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 is financially supported by the Department of Humanities at Federico II.

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