39th Congress of the German Society for Romance Studies:

Language in Film and Series in a Romanic Language –

Linguistic Perspectives on Development Trends in Fictional Language

Date: 22-Sep-2025 – 25-Sep-2025
Location: Konstanz, Germany
Contact Person: Mara Papaccio
Meeting Email: mara.papaccio@uni-a.de

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics; Pragmatics; Sociolinguistics; Text/Corpus Linguistics
Subject Language(s): French (fra)
German (deu)
Italian (ita)
Spanish (spa)

Call Deadline: 31-Dec-2024

Meeting Description:

39th Congress of the German Society for Romance Studies

This section focuses on the cinematic representation of romance languages from the beginnings of sound film, i.e. from the early 1930s to the present day. In addition to films, series will also be examined as an object of study, which, especially in times of numerous streaming services, are of great interest to a wide range of audiences. This results in diverse and wide-ranging objects of research that can be examined for development trends from a diachronic perspective. The following is a small selection of possible research questions for the section contributions:
– How is the contact of Romance and non-Romance languages depicted on film?
– How is youth language staged on film?
– What role do dialects play in films and series?
– How are interpersonal conflicts portrayed linguistically in films and series?
– How is oral language imitated or created in fiction?
– How can film characters be located sociolinguistically?
– Which linguistic registers are used in films and series?
– What possibilities does fictional language offer to reflect new tendencies in real language?

Methodologically, this results in a broad spectrum in which fictional language in films and series can be examined, for example, in terms of variety linguistics, conversation analysis or pragmalinguistics. In Romance studies, there are linguistic studies on staged French youth language in feature films (Bedijs 2012), on spoken language in Francophone cinema (e.g. Chion 2008, Planchenault 2011), on varieties of Spanish in cinema and television (Moreno-Fernandez 2022) and on multilingualism in Italian film (Gaudenzi 2016), which has been the subject of increased research in Italian studies in recent years (see also Gargiulo 2018, Orrù 2017, Rossi 2020). From a linguistic perspective, there is still a great need for research on language in film, especially from a diachronic perspective, not least against the background that the focus in the field of media language was initially on the press, radio and television (cf. Helfrich 1998, 6) and that linguistic terms were or are used metaphorically in the research literature on film language to describe the nature of films (cf. e.g. Bedijs 2012, 21-22).

The working languages of the section are German, French, Italian and Spanish.

Abstracts (max. 4000 characters including spaces and references) are due by 31st December 2024. Please send an email to mara.papaccio@uni-a.de and sita-rose.boileau@uni-a.de.

Invited speakers: Marc Chalier (Sorbonne Université) and Fabio Rossi (Università degli Studi di Messina)