CLOW3: Contested Languages in the Old World 3 University of Amsterdam Amsterdam, Netherlands, May 3-4, 2018 |
Conference website | http://www.multilingualism.humanities.uva.nl/clow3/ |
Submission link | https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=clow3 |
Abstract registration deadline | December 15, 2017 |
Submission deadline | December 15, 2017 |
Only a fraction of European languages listed in the 2010 “UNESCO Atlas of World’s Languages in Danger” enjoys some degree of recognition within the state(s) in which they are spoken. This leaves many European bilinguals whose linguistic rights are limited to one of their everyday codes – often not their preferred one.
The meeting will focus on contested languages: linguistic codes which are generally recognized as such by the international scientific community: e.g., they are reported as languages in Ethnologue and tend to have an unambiguous ISO 639 code, and also their status as separate languages is often not questioned by linguists, especially out of their home country. Still, they have not usually attained any reasonable degree of official recognition, or, where recognition has been granted, especially at the local level, it has not triggered any reasonable attempts at language development. In other words, official recognition is not a guarantee in the absence of contestedness.
In contested languages, speakers’ awareness varies, but it is generally low and restricted to active minorities. The result is that these European bilinguals do not perceive themselves as such, and therefore their language loyalty and intergenerational transmission is in danger. Generally, the visibility of these languages in the public sphere is negligible.
Contested languages are distinctly apart linguistically from the official languages of the state in which they are spoken; they further have a substantial number of speakers of different age groups (although younger speakers tend to be less conversant and prefer the use of the state language), often a distinct literary written tradition, and display some level of standardization and corpus planning. Still, these languages are often referred to as “dialects”, “patois” etc. in everyday (and sometimes in academic) discourse.
Typical cases of contested languages are several regional languages of Italy (Lombard, Piedmontese, Sicilian, Venetian, but also Sardinian – which has been officially recognized as a minority language – and others), Netherlands (e.g. Frisian, in certain contexts), Germany (e.g. Bavarian, Low Saxon, Swabian), and Poland (e.g. Kashubian, Silesian), a few regional languages of Spain (e.g. Aragonese, Asturian, or, in certain contexts, even Catalan), and most regional languages of France. We welcome all cases of contested languages within the European continuum.
We also include languages traditionally present in the continent which are either a-territorial or lacking a well defined territory, such as various languages of the Roma people, Yiddish or Sami. Creole languages without a high degree of Ausbau and spoken by a consistent community in a territory of Europe (such as Papiamento in the Netherlands) can be included. In many cases, also sign languages are often contested in the European context. Finally, a special case of contested language is Esperanto.
The conference aims at bringing together scholars and activists working on the current status and future prospects of contested languages, as well as on issues of corpus, status and planning, and how these impact on the speaker communities themselves and on the academic world.