Call for paper

The conference focuses on the topic of language documentation from the various perspectives offered by different ‘minority’ situations (migrant languages, minority languages, dialects). Its aim is to provide an interdisciplinary look at a topic which is today the focus of renewed interest, both in epistemological and theoretical terms.

On an epistemological level, the increasing need to document the unprecedented super-diverse linguistic reality inherent in migrant and transit communities, which is typically associated with the field of investigation classified as linguistic documentation, has the inevitable consequence of broadening the spectrum of associated disciplines (contact linguistics, sociolinguistics, variational linguistics, …) and of the themes with which it intersects (language attrition, language contact, contact-independent innovations, …).

At a purely methodological level, new technology has made possible remote and virtual investigations, using digital resources and platforms, making it reasonable to ask what the future might be for methods such as participant and participatory observation, documentation of communicative practices within communities, and descriptions of the cultural practices associated with written and oral forms of communication.

The conference will accept proposals on the following key themes:

- Language documentation and language contact

- Language documentation in superdiverse and urban settings

- Language documentation of linguistic minorities, of dialects, of heritage languages

- Language documentation and new technologies

- Corpora and annotation (speech, gestures, …)

- Standardization of minority languages

- Ethnography, anthropology and linguistic documentation

- Language documentation from a multimodal perspective

Interested parties should send an abstract of 500 words (in Word or pdf format) to margherita.disalvo@unina.it by no later than May 15th. The abstracts will be evaluated by the Scientific Committee and notification of acceptance will be communicated by June 5th.

The working languages of the conference are English, Italian, French and Spanish.