The Diachrony of Language Geography: Linking Small-Scale and Large-Scale Perspectives
Date: 26-Aug-2025 – 29-Aug-2025
Location: Bordeaux, France
Contact Person: Matthias Urban
Meeting Email: matthias.urban@cnrs.fr
Web Site: https://societaslinguistica.eu/sle2025/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2024/09/The-diachrony-of-language-geography.pdf
Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics; Historical Linguistics; Sociolinguistics; Typology
Call Deadline: 15-Nov-2024
Meeting Description:
Language geographies differ significantly across the world. Such differences can be observed on local, regional, continental, and global scales.This workshop aims to explore what historical, sociolinguistic, and environmental factors shape language geographies on lower scales, and how large scale patterns might emerge from such lower-level language ecologies in different environments across the globe.
A full description of the workshop and its aims can be found on the conference website:
https://societaslinguistica.eu/sle2025/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2024/09/The-diachrony-of-language-geography.pdf
Call for Papers:
Abstracts (max. 300 words, excluding references) should be sent to Matthias Urban
(matthias.urban@cnrs.fr) by the end of November 15th CET
The workshop invites different types of presentations:
With the goal of obtaining a better comparative view on language ecologies and their
diachronic dynamics at local and regional scales, presentations may sketch the
characteristics of a specific regional language ecology and explore how it relates to the
creation and maintenance of the region’s language geography. Presentations dealing
with ecologies that have not yet been made as prominent as e.g. the Vaupés, are
particularly welcome. Such presentations should have a comparative perspective and
present case studies involving a set of distinct languages rather than a single one. They
should provide an overview of the area concered; the languages involved; their
geographical distribution; describe what the social and economic relations between
their speakers are; what language ideologies govern language use (if any); what effects
the regional system in which language use is embedded has on the diachronic trajectory
of languages. This may concern the lexicon (e.g. lexical borrowing or the absence
thereof); convergence effects, including large-scale readjustments of morphosyntactic
organization (e.g. Ross’s 1996 „metatypy“), but possibly also divergence effects (Evans
2019) as speakers seek to maintain ideologically relevant linguistic differences. Of
interest is also the question whether there is evidence that the observed characteristic
language ecology is a long standing stable one that may be projected into the past, and
if so what evidence there is in support.
Also welcome are presentations that treat particular language geographies on any scale
of analysis, including large or even global scales, and that model, either quantitatively or
qualitatively, the language dynamics underlying the generation or maintenance of
distinct patterns in language geography.
Finally, particuarly welcome are studies that link the quantitative analysis of
environmental variables and diversity levels with empirically observable linguistic and
nonlinguistic behavior and/or diachronic language dynamics of expansion and language
shift, and that help to understand synchronically observed patterns of language
geography through the exploration of the underlying diachronic language dynamics.