36.2039, Confs: Sociolinguistic Variation in Ancient Languages (United Kingdom)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-36-2039. Wed Jul 02 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.2039, Confs: Sociolinguistic Variation in Ancient Languages (United Kingdom)

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Date: 01-Jul-2025
From: Dalia Pratali Maffei, Solveig Hilmarsdottir [svalconference at gmail.com]
Subject: Sociolinguistic Variation in Ancient Languages


Sociolinguistic Variation in Ancient Languages
Short Title: SVAL
Theme: Towards Third Wave approaches and beyond

Date: 26-Mar-2026 - 28-Mar-2026
Location: Cambridge, United Kingdom
Contact: Dalia Pratali Maffei, Solveig Hilmarsdottir
Contact Email: svalconference at gmail.com
Meeting URL: https://svalconference.wordpress.com

Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics; Sociolinguistics;
Text/Corpus Linguistics

Submission Deadline: 15-Sep-2025

We are pleased to announce a conference on Sociolinguistic Variation
in Ancient Languages. Towards Third Wave approaches and beyond, which
will take place at the University of Cambridge on 26-28 March 2026, at
Jesus College and at the Faculty of Classics. The theme is how Third
Wave approaches can enhance our understanding of variation in ancient
languages, and how we can integrate such approaches with previous
methodologies. We focus especially on new methodologies and new
corpora, with languages spanning beyond Ancient Greek and Latin, from
different language families and from the Mediterranean or further
afield. The keynote speakers will be professors Penelope Eckert,
Eleanor Dickey and Klaas Bentein.
Third Wave Variationism is the most recent approach to the study of
sociolinguistic variation, spearheaded by Eckert (see Eckert 2008).
First and Second Wave sociolinguistic studies focussed mainly on the
correlation between linguistic variables and social groups, either
from macro categories, such as e.g. class, age, and gender, or
categories significant within local communities (Weinreich, Labov, &
Herzog 1968). Third Wave approaches, on the other hand, are mostly
stylistic and conceive of variation as a social semiotic system, where
language variants index meaning which is reflected by but also
constructed in the context. Speakers are seen to act as the main force
of the construction of this meaning and its change. Work within the
Third Wave has argued that different linguistic variants are not
directly correlated to social categories or to a specific social
meaning, but that their meaning is unspecified and dynamic, and that
it is activated by the usage of variables in different contexts
(Hall-Lew, Moore and Podesva 2021). A central concept is the
‘indexical field’, i.e. the set of potential meanings linked to a
linguistic variant (Eckert 2012). As society changes, speakers can
associate new meanings with linguistic variants and, in reverse, new
contexts of usage can activate new meanings, both at a conscious or at
an unconscious level.
Some steps have been taken towards integrating Third Wave approaches
to the study of historical languages like Late Medieval and Late
Modern English (e.g., Conde-Silvestre 2016; García-Vidal 2023).
Nevertheless, the sociolinguistic study of ancient languages has up
until now mostly been tackled from First and Second Wave perspectives
(e.g. Horrocks 2010; Adams 2013; Mancini 2014) and it requires
different methods (cf. e.g., Bentein 2019).
Many aspects of ancient linguistic data differ from the data commonly
dealt with in historical sociolinguistics; our data are e.g., purely
written and often transmitted indirectly (such as in the process of
manuscript transmission). In the case of ancient inscriptions, we
often lack information about writers as well as (intended) readers,
and metalinguistic testimonia often postdate our primary sources by
several centuries. In addition, tracing the reallocation of social
meaning is often challenged by the lack of quantitative data for the
frequency of linguistic variables in certain contexts in the first
place. Recent scholarship on Post-Classical Greek papyri has brought
Third Wave approaches to the study of pragmatic and lexical elements
and their interaction with the paratext, such as e.g. materiality and
layout, rather than morpho-phonologocal features (cf. e.g. the volume
edited by Bentein 2024).
This conference aims to explore more broadly how qualitative Third
Wave approaches can enhance our understanding of variation in ancient
languages, and how we can integrate such approaches with previous
quantitative methods. Languages with large corpora of varying text
types, such as Greek and Latin, clearly lend themselves well to this
type of analysis; we also encourage submissions from other ancient
language traditions, from the Mediterranean area or further afield,
and from other language families. Research questions may include but
are not limited to:
 - How do we develop methodologies for applying Third Wave approaches
to texts from the ancient world?
 - How can we apply the framework of indexicalities to
intra/inter-language variation in ancient sources?
 - How did different stylistic processes come together to produce
social meaning, and how can we identify these?
 - Can we trace the construction of different meanings through the
co-occurrence of features, rather than features in isolation? Did the
usage of features in different registers or genres have an impact on
the construction of their meaning?
 - Are there linguistic levels more prone to variation and therefore
association with meanings than others? How do features inherently
indexical to a specific context (such as deictics) interact with
features not inherently indexical?
 - How can we complement our data with metalinguistic sources? How did
local and social meanings interact with wider macro-social categories?
Can we trace diachronic changes in social meanings in parallel with
socio-cultural and ideological shifts?
The conference will take place at the University of Cambridge on 26-28
March 2026, at Jesus College and at the Faculty of Classics. There
will also be a chance to attend online; online presentations can be
arranged in exceptional circumstances. We invite abstracts in English
of up to 500 words (references excluded) from researchers at all
career stages (PhD students included), with a focus on early career
scholars. Papers focussing on methodological approaches will be
especially welcome, but we will also consider papers dealing mainly
with new data and corpora. Accepted papers will be 20 minutes long,
followed by 10 minutes for questions.
Abstracts should be submitted as anonymised Word/PDF documents by 15th
September 2025 to svalconference at gmail.com. Notice of acceptance will
be given on 15th October 2025. We plan to have ca. 15-20 papers across
the three days, along with the three longer keynote talks. Note that
for those interested, we intend to publish selected papers as a volume
or as a special issue (more information to follow in due course).
A conference dinner will take place on the evening of Friday March 27.
For full list of references, please see the conference website.



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