12th Historical Sociolinguistics Network Conference 2023

31 May – 2 June 2023
Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Theme: Language histories from above and from below

Venue: BIP Meeting Center – Koningsstraat 2-4, 1000 Brussel
(in the center of Brussels)

Keynote speakers:

Shana Poplack (Université d’Ottawa)
“En route to change: The circuitous pathways of spontaneous speech”
Simon Pickl (Paris-Lodron-Universität Salzburg)
“Standardization and linguistic ideals. Relativizing the principle of variation reduction”
Jeroen Darquennes (Université de Namur)
“Voices from oblivion. The forgotten richness of macrosociolinguistic debates on language shift and maintenance”
Salikoko S. Mufwene (University of Chicago)
“The role of population structure in language change”

Registration now open — sign up now!

Registration now open – sign up here!

Registration (before May 1st):
(includes all lectures, coffee breaks, lunches, and welcome reception)

Regular attendees: €195
Student attendees (unfunded): €95
(PhD candidates or students who do not have full funding to attend this conference)
Conference dinner (optional): €60

Late registration (after May 1st):
(includes all lectures, coffee breaks, lunches, and welcome reception)

Regular attendees: €295
Student attendees (unfunded): €150
(PhD candidates or students who do not have full funding to attend this conference)
Conference dinner (optional): €60

Registration and cancellation policy:

Registration is binding. If you wish to cancel your registration please contact the organizers at hison2023@gmail.com. If you cancel before the 1st of May, a processing fee of €50 will be charged. Refunds will be processed within 30 days after the conference. Refunds will not be granted for cancellations received after the 1st of May nor will they be given for no-shows.

Program

https://www.conftool.pro/hison2023/sessions.php

Plenary speakers

Shana Poplack

Shana Poplack is a Distinguished University Professor in the linguistics department of the University of Ottawa and three time holder of the Canada Research Chair in Linguistics. She took her PhD (1979) at the University of Pennsylvania under the supervision of William Labov. As a keynote speaker for the Historical Linguistics Network Conference, she will present on the circuitous pathways of spontaneous speech.

En route to change: The circuitous pathways of spontaneous speech

The gradual ousting of one of two or more expressions of the “same thing” is the most straightforward and intuitive scenario for change. But resulting shifts in rates of occurrence of competing variants may stem from a variety of other sources as well (Poplack & Tagliamonte 2001). Even where they do signal change, rarely is it confined to the rise or decline of a variant, and even more rarely will it go to completion, especially in the time spans typically available to linguistic inquiry. These facts highlight the importance of focusing more systematically on the transition period between endpoints of change. What transpires in this interval? How do changes spread across grammatical sectors and communities of speakers, and what does their trajectory reveal about the productivity, dispersion and potential for survival of the variants involved?
Drawing on the Comparative Variationist framework (Poplack & Meechan 1998; Tagliamonte 2002), we address these questions through analysis of three corpora of spoken Quebec French (QF; Poplack 1989; 2015; Poplack & St-Amand 2009), which together cover an apparent-time span of a century and half, offering a virtually unprecedented amount of time to trace the existence and progression of slow-moving changes in speech. QF lends itself particularly well to this endeavour, since it is widely assumed to have changed profoundly, whether through isolation from metropolitan French or contact with English in Canada.
Sustained analyses of a number of morphosyntactic variables in these materials did in fact turn up some spectacular changes in the distribution of alternating variants, but the configuration of environmental factors affecting their selection is more revealing. Such conditioning can be construed as the grammar of the variability, and its varying dispositions may be marshalled at different points in time to identify and classify types and pathways of change. This exercise uncovered remarkable stability at the core grammatical level. But a recent deep dive (Poplack & Dion 2021) into these competing trajectories revealed alterations of many more subtle types that throw the standard enterprise of relying on rates to infer change into doubt. Among the most potentially misleading are rising rates with loss of productivity, stable rates with change of function, and mismatches in rates and conditioning. Importantly, only some of these qualify as structural changes, others are more accurately viewed as changes in the “textual habitat” (Szmrecsanyi 2016). Indeed, the vagaries of the linguistic contexts hosting the variants (whether receding, expanding, or serving as “last bastions”) play a crucial role in these and other previously undocumented developments. The same is true of extra-linguistic contexts, since some variants may be totally absent from the speech of some community members, while increasing or waning in that of others.
In this paper we review these developments, largely invisible to any but quantitative variationist analysis over the longue durée, and propose a more holistic approach to the identification and assessment of change. This would incorporate not only rates, but also conditioning and context, while simultaneously taking account of productivity and dispersion. We argue that only once the various types of change have been apprehended in the stream of spontaneous speech and accurately identified, can we begin to address questions about where they occur (if at all), when and under what conditions.

Simon Pickl

Simon Pickl is a professor at the Paris-London university in Salzburg, Austria. He specializes in language variation and change with a particular focus on German. In the area of dialectology, he works with geostatistical methods in order to understand the geographic distribution of dialect features and how spatial patterns of language variation are shaped by geographical, political and societal factors.

