Objective and Content of the Conference

Language Empires in Comparative Perspective

The first international conference dedicated to „Language Empires in Comparative Perspective“ is going to take place at the University of Bremen on March 3-7, 2012. It will be organised by the scientific research network Language Contact and Language Comparison under the leadership of Prof. Dr. Thomas Stolz. During this conference contributions addressing asymmetric language contacts between Russian, Chinese, Arabic and the Romance languages on the one hand and the languages influenced by them on the other hand are supposed to throw light on potential similarities and differences, so that first generalisations about the phenomenology of Language Empires can be made. The talks will focus on the influence of the dominant prestige language on the lexicon, idioms, syntax, morphology, semantics and phonology of the recipient language. Moreover, cultural, social, political and other contextual conditions circumstances as well as aspects of language policy need to be covered, too.