Forty Years After: Tidemarks, Legacies and Futures of Research on Language Contact
This year marks forty years since the publication of Pidginization and Creolization of Languages. Edited by Dell Hymes, the volume has been foundational for research on language contact and creolization. Furthermore, in foreshadowing our intellectual engagements with the shifting realities of today, many of its insights and implications have entered into intellectual traffic with other fields and disciplines. The field of research charted by Hymes and DeCamp in their introductory remarks in the volume was as much concerned with questions of population flows, the linguistic and communicative continuities and challenges that these flows entailed, and the historical and social forces that they carried, as it was driven by the questions of formal linguistic processes that emerged to confront and attenuate these challenges. We would like to reflect on the trajectories of research on contact languages and language contact over the past four decades by asking: In what ways have we been carrying out, redefining, as well as perhaps forgetting the field’s early questions? Which of the initial problems and insights have remained salient? Which ones have been validated and invigorated by the cross-currents of intellectual engagements of today? Which ones may have been washed away?
Suggested themes for papers include but are not limited to:
– Ethnographic perspectives on language contact and emergence
– Language contact and digital media
– Contact languages and linguistic heritage
– Contact languages, nationalism, and citizenship
– Displacements and relocalizations of language
The panel organizers are Janina Fenigsen and Paul Garrett. Please send proposals to Janina: fenigsen@uwm.edu