Date: 14-Jun-2019 – 15-Jun-2019
Location: University of Göttingen, Germany
Contact Person: Georg Höhn
Web Site: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=medlangcon2019
Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics; Morphology; Semantics; Sociolinguistics; Syntax
Call Deadline: 15-Apr-2019
Meeting Description:
This workshop aims to bring together current research on grammatical aspects of language contact in the Mediterranean, particularly in the context of the typically asymmetric contact relations found in situations of language endangerment up to language decline/death.
The workshop is going to take place at the University of Göttingen on 14 and 15 June 2019.
Call for Papers:
The Mediterranean has been an area of intense intercultural interaction for more than two millenia. This history has provided numerous occasions for language contact. A well-known hot bed for such interaction are the Balkans, where several different Indoeuropean and non-Indoeuropean language families have been in contact for several centuries, leading to the development of the Balkan Sprachbund. Further catalysed by the dissolution of the Ottoman empire and subsequent political developments, there are a wide range of minority languages in contact with (and often under pressure from) the respective national languages. One set of examples includes Turkish, Albanian (Arvanitika), Romance (Aromanian/Vlah) or Slavonic (e.g. Pomak) varieties spoken on the territory of Greece.
A different contact situation involving Greek can be found in southern Italy. Local Greek varieties used to be widely spoken in areas of Calabria (Greko) and Salento (Griko) into the first half of the twentieth century, but have since massively declined as a result of economic, political and social pressures in favour of local Romance varieties as well as regional forms of standard Italian (Squillaci 2016). Several grammatical phenomena observed in southern Italo-Romance varieties have been connected to contact with Greek; vice-versa there has been some influence from Romance on the local Greek varieties, although possibly not to the same extent (see e.g. Ledgeway 2013 for an overview; Lekakou & Quer 2016 for change in Griko influenced by the local Romance variety; Squillaci 2016 for details on the contact situation of Greko and Bovese, particularly also the limited influence on Greko from Romance).
Cyprus represents another environment where Greek is involved in language contact, this time with two different non-Indoeuropean varieties, Cypriot Turkish and Cypriot Maronite Arabic (cf. Gülle 2014). Of these, critically endangered Cypriot Maronite Arabic is clearly in a minority position. It shows signs of contact induced influence in various areas of grammar, especially from Greek (Newton 1965, Borg 1985, Gülle 2014).
Considering the endangered status of CMA and the Italian varieties of Greek, an additional important empirical and methodological issue is that of language decline/language death and its interaction with language contact.
This workshop aims to bring together current research on grammatical aspects of language contact, particularly in the context of the typically asymmetric contact relations found in situations of language endangerment up to language decline/death.
We invite submissions for 40 minute presentations (30 + 10 minutes) on grammatical aspects of language contact in the Mediterranean with a focus on minority languages. Contributions may address particular grammatical phenomena from the perspective of language contact, or discuss instances of language decline against the background of language contact.
The subject languages need not be restricted to the examples provided above, but might further include, for example, Judeo-Spanish in the context of languages spoken in the Ottoman empire, but also other Romance varieties, especially with a focus on contact phenomena between different branches of Romance (e.g. possible Ibero-Romance influence in southern Italy).
Invited speakers:
Evangelia Adamou (CNRS)
Alexander Borg (Ben Gurion University of the Negev)
Marika Lekakou (University of Ioannina)
M. Olimpia Squillaci (Smithsonian) — newly confirmed
Where: University of Göttingen
When: 14 and 15 June 2019
Extended submission deadline: 15 April 2019
Notification of acceptance: 22 April 2019
Abstracts should be no longer than 2 pages (A4) and submitted anonymously in PDF format on https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=medlangcon2019