German(ic) in language contact: Grammatical and sociolinguistic dynamics

 

Workshop at Freie Universität Berlin

Organizers: Potsdam/Berlin research team on German in Namibia

Date: 3–5 July 2019

Contact between speakers of different languages or varieties leads to dynamics in many respects. This workshop is going to focus on German and other Germanic languages in multilingual contexts, bringing together two strands that are motivated by our research on German in Namibia: On the one hand, we invite contribution focussing on the dynamics of German in contact, i.e., on language variation and change within German. Topics to be discussed include grammatical change, the role of norms, normative orientations, and the role of speakers’ attitudes. On the other hand, the workshop aims to integrate this with papers focussing on the specifics of language contact phenomena when closely related Germanic languages come into contact. Interesting topics will be, for instance, how to handle contact phenomena of closely related languages (such as German in contact with Afrikaans and English in Namibia, given the further possibility of a Low German substrate), or how to disentangle language internal and language external factors (such as contact) in the explanation of innovations.

The workshop will bring together scholars who share a general interest in language contact phenomena but work in different frameworks, such as colleagues who are concerned with Sprachinseln, historical (socio-)linguistics, theoretical approaches to multilingualism et cetera.

Invited speakers:

Dalit Assouline (Haifa)

Hans C. Boas (Austin)

Ana Deumert (Cape Town)

Steffen Höder (Kiel)

Nils Langer (Flensburg)

Rosemarie Tracy (Mannheim)

Abstracts: We invite abstracts for 20-minute talks. Abstracts should be anonymous and at most 500 words in length, plus examples and references. Please send your abstracts to histling@zedat.fu-berlin.de, and include your name, affiliation and the title of the abstract in the body of the e-mail.

Deadline for submission of abstracts: 11 January 2019

Notification of acceptance:  18 January 2019