Standardization and linguistic ideals. Relativizing the principle of variation reduction

Jeroen Darquennes

Jeroen Darquennes is Professor in German Linguistics and General Linguistics. His research focuses on language contact and conflict among linguistic minorities in Europe. He is the author of dozens of publications on aspects of language policy and planning in Europe, he is one of the editors of Sociolinguistica (the yearbook of European sociolinguistics published by de Gruyter) and a member of the editorial board of international journals such as Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics (de Gruyter) and Language, Culture & Curriculum (Routledge), of which he was associate editor between 2013 and 2016. He was director of the department of Germanic languages and literatures between 2012 and 2015. From 2016 to 2021 he directed the Namur Institute of Language, Text and Transmediality. In 2021-2022 he held a Francqui Chair (in the field of multilingualism and language contact) at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

Voices from oblivion: The forgotten richness of macrosociolinguistic debates on language maintenance and language shift.

Over the past decades protagonists of critical sociolinguistics and the sociolinguistics of globalization have repeatedly questioned the relevance of macrosociolinguistic research in the tradition of Joshua A. Fishman. Partly because of its rather essentialist conceptions of language and the structure of society, traditional macrosociolinguistics would fail to adequately illuminate the heightened complexity of language practices in an increasingly superdiverse world. One cannot ignore that critical sociolinguistics and the sociolinguistics of globalization have succeeded in promoting concepts and methods that are eagerly used to study many different aspects of today’s linguistic diversity in a society that can hardly be compared to the society in which the founding fathers of the sociology of language and macrosociolinguistics were active. The drive for innovation that marks much of what in a short period of time has become mainstream sociolinguistics is certainly to be applauded. What is debatable, however, is the way in which some protagonists of critical sociolinguistics and the sociolinguistics of globalization sometimes tend to posit stances, characterize views that are prevalent in macrosociolinguistics as dust-laden remnants of 19^th-century thinking or argue in favor of ditching older concepts altogether (Darquennes 2014; Pavlenko 2018; Darquennes, Salmons and Vandenbussche 2019; Edwards 2022). In the introduction to his edited volume entitled Sociolinguistics. Theoretical Debates, Coupland (2016: 12) characterizes sociolinguists’ “recent enthusiasm for theoretical innovation and change” as being “admirable, engaging, and often inspiring”. He argues, however, that “progressive evolution can be more productive than abrupt revolution” (which, as one could argue, is how sociolinguistics emerged, cf. Wölck 1977) and that “[i]n many cases what we arguably need is to reinflect and retheorize older concepts (community, variety, diversity, identity, standard and vernacular, mediation, etc.) rather than dispense with them altogether” (Coupland 2016: 12). Obviously, researchers whose work is rooted in the macrosociolinguistic tradition can contribute to such an endeavor by drawing the attention to and building on the richness of the constructive debates that took place in networks of scholars interested in processes of language maintenance and shift in minority language communities. Focusing on a selection of debates in sociolinguistics’ fairly recent history, this talk seeks to contribute to a more systematic and detailed historiography of ideas, beliefs and concepts that circulate(d) in the sociolinguistic enterprise and that color the variety multifocal lenses used to look back into the future (Krogull & Darquennes 2020).

Salikoko Mufwene

Salikoko Mufwene is the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor of linguistics at the University of Chicago, where he also obtained his PhD (1979). He was recently elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2022. Professor Mufwene has worked extensively on the development of creole languages, the morphosyntax of Bantu languages and on African American Vernacular English. He has also published several articles and chapters about language evolution, a topic on which he will present as a keynote speaker for the Historical Linguitics Network Conference. Professor Mufwene will hold his presentation on the role of population structure in language change.

The role of population structure in language change

Population structure is a cluster of ecological factors that I have invoked to account for differential language evolution, especially regarding the emergence of creoles and of World Englishes (relative to other modern language varieties with which they share their lexifiers), as well as language endangerment and loss (LEL). It includes the socioeconomic structure of a population, including whether the latter is segregated and/or stratified by ethnicity, race, or socioeconomic class, which group(s) experience(s) the most pressure to accommodate which other group, and what are the associated patterns of social interactions, notwithstanding other traditional factors such as gender, age, level of education, etc. From a uniformitarian perspective, I want to show how population structure can also help us explain some changes in the distant past, for instance, how Latin evolved into the Romance languages from several local or regionalneo-Latin varieties spoken in provinces of part of the Western Roman Empire to modern varieties now called French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish, among others. I want to show how the evolution was multilateral and quite diverse (rather than unilateral), as well as why Classical Latin lost while Vulgar Latin prevailed. Focusing on France and Spain, I also wish to show how this evolution had to be gradual, depending largely on the success of Roman-style economy and urbanization, and on changing power relations between Christians and Muslims in Iberia in the Middle Ages, rather than on factors such as prestige and language policy. The same factors bearing today on language shift applied then.

Accommodation

Participants are required to book their own accommodation as this is not included in the conference fee.

Some recommended hotels near the conference venue:

Aparthotel Adagio access Brussels Europe (11 min. walk to conference venue)
Aparthotel offering fully equipped apartment studios for 2-4 people, near the EU institutions and not far from the city center.
Ibis Brussels off Grand Place (***) (10 min. walk to conference venue)
Ibis economy hotel, perfectly located in the heart of the city center and near the central railway station
Novotel Brussels off Grand Place (****) (10 min. walk to conference venue)
Four-star hotel right in the center of the city, near the central railway station
Le Louise Hotel Brussels – MGallery (*****) (12 min. walk to conference venue)
Luxury boutique hotel in the fancy Louise shopping district, a short walk from the touristy city center
Happy Guesthouse: with discount code “Happy-VUB” (5 min. walk to conference venue and 2 min. walk from the central railway station) Small and adorable hotel in the historical city-centre, owned and managed by a local.
Accor Group Hotel : 30810315092931NZ (Loyalty or subscription number)

Other hotel options near the conference venue to be added soon.

Venue and travel

Venue

The 12th Historical Sociolinguistics Network Conference will be held in the historic center of Brussels, more specifically in BIP – Huis van het Gewest on Place Royale , which is located within walking distance from the Grand-Place as well as the Royal Palace of Brussels.

Travel

If you prefer to come to Brussels by plane, we recommend traveling to Brussels Airport. The airport has a direct train connection to the center of Brussels (stop: Bruxelles-Central), which only takes 30 minutes. You can check the timetable of the trains here. It is important to note that if you travel from the airport to the center of Brussels, you must include the Brussels Airport Supplement when purchasing a ticket to exit the train station within the airport.

Another option is to fly to the Brussels South Charleroi Airport. To get to the city of Brussels you can either book a taxi, or take a shuttle bus from Flibco, which will take you to the train station Bruxelles-Midi in about an hour. From Bruxelles-Midi you can take the tram, metro or train to any place in Brussels. Instead of taking a taxi or a shuttle bus, you can also take the public bus from Charleroi Airport to the train station of Charleroi, where you can take a train to Brussels, although this is less convenient.

If you prefer to travel by train, we suggest booking a ticket to Bruxelles-Midi or Bruxelles-Central. From there you can easily reach any part of Brussels by bus, tram, metro or train.

Events

Belgian beer reception — Wednesday 31st May

A wonderful welcome reception serving authentic Belgian beers (and other drinks!).

Location: the historic Brewers Guild House on the Grand Place

Included in the registration price for all conference participants. Registration required.

City walk

A historic walk through Brussels’ multilingual history!

Thursday 1st June

Included in the registration price for all conference participants. Registration required.

Conference dinner

Dinner is a classic Belgian brasserie — venue to be announced soon. Three courses, drinks included.

Thursday 1st June

Registration required, € 60 per person.

Call for papers

Now closed!

The conference welcomed submissions for:

individual presentations,
poster presentations, and
thematic panels, roundtables or workshops.

We welcome contributions on themes addressed by researchers working in historical sociolinguistics, within a broad view of the field, including (sub)disciplines and themes such as dialect contact and new dialect formation, historical dialectology and geolinguistics, historical discourse analysis, historical pragmatics, history of linguistics and the history of language teaching, intra-speaker variation, networks and communities of practice, language and gender, language attitudes and ideologies, language history ‘from below’, language maintenance, shift and revitalization, language planning and policy in the past, linguistic identities and style, methodology and corpus linguistics, multilingualism, language contact, code-switching, registers, genres and text types, representations of speech in writing, standardization, norms, purism and prescriptivism, variationist sociolinguistics, and language variation and change. Also scholars working in disciplines and theoretical frameworks other than those typically associated with sociolinguistics – such as linguistic anthropology, literary analysis, cultural studies or history – are warmly welcomed to submit proposals.

We particularly – but not exclusively – invite submissions focusing on the central theme of the 2023 conference:

“Language histories from above and from below”

For decades now, historical sociolinguists have argued that we need to supplement the traditional accounts of language histories ‘from above’, marked by the different types of biases in terms of writers and texts, with new approaches incorporating perspectives ‘from below’. Studies taking such perspectives try to widen the scope of the material used in constructing language history, by incorporating handwritten texts and less formal writings, often closer to conceptual orality (e.g. ego-documents), written by men, women and children from different social ranks and backgrounds – pushing the primary focus away from literary and highly formal writings of highly-educated elite writers as our windows into the past. Nonetheless, such perspectives from below should be seen as complementary to older and ongoing work from above, and the interaction between language histories from below and from above is still an important topic to explore, as are the links between social conceptualizations of ‘from above’ and ‘from below’, versus the more traditional Labovian interpretation of changes through the speech community above or below the level of speakers’ conscious awareness. As such, we invite contributions taking more traditional ‘from above’ perspectives, as well as contributions working with approaches or material ‘from below’, in addition to any studies focusing on the interactions between these two.

Individual papers are formal presentations on original research by one or more authors, lasting a total of 30 minutes (20 minutes for presentation and 10 minutes for discussion). The length of abstracts for individual papers is max. 500 words (including possible references).

Poster presentations can be used to share work-in-progress or upcoming