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------- Forwarded message follows ------- From: Nils Langer <[log in to unmask]> Language History from Below - Linguistic Variation in the Germanic Languages from 1700 to 2000 University of Bristol ENGLAND April 6-9, 2005 website: http://www.bris.ac.uk/depts/German/languagehistory.html FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS Guest Speakers Ana Deumert (Monash, Melbourne) David Denison (Manchester) Ernst Håkon Jahr (Kristiansand) Angelika Linke (Zürich) In a teleological and isolationist approach to the "big" languages, the traditional historiography of the Germanic languages has usually focused on standard or prestige varieties. This conference will seek to develop an alternative perspective: the view "from below", to describe and explain developments within and between these languages in the last 300 years, i.e. roughly since the beginnings of standardisation efforts. On the basis of data hitherto ignored or neglected in language historiography, the question will be addressed to what extent non- prestigious varieties and writers form an important part of the history of Germanic languages. The organisers will particularly welcome corpus- based contributions to the development of alternative approaches, new sources of data and new topics of interest, such as the following: Approaches - social identity, social networks, and individual speakers/writers - communicative patterns of discourse - gender-based variation - contact-induced phenomena Sources - ego-documents (private letter correspondence, diaries) - administrative and legal texts - functional texts (cooking books, instruction manuals, inventories) - pamphlets and newspapers Topics - literacy vs. orality - schooled vs. unschooled speech and writing - prescriptivism and norm codification - linguistic continuities and changes in speech communities - cross-linguistic similarities and diachronic differences Please send your abstract of 250 words by October 31st, 2004 either by email (preferred) or post to Nils Langer, Dept of German, 21 Woodland Road, Bristol, BS8 1TE [log in to unmask] website: http://www.bris.ac.uk/depts/German/languagehistory.html Organisers Nils Langer (Bristol) Stephan Elspaß (Münster) Joachim Scharloth (Zürich) Wim Vandenbussche (Brussel) ---------------------- Dr Nils Langer Lecturer in German Linguistics Dept of German University of Bristol Bristol, England BS8 1TE 0044-(0)117-928 9841 [log in to unmask] homepage: http://eis.bris.ac.uk/~gexnl In early times some sufferer had to sit up with a toothache, and he put in the time inventing the German language. (Mark Twain 1877)