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Call for Papers

Attractive and terrifying, modern cities and megacities structure our lives and communication more than ever. More than 50% of the world’s population live in big cities. If urban conglomerations are places where people from other places gather, they form the communicative conditions in many ways: Migration leads to multilingualism, social diversity leads to complex indexical fields.

The main theme of the 19th Sociolinguistic Symposium will be Language and the city. It brings together sociolinguistic work that sheds light on the relations between the socio-geographical phenomenon urbanity and linguistic variation and change. Thus, we particularly welcome contributions on urban indexical fields, social networks in the city, urban communities of practice, urban styles, languages of urban tribes, urban space, multilingualism, language contact, dialect levelling and koineization, new dialect formation, code-switching, linguistic landscapes and all related topics. We also encourage presentations of new methodologies and tools for data collection, transcription, and analysis.

Since the Sociolinguistics Symposium has always been a place for sociolinguistic discussion in the broad sense, space will also be given to contributions on any other subfield of sociolinguistic research.

Submission types

We invite scholars to submit abstracts for contributions of the following four types:

• Paper in one of our thematic session
  The Sociolinguistics Symposium will have a huge number of thematic sessions, which you can contribute to. Please have a look at our (searchable) list of thematic sessions, where you will also find the descriptions of the aims and the contents of each session:
  ** List of thematic sessions at the Sociolinguistics Symposium 19 **
  If you want to contribute to one of the thematic sessions, please submit an abstract for this specific session. In order to do so, you will need the 'Session ID' (given in the list). Your paper should describe original work, thematically related to the theme of the session.
  Positively reviewed papers that cannot be accepted for a specific thematic session only for organizational reasons will automatically be shifted to the general session.


• Poster in our central poster session on 'big cities'
  The Sociolinguistic Symposium 19 will feature a centrally placed ‘Urban Sociolinguistic Observatory’ in the form of posters, each of which will portray a ‘big city’ in a comparable way. If you want to contribute a poster to this session, please have a look at our description:
  ** Poster Session on Big Cities in the 21st Century – Portraits of Urban Linguistic Ecologies **
  If you want to contribute to this unique poster session, please submit an abstract for this specific session.


• Paper in the general session
  Papers describe original work, either completed research which has given rise to substantial results, or the development of significant new methodologies, or rigorous theoretical, speculative or critical discussions. The papers in the general session are not bound to a specific theme.


• Poster in the general session
  Posters may be a more suitable way of presenting results, work-in-progress, fieldwork, or when large amounts of data need to be displayed. Poster presenters have the opportunity to exchange ideas one-to-one with attendees and to discuss their work in detail. They may also provide handouts with examples or more detailed information.

Guidelines

• All submissions have to be made through our online submission tool (ConfTool).
• Your abstracts should not exceed the length of 500 words (incl. references).
• Each abstract will be reviewed anonymously by at least two peers.
• Each paper will be given a time slot of 20 minutes for the presentation plus 5 minutes for discussion.
• Each participant may have at most two contributions at the conference, one as author and one as co-author.

Deadlines

• The submission period started on December 1, 2011
• Abstract submission ended on January 31, 2012
• Notification of acceptance: April 2012
• Registration for the conference started on April 15, 2012