July 6, 2012 | CRASSH, The Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, Cambridge, UK
Conference: Dr Mari Jones (Department of French/Peterhouse, University of Cambridge), Christopher Connolly (Department of Linguistics/Peterhouse, University of Cambridge)
Language Endangerment: Methodologies and New Challenges
A steadily increasing number of our world’s languages are currently under threat of extinction. Unsurprisingly, therefore, linguists have been seeking to analyse and document these languages while they are still spoken. However, it is striking that, in many cases, researchers have been slow to exploit fully the enhanced resources offered by the development of new technologies for areas ranging from visual and sound archiving to digitisation of textual resources to electronic mapping: resources which, if utilised to their full capacity can also be used as teaching resources in language revitalisation.
However, these new technologies also bring with them a host of new challenges: one cannot simply graft existing practices onto new instruments. Rather, there is a need for traditional methods and ideas to evolve along with the technology. Moreover, lack of interchange with other teams also often leads researchers to continually reinvent the wheel. This conference invites researchers and language-documentation practitioners from around the world to come together to share their methodologies and to learn from each other.
July 1-13, 2012 | Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage, Institut des Sciences de l’Homme, Lyon
Conference: LED-TDR (Langues En Danger – Terrain Documentation Revitalisation), DDL and ICAR, CNRS laboratories
Summer school: Endangered Languages, from Documentation to Revitalization
The focus of this Summer School will be on the links between work on description, documentation and archiving of endangered languages and the conservation, revalorisation and revitalisation of these languages.
The Summer School will include morning lectures by major figures of the field, afternoon courses and workshops and thematic evenings. One goal of the school is to facilitate networking between on-going field projects and provide support for the launching of new field projects linked to revitalisation projects. The Summer School will be trilingual: English-French-Spanish.
On Friday 6th and Saturday 7th of July, the 3L Consortium will host an International Conference on the Evaluation of 20 years of focus on Endangered Languages (1992-2012), with the participation of UNESCO, the CTLDC and the major foundations for Endangered Languages.
June 29-30, 2012 | CRASSH, The Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, Cambridge, UK
Workshop:
Dr Mark Turin (World Oral Literature Project/Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge)
Charting Vanishing Voices: A Collaborative Workshop to Map Endangered Oral Cultures
A two-day collaborative workshop bringing together university-based researchers, heritage specialists and community organisations to draft and design a web catalogue and online map of existing resources on endangered oral cultures.
May 4-6, 2012 | Inter-University Centre, Don Frana Bulića 4, 20000 Dubrovnik, Croatia
Conference: Institute for Anthropological Research, Zagreb
2nd LINEE Conference: Multilingualism in the public sphere
LINEE (Languages in a Network of European Excellence) is a scientific network aimed at investigating linguistic diversity in Europe in a coherent and interdisciplinary way. Following on a very successful international conference on New Challenges for Multilingualism organized by LINEE in 2010 in Dubrovnik, it has been decided to organise the second international conference in 2012 again in Dubrovnik to continue to critically examine the concept of multilingualism in the context of complex cultural and linguistic diversity characterized by mobility, migration and minorities, and to propose further theoretical and research perspectives.
The objective of this second international conference is to provide a forum for researchers studying multilingualism as social practice in various public spaces to rethink the concept of ‘language’, and its role in fostering social cohesion. The conference will gather researchers who investigate plurilingual communication from a perspective that seeks to critically address power relations and includes different types of public spaces as concrete empirical settings, each with their specific contribution to communication across linguistic and cultural boundaries, such as: public places (shops, markets, tourist sites); field of economy and work-organizations; functional/sectoral public arenas of differentiated service-provision (such as education, health-care, administration etc.) and media.