37.3389, Confs: Workshop at ICHL28: Language Fragmentation and Endogenous Change (Iceland)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-37-3389. Mon Oct 19 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.3389, Confs: Workshop at ICHL28: Language Fragmentation and Endogenous Change (Iceland)

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Date: 15-Oct-2026
From: Marc Olivier-Loiseau [marc.olivier-loiseau at tcd.ie]
Subject: Workshop at ICHL28: Language Fragmentation and Endogenous Change


Workshop at ICHL28: Language Fragmentation and Endogenous Change
Short Title: ICHL28
Theme: Language Fragmentation and Endogenous Change

Date: 26-Jul-2027 - 30-Jul-2027
Location: Reykjavík, Iceland
Meeting URL: https://ichl28.hi.is

Linguistic Field(s): Genetic Classification; Historical Linguistics;
Linguistic Theories; Syntax; Typology

Submission Deadline: 01-Dec-2026

Organizers (both equally involved)
Marc Olivier-Loiseau (marc.olivier-loiseau at tcd.ie), Trinity College
Dublin
Afra Pujol i Campeny (afra.pujolcampeny at udg.edu), Universitat de
Girona
Language change inevitably gives rise to new linguistic systems. This
workshop addresses the issue of fragmentation: the process by which
two or more linguistic communities within a given linguistic system
develop idiosyncratic, or distinct, linguistic systems. We seek to
explore the endogenous mechanisms that give rise to the divergent
representations of a particular grammar, to the widening gulf between
what was once a single language, with the aim of improving our
understanding of the locus of fragmentation; what formal traits render
a system more or less prone to evolve in different directions; the
different ways in which it can be modelled, formalised, and
represented; and how fragmentation can be diachronically
reconstructed.
The extralinguistic conditions that give rise to fragmentation often
stem from geographical isolation, whether because a subpart of the
community relocates to a different continent or because a dividing
wall is built through a city. Once physical separation occurs,
linguistic fragmentation follows and affects all language domains:
phonology, prosody, morphology, syntax, and so on.
We distinguish between ‘fragmented variety’ and ‘ancestral variety’.
The former (i.e., fragment) denotes a linguistic variety that,
following the separation of a previously unified speech community, has
developed a grammar noticeably distinct from that of the source
community. The latter (i.e., the ancestral variety) denotes the
variety from which the fragment geographically originated, that is, it
is the variety that constituted the source at the time of separation,
though it may itself have since undergone change. To illustrate,
17th-18th-century British English is a source variety that gave rise
to American English, a fragmented variety, and present-day British
English, the ancestral variety.
This issue was first brought to light in the philological scholarship
of the 19th century, in the works of August Schleicher (1821–1868) and
František Ladislav Čelakovský (1759–1852), notably through the study
of the Indo-European family and how it split into its constituent
subfamilies, languages, and dialects. The tree model, while simplistic
and agnostic with respect to other crucial parameters such as language
contact and multilingualism, captures a palpable reality: once a
linguistic community is divided, fragmentation follows.
The merits and pitfalls of Schleicher’s (1853) Stambaumtheorie
continue to be discussed and compared to this day. The last two
decades have seen significant advances in the modelling of linguistic
fragmentation, be it by proposing innovative uses of the
Stammbaumtheorie and Wellentheorie, for instance, in François’ (2014)
historical glottometric approach, or phylogenetic approaches that
borrow from evolutionary biology, such as Bayesian maximum-likelihood
methods (Dunn et al. 2008), network analyses (Forster, Toth and
Bandelt’s 1998), or the Parametric Comparative Method of Longobardi &
Guardiano (2009). To what extent can these methods capture processes
of divergence in contexts of linguistic isolation?
Works on exogenous factors, such as language contact, provide a key to
unlock our understanding of language change (see Willis 2017 on the
role of exogenous factors in transmission). Trudgill (2020), for
instance, argues that the rate of change is significantly influenced
by social factors such as geographical isolation/contact and social
stability/instability. Yet this emphasis on contact-driven
explanations leaves the converse case comparatively underexplored: the
role of endogenous factors in language change in non-contact contexts
still presents us with many unanswered questions. What are the drivers
of change in a fragmented variety?
Fragmentation creates contrast, whereby a linguistic phenomenon
(broadly defined) can be characterised as either archaic (i.e., it has
remained stable) or innovative (i.e., it deviates from the source).
The former is inherited from the original linguistic community whereas
the latter is a novelty. A fragmented variety, therefore, can arise
for one of two reasons: either by virtue of being archaising, in
contrast to the original community that shows innovations, or by
virtue of developing separate innovations. As a direct consequence,
fragmentation becomes a question of measurement and delimiting how
much archaism or innovation is enough to mark the birth of a distinct
variety. A further question concerns the rate at which fragmented
varieties change relative to the source community, and whether this
rate is predictable.
It is widely accepted that linguistic drift (Sapir 2021) is a force
behind language change. The parametric framework and the concept of
cascading parametric change might offer insights on drift rate and
directionality (Biberauer & Roberts 2008). However, case studies show
that while fragmented varieties and their ancestral varieties had the
same initial structural (and by extension, parametric) make-up, they
do not drift in the same direction or at the same rate (a good example
is the persistence of case in Icelandic vs. mainland Scandinavian
varieties, Eythórsson 2000). If endogenous language change is partly
due to a linguistic drift determined by a variety’s formal structure,
why does change in fragmented varieties not follow the same direction
or rate as in ancestral ones?
Studies of language change show that different domains of language are
more susceptible to contact than others. This is formalised in
Thomason & Kaufman’s (1988) borrowing scale, which places content
words among the elements most likely to be borrowed, while
morphological and syntactic features are less readily borrowed and
typically require more intense contact. However, we do not know
whether fragmented varieties are more likely to exhibit change in
domains that are also more likely to change in the context of contact,
such as the lexicon (as suggested in Padilla Iglesias et al. 2020), or
in others, like phonology, morphology, or syntax. An example of a
fragmented variety undergoing change in a less likely domain, from a
contact perspective, is Balearic Catalan, an insular variety that
fragmented from mainland Catalan, where stress shift from the main
word to the clitic cluster of verb-clitic compounds was innovated in
Mallorca during the late modern era, as part of a shift in the prosody
and phonology of the variety (Torres-Tamarit & Pons-Moll 2019).
Examples of linguistic fragmentation driven by endogenous change
include Icelandic, which fragmented from continental Old Norse a
millennium ago and evolved at a relatively slow pace and with little
contact with mainland Scandinavian (Friðriksson 2008; Trudgill 2020).
The high degree of conservatism of this language in comparison to
Norwegian, Swedish, or Danish, also from Old Norse, makes it an
interesting case of archaising variety. Another example of endogenous
change giving rise to a new variety is Tristan da Cunha English
(Trudgill 1986; Schreier 2003), the most isolated anglophone island on
the planet. This variety shows innovation in its phonology, having
lost voiced fricatives, and in its morphosyntax, through the
simplification of inflection morphology (e.g., she sing).
Fragmentation does not necessarily feature a great geographical
distance: Korean, now shared out between two neighbouring countries
that do not interact with each other, has given rise to increasingly
different varieties (see Yun and Kang 2019 on phonological change).
While the extralinguistic conditions surrounding Icelandic, Tristan da
Cunha English, and North/South Korean may differ, the linguistic
result converges: they take roots in a language community from which
they have fragmented, and have since become noticeably different due
to internal changes.
This workshop’s primary objective is to examine the processes and
mechanisms underlying fragmentation, with a view to better
understanding how linguistic change unfolds when exogenous factors
cannot be invoked. The research questions below evoke several ways in
which this matter can be approached.
1.      How can we model language fragmentation?
2.      How much archaism or innovation must accumulate before a
fragment counts as a distinct variety, and can this be formally
measured?
3.      What are the drives behind endogenous change?
4.      Does endogenous change hit the same linguistic domains
(lexicon first, syntax last) as contact-driven change, or does
isolation reorder which domains change most?
5.      Why do fragments and their ancestral varieties drift in
different directions and at different rates despite sharing the same
parametric starting point?



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