[Lingtyp] Call for Papers: SLE 2022 Workshop "Spatial and social separation of speech communities and language change"

Fri Nov 5 23:01:44 UTC 2021

[apologies for cross-posting]

Dear colleagues,

I would like to draw your attention to the attached call for papers for the
SLE 2022 workshop proposal *"Spatial and social separation of speech
communities and language change".* Please see
the text below for details.

Deadline for short abstracts (300 words) is on *November 15.*

Feel free to spread the word with those who might be interested.

Best wishes,
Ezequiel Koile

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Call for papers:

Spatial and social separation of speech communities and language change

Convenors: Ezequiel Koile, Michael Daniel, Pierpaolo Di Carlo, Jeff Good,
and Susanne Maria Michaelis

(HSE University, Moscow; University at Buffalo; and Max Planck Institute
for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig)

Keywords: language change, linguistic geography, social structure,
multilingualism, language contact

The consideration of real-world situations of interaction among language
users is integral to the study of language contact and change. The
geography of an area has potentially significant effects in shaping such
interactions, as do social features of the groups interacting, such as
marriage patterns and degrees of political centralization and complexity.
There is a specific subset of real-world situations that has recently
received increasing attention, namely situations where speech communities
are characterized by relatively high degrees of geographical and/or social
separation from other communities. These include e.g. mountainous
landscapes where villages lie at different elevations, and small island
communities.

There have been claims that language varieties used in spatially and/or
socially separated communities show a higher degree of grammatical opacity,
more elaborated grammatical paradigms, and rarer sounds compared with
closely related neighboring language varieties that have been spatially and
socially less separated (Trudgill 2011). This effect has been observed in
different regions of the world, such as the Caucasus (Nichols, 2013, 2015,
2016), the Andes (Bentz, 2018), as well as in different dialects of German
(Baechler 2016), and surveyed in Urban 2020. As for genuinely social
factors, it has been proposed that the strongly endogamic nature of some
Caucasian speech communities is a relevant factor in the languages of such
communities developing distinctive patterns from their neighboring language
communities (Pakendorf et al. 2021, Dobrushina et al. 2020, Kirby et al.
2016).

In this workshop, we aim at investigating whether the claims made by
Trudgill, Nichols, and others hold across other scenarios of spatially and
socially separated language communities. The main focus is on societies
where traditional, pre-colonial cultural traits are still observable,
especially those characterized by small-scale multilingualism (i.e.
widespread multilingualism in local languages), though work considering
this topic from an areal or global perspective where sociolinguistic
information is not available at a high level of detail is included as well.
Our goal is to stimulate discussion on the ways in which separation of
speech communities from each other, whether this is due to spatial factors,
social factors, or a combination of the two impacts patterns of language
change and whether it is associated with a distinctive profile from
language change in other contexts, as claimed by the mentioned authors.

We invite submissions for papers that study how spatial and social
structures shape language structure. Both empirical and theoretical studies
are welcome, as well as different scales of granularity, such as
small-scale, areal, and global studies. A non-exhaustive list of possible
topics is:

   -

   Studies of outcomes of language contact in landscapes where settlements
   exhibit significantly different degrees of accessibility or connectedness
   (e.g., mountainous landscapes where villages can be at very different
   levels of elevation, small island communities and similar situations).
   -

   Work on the relationship between marriage patterns and linguistic
   variation, in particular in contexts where some communities show greater
   degrees of endogamy than others.
   -

   The role of spatial and social factors in conditioning structural
   features of languages.
   -

   Spatial factors as contributing to social separation and the ways that
   they affect languages.
   -

   Studies of language complexity as conditioned by social and spatial
   separation

Please send your non-anonymous abstract of max. 300 words to
ezequielk at gmail.com by November 15, 2021. The convenors will carry out a
first round of review and notify authors of their decision later that week.
Accepted abstracts will be sent to the SLE conference organizers as part of
the workshop proposal. Notification of acceptance or rejection of the
workshop proposal will be by 15 December, 2021.

References

Baechler, R. (2016). Inflectional complexity of nouns, adjectives and
articles in closely related (non-)isolated varieties. In R. Baechler & G.
Seiler (Eds.), Complexity, isolation, and variation (pp. 15– 46). Berlin,
Germany/Boston, MA: Walter de Gruyter.

Bentz, C. (2018). Adaptive languages: An information-theoretic account of
linguistic diversity. Berlin, Germany/Boston, MA: Walter de Gruyter.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110560107

Dobrushina, Nina , Michael Daniel , and Yuri Koryakov, Languages and
Sociolinguistics of the Caucasus, in Polinsky, Maria (Ed.) The Oxford
Handbook of Languages of the Caucasus, Oxford University Press 2020. DOI:
10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190690694.013.30

Kirby, Kathryn R., Russell D. Gray, Simon J. Greenhill, Fiona M. Jordan,
Stephanie Gomes-Ng, Hans-Jörg Bibiko, Damián E. Blasi, Carlos A. Botero,
Claire Bowern, Carol R. Ember, Dan Leehr, Bobbi S. Low, Joe McCarter,
William Divale, and Michael C. Gavin. (2016). D-PLACE: A Global Database of
Cultural, Linguistic and Environmental Diversity. PLoS ONE, 11(7):
e0158391. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0158391
<https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0158391>.

Nichols, J. (2013). The vertical archipelago: Adding the third dimension to
linguistic geography. In P. Auer, M. Hilpert, A. Stukenbrock, & B.
Szmrecsanyi (Eds.), Space in language and linguistics: Geographical,
interactional, and cognitive perspectives (pp. 38– 60). Berlin,
Germany/Boston, MA: Walter de Gruyter.

Nichols, J. (2015). Types of spread zones: Open and closed, horizontal and
vertical. In R. Busser & R. J. LaPolla (Eds.), Language structure and
environment: Social, cultural, and natural factors (pp. 261– 286).
Amsterdam, the Netherlands/Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.
https://doi.org/10.1075/clscc.6.10nic

Nichols, J. (2016). Complex edges, transparent frontiers: Grammatical
complexity and language spreads. In R. Baechler & G. Seiler (Eds.),
Complexity, isolation, and variation (pp. 117– 137). Berlin,
Germany/Boston, MA: Walter de Gruyter.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110348965-006

Pakendorf B, Dobrushina N, Khanina O. A typology of small-scale
multilingualism. International Journal of Bilingualism. June 2021. doi:
10.1177/13670069211023137 <https://doi.org/10.1177/13670069211023137>

Trudgill, P. (2011). Sociolinguistic typology: Social determinants of
linguistic complexity. Oxford, England/New York, NY: Oxford University
Press.

Urban, Matthias. 2020. Mountain linguistics. Language and Linguistics
Compass.

https://doi.org/10.1111/lnc3.12393
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