Language in Space: Geographic Perspective on Language Diversity and Diachrony
Description
The Language in Space workshop builds upon a long academic tradition of studying the geography of languages and dialects, the dynamics of language contact, spread and shift, and the social and cultural processes that surround language change. Recent advances in linguistics, geography, and other fields (e.g. genetics) have led to a revitalization of spatially-oriented studies of language and innovative uses of language data to understand human prehistory. This work is being done in a number of fields and subfields – dialectology, phylogenetics, contact studies, spatial analysis, population genetics, etc. Despite the apparent fragmentation of this area of study, there is a new vitality in geographically-oriented work on language evolution. The Language in Space conference aims to bring together diverse scholars to discuss the theories and methodologies that have been employed to study spatial dimension of language change as well as the direction of this emerging field. The invited speakers for this workshop include linguists, geographers, anthropologists, geneticists and psychologists.
Organizers
- Andrew Garrett, garrett AT berkeley DOT edu
- Hannah Haynie, hannah DOT j DOT haynie AT gmail DOT com
