21.3876, Calls: Socioling/Germany

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LINGUIST List: Vol-21-3876. Sun Oct 03 2010. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 21.3876, Calls: Socioling/Germany

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1)
Date: 01-Oct-2010
From: Tanja Proebstl < languagetalks11 at lrz.uni-muenchen.de >
Subject: Speaking about Boundaries: Multilingualism in Europe
 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Sun, 03 Oct 2010 22:13:31
From: Tanja Proebstl [languagetalks11 at lrz.uni-muenchen.de]
Subject: Speaking about Boundaries: Multilingualism in Europe

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Full Title: Speaking about Boundaries: Multilingualism in Europe.. 

Date: 16-Feb-2011 - 18-Feb-2011
Location: Munich, Bavaria, Germany 
Contact Person: Tanja Proebstl
Meeting Email: languagetalks11 at lrz.uni-muenchen.de
Web Site: http://www.languagetalks.fak13.uni-muenchen.de 

Linguistic Field(s): Sociolinguistics 

Call Deadline: 30-Nov-2010 

Meeting Description:

Languagetalks 2011
Speaking about Boundaries. Multilingualism in Europe and the World

Graduate Conference at Munich University
16-18 February 2011 

Call For Papers

The doctoral programmes of Linguistics and Literature at Munich University 
invite you to hand in contributions to the interdisciplinary conference 
Speaking about Boundaries. Multilingualism in Europe and the World. The 
conference, which will take place in Munich from Wednesday, 16 February 
to Friday, 18 February, addresses the four following core areas:

I. Language of the self and of the 'other'
Encountering the language of the 'other' may render one's own language a 
potential 'foreign language'. This panel invites reflections on what is alien 
in one's own language and on the question what makes foreign languages 
alien. What do misunderstandings, non-understanding and the experience 
of language boundaries reveal about a person's or language community's 
capacity of language comprehension? It is not only the confrontation with 
foreign languages that makes one's own seem foreign: The literary use of 
words, or simply the isolation of a single expression, can also lead to 
alienation. As Karl Krauss once put it: 'The longer you look at a word, the 
more foreign it will look back (at you).' What literary techniques are 
responsible for such effects? Can alienation from one's own language be 
described from a linguistic point of view? From an interdisciplinary 
perspective, the following questions are also relevant: Can such an 
alienation be observed increasingly for example in foreign language 
acquisition, and, vice versa, to what extent is it one's mother tongue that 
influences learning success and strategies?

II. Power and resistance
Language encounters do not always take place between equal partners. In 
(post-)colonial contexts particularly, languages are used as an instrument of 
power. But even within Europe, political conflicts manifest themselves in the 
confrontation of 'smaller' languages with official national ones. For instance, 
how pertinent is Max Weinreich's statement that a language is 'a dialect with 
an army and a navy'? This panel deals with the role of minority languages, 
official languages and language prohibitions. How can one be kept separate 
from the other? How are political and social affinities defined through 
languages and dialects? What happens to the communities' culture when a 
language is imposed on them? With what strategies do they confront the 
language of the oppressor? In the South-American and African postcolonial 
context, intertextually marked strategies of 'writing back' play an important 
role; what also needs to be considered here is the question of whether 
there are similar attempts within Europe.

III. Language contact and hybridisation
The language confrontations leave traces, among them are creoles and 
other hybridisations of language, such as Spanglish in the context of the 
Latino-American diasporas in the United States. The 'adoption' of single 
expressions due, for example to the international influence of English, also 
sheds an interesting light on the role of language contacts in periods of 
globalisation. In contrast to panel II, primarily the productive aspects of 
language encounters and acquisition are to be considered here. 
Translators and interpreters, in guiding the contacts between different 
language communities, hold an intermediate position in the network of 
power and linguistic creativity. Thus, they might become betrayers of their 
own and the foreign language, but they can also enrich and shape both 
languages and cultures at the same time. What is of interest in this panel, 
beyond the obvious influences of languages on each other, are the 
particular convergences that speakers are not immediately aware of. On a 
diachronic level, this could be, for instance, Sprachbund phenomena, or, on 
a synchronic level, assimilation strategies in actual discourse (for instance 
those of a phonetic-phonological nature). 

IV. Artificial languages and language utopias
On the one hand,  the term 'artificial languages (in more than one sense)' 
applies to the languages of arts - specific languages in a multilingual world. 
How do literary languages differ from other ones? On the other hand, 
'artificial languages'' are also planned, invented languages. Here, we are 
thinking of (utopic or concrete) conceptions of languages as reactions to 
multilingualism - such as universal languages, transparent object-
languages, proto-language(s), meta-languages, ideas concerned with 
globally comprehensible planned languages like Esperanto or Volapük, 
secret languages, and also specific conceptions of literary language. 
Moreover, this panel aims at analysing the artificiality of several existing 
languages, for example the artificiality of academic languages (according to 
Thomas S. Kuhn) as languages which are in each case introduced by 
paradigmatic academic contributions and reproduced by textbooks, which 
are basically incommensurable and primarily attempt to limit multilingualism. 
Last but not least, this panel invites reflections on the political aspect in the 
constitution of artificial languages.  

Administrative information
Abstracts containing a maximum of 400 words (including selected 
references) can be handed in by doctoral  and post-doctoral candidates by 
the end of November 2010. Participants will be selected by mid-December. 
Presentations should take about 20 minutes (there will be time for 
discussion at the end) and may be delivered in either German or English. 
Selected contributions will be published in our languagetalks proceedings. 

The panels will be opened by the following plenary speakers: Yaron Matras 
(Manchester), Manfred Schmeling (Saarbrücken), Ludwig M. Eichinger 
(Mannheim) and Ottmar Ette (Potsdam).

Please send your abstract to languagetalks11 at lrz.uni-muenchen.de by 30 
November 2010.





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