Conference

HiSoN conference "Making Waves in Historical Sociolinguistics"

Date

30 May 2018 - 1 June 2018

Address

Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden

The conference "Making Waves in Historical Sociolinguistics" is organized by the Historical Sociolinguistics Network (HiSoN) and the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL). The conference takes place in Leiden on 30 May – 1 June 2018.

What are the next steps in historical sociolinguistics? Where is the discipline heading? Which challenges and opportunities are we facing? These are the issues we want to address at the next HiSoN conference on historical sociolinguistics. Over the past few decades, the field of historical sociolinguistics has developed from a niche that brought together historical linguists, philologists and sociolinguists to a vibrant and established subdiscipline of its own. The results have been impressive: new data sets have been collected, corpora have been built, theories, methods and analyses have been presented in papers, books and journals. At the 2018 conference, at a time when the Leiden-based Going Dutch-project is nearing its end, we want to reflect on the state-of-the-art in our field, and identify new avenues of historical-sociolinguistic research.

Possible issues to be addressed include the following. Are hot topics in modern sociolinguistics, such as contact, migration and identity, sufficiently represented in historical sociolinguistics? If not, how can we operationalize them? What about key concepts in historical linguistics, such as grammaticalization, constructionalization and subjectification? If we seek to integrate internal and external factors in explaining language change, do these concepts need to become more integrated into our analyses? Are stylization and enregisterment useful concepts in the analysis of historical situations? Are so-called third-wave studies of historical situations feasible at all – in the frequent absence of detailed information about individual writers and their identities? Which languages and language groups are still conspicuously absent from the field? Can we extend the historical-sociolinguistic approach to ancient languages, or to contexts with only a recent written tradition? Which methodological innovations can further our field and its analytical adequacy? What kinds of data from the written record are still waiting for us to study?

Keynote speakers

James Clackson (University of Cambridge) – Sociolinguistics of ancient languages, esp. Latin and Greek

Kristine Horner (University of Sheffield) – Language politics, multilingualism and mobility

Rajend Mesthrie (University of Cape Town) – Migration, language and social change

Organizing committee

Andreas Krogull, Gijsbert Rutten, Jos Schaeken, Bob Schoemaker, Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Marijke van der Wal

Contact

Email: [e-mail]

Programme and Registration

The conference programme.

Conference fee: € 60,-

Conference diner (31 May): € 40,-

Registration: closed

For more information about accommodation: see here

How to get to Leiden