades by asking: In what ways have we been carrying out,  redefining, as well as—perhaps—forgetting the field’s early mandate? Which of the initial problems and insights  have retained their salience? Which ones have been  validated and invigoriated by the cross-currents of intellectual engagements of today? Which ones may have been washed away? 

Suggested themes for papers include but are not limited to:

- Ethnographic perspectives on language contact and emergence
- Language contact and the digital media
- Contact languages and linguistic heritage
- Contact languages, nationalism, and citizenship
- The displacements and relocalizations of language