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.