Language and the city

Conference
Sociolinguistics Symposium 19
22.08.12-24.08.12
Free University, Berlin

In 2012, the 19th Sociolinguistics Symposium will be hosted by the Freie Universität Berlin in Germany. The general theme of the 2012 conference will be "Language and the city".

Conference date
August 22 - 24, 2012

Plenary speakers (confirmed)

• Peter Auer (FRIAS, Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies)
• Penelope Eckert (Linguistics, Stanford University)
• Maria Eugênia Lamoglia Duarte (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro)
• Xu Daming (China Center for Linguistic and Strategic Studies, Nanjing University)

Attractive and terrifying, modern cities and megacities structure our lives and communication more than ever. More than 50% of the world's population live in big cities. If urban conglomerations are places where people from other places gather, they form the communicative conditions in many ways: Migration leads to multilingualism, social diversity leads to complex indexical fields.

The main theme of the 19th Sociolinguistic Symposium brings together sociolinguistic work that sheds light on the relations between the socio-geographical phenomenon urbanity and linguistic variation and change. Thus, we particularly welcome contributions on urban indexical fields, social networks in the city, urban communities of practice, urban styles, languages of urban tribes, urban space, multilingualism, language contact, dialect levelling and koineization, new dialect formation, code-switching, linguistic landscapes and all related topics. We also encourage presentations of new methodologies and tools for data collection, transcription, and analysis.

Since the Sociolinguistics Symposium has always been a place for sociolinguistic discussion in the broad sense, space will also be given to contributions on any other subfield of sociolinguistic research.
Submissions

We invite scholars to submit abstracts for contributions of the following types:

Thematic sessions

• A Thematic Session is a cluster of related talks about a common topic. You can propose such a topic and will - if accepted - act as organiser of the thematic session. This means that you will be one of the reviewers for the papers/posters submitted to the session and that you will be responsible for the organisation of the session in August 2012.
• We will try to have at least 50 % of the thematic sessions related to the main theme of the conference (Language and the city).
• The length of your abstract/description should not exceed 600 words (excluding references).

Papers
Papers describe original work, either completed research which has given rise to substantial results, or the development of significant new methodologies, or rigorous theoretical, speculative or critical discussions. Individual papers will be allocated 25 minutes (20 minutes for presentation and 5 minutes for questions). The length of your abstract should not exceed 300 words (excluding references).

Posters
Posters may be a more suitable way of presenting results, work-in-progress, fieldwork, or when large amounts of data need to be displayed. Poster presenters have the opportunity to exchange ideas one-to-one with attendees and to discuss their work in detail. They may also provide handouts with examples or more detailed information. The length of your abstract should not exceed 300 words (excluding references).

Papers and posters can be submitted for a specific thematic session, but also without reference to a specific session.

Submission of thematic sessions
Deadline: September 15, 2011

After reviews and selection of thematic sessions for the conference, the submission of individual papers/posters will be opened (in early October).

Submission of individual papers and posters

• for the general theme of the conference (Language and the city)
• for a specific thematic session
• for any subject within the field of sociolinguistics.

Deadline: January 15, 2012

Local Organizers
Matthias Hüning, Uli Reich and Norbert Dittmar