SLBI 2024
Small languages, big ideas: the smaller Germanic languages from a theoretical, general and comparative perspective
The Department of Scandinavian Languages at Uppsala University, with the external participation of the Virtual Institute for Afrikaans (South Africa), organizes the third edition of the conference Small languages, big ideas (SLBI), which will take place in Uppsala on Thursday 13 and Friday 14 June 2024.
SLBI 2024 brings together researchers working on Germanic languages from a variety of linguistic subdisciplines, such as phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, microvariation, psycholinguistics, first and second language acquisition, and didactics. Germanic languages hold a big research potential for broader language theoretical questions and offer a well-equipped, readily accessible linguistic laboratory because of their rich (micro)variation.
Confirmed invited speakers
• Ass. Prof. Dr habil. Ermenegildo Bidese (Trento)
Syntactic variation in the German(ic) language islands in Northern Italy. What Cimbrian and other microvarieties tell us about the structure of Germanic languages
• Prof. Dr Veturliði G. Óskarsson (Uppsala)
The tale of a language on life support - from purism to language technology
Call for Abstracts
We invite abstracts that address one or more Germanic language(s) other than the two largest Germanic languages English and German. Aside from languages such as Dutch, Afrikaans, the Scandinavian languages, and Frisian, we also explicitly invite research on regional language(s), contact language(s) or dialect(s) from a general or comparative perspective, linking it to linguistic theory, be it from a synchronic or diachronic perspective.
We specifically encourage junior researchers and students to submit abstracts. In addition to oral presentations, the conference will also feature a poster session at the end of the first day. We particularly invite students to take this as an opportunity to present their own work.
Oral talks will be 20 minutes long + 10 minutes for discussion in English or German. You can submit your abstract in any Germanic variety you like, but please also provide an English translation for practical purposes. We encourage the use of languages other than English and/or German as metalanguages for the posters. However, if you would like to present a poster in a different language, minority language or dialect, we kindly ask you to provide an English translation of your poster as a handout to ensure intelligibility.
Your abstract should be maximally one A4 page, single-spaced, with 2.5 cm margins and a 12-point font, formatted as a PDF file. We allow for one additional page with data and figures, and a final page with references.
The deadline (January 22, 2024 at 08:00 Central European Time) has passed.