Second Call for Papers
This letter is a gentle reminder on the ongoing call for papers for the conference “Language functioning in remote areas: The Arctic and beyond”, which will be held at the Institute of Linguistics (Russian Academy of Sciences), Moscow, on 26–28 October 2023.
Meanwhile, the conference has changed its status and is now regarded as the annual Linguistic Forum of the Institute of Linguistics (Russian Academy of Sciences) 2023. The series of Linguistic Forums was launched by the Institute of Linguistics in 2019. Every year the Forum focuses on a particularly relevant domain of linguistics.
The deadline for abstract submission has been extended to 28 May 2023.
First Call for Papers
The Laboratory for Study and Preservation of Minority Languages is pleased to announce the conference “Language functioning in remote areas: The Arctic and beyond”, which will be held at the Institute of Linguistics (Russian Academy of Sciences), Moscow, on 26–28 October 2023.
The concept of remoteness (or inaccessibility) can be considered in geographical as well as infrastructural and administrative dimensions.
In the first case, one deals with natural geographically conditioned barriers (e.g., remoteness of the region or adverse weather conditions). This is especially relevant for the languages spoken in the tundra, jungle or mountainous regions.
In the second case, inaccessibility is created artificially, for instance, transport infrastructure may be poorly developed in the region, which makes it difficult to access individual settlements. Apart from that, there is an “administrative” inaccessibility: limited access to certain regions, reservations, state borders, etc. On the one hand, this becomes an obstacle to potential language contacts. On the other hand, this often complicates or makes impossible linguistic research in the region; as a result, the idiom remains understudied and its chances to obtain some official status decrease. Remoteness can also be determined by various social factors, such as nomadic way of life of the speakers, military conflicts in the region, etc.
During the conference, we are going to discuss extra- and intralinguistic processes that languages in hard-to-reach regions undergo, and try to answer, among others, the following questions: what is the level of vitality of languages in remote areas? Do such languages have a chance to change under the influence of languages with a larger number of speakers? Does inaccessibility affect the preservation of grammatical categories and structural properties of the languages? Do such languages have common features, and is it possible to build a specific typological profile for them?
In recent years, the Arctic region has often become a field for searching for such patterns (cf. the study of the typology of language contact in the North [Khanina et al. 2019] and the consequences of ancient contacts for the structure of the languages in North-Eastern Siberia [Vinyar et al. 2022], as well as recent attempts to describe individual linguistic phenomena taking into account the factor of geographical specificity [Sipőcz, Szeverényi 2022]). At the same time, the influence of socio-cultural and geographic factors on linguistic structure was discussed on the material of languages spoken far away from the Arctic. region (see the collection [De Busser, LaPolla (eds.) 2015]). The announced conference welcomes the expansion of the areal context, experts in languages of the Arctic and other remote (hardly accessible) areas are invited to participate.
We particularly encourage submissions relevant to the following topics:
- the sociolinguistic situation, the level of vitality of languages and dialects in remote areas;
- language contact in remote areas;
- specific grammatical features of languages and dialects in remote areas, if any can be found;
- the problem of describing idioms in terms of their accessibility for researchers (geographical, infrastructural, admitrative).
The conference programme will include three plenary talks and oral presentations by other conference participants (20 min. for presentation and 10 min. for discussion). It will be held in a hybrid format (offline participation and online participation via Zoom). The languages of the conference are English and Russian. Submissions are limited to one individual and one joint abstract per author.
Invited speakers:
Anna Berge (University of Alaska Fairbanks)
Irina Samarina (Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences)
Patience L. Epps (University of Texas in Austin)
Those who would like to take part in the conference should send their anonymous abstracts to the e-mail address conf_minlang@iling-ran.ru by 10 May 2023. The abstract should not exceed one A4 page (Times New Roman, 12 pt, single-spaced, margins 2.5 cm; .pdf, .doc(x) or .rtf formats), one more page can be used for examples and references. Notification of acceptance will be sent out no later than 25 June 2023.
The following information should be provided in the body of the e-mail:
— title of your presentation,
— the authors' first and last names and affiliations,
— your e-mail address and phone number.
Important dates
- 10 May 2023: deadline for submissions
- 2 July 2023: notification of acceptance
- 26–28 October 2023: conference (Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow; online via Zoom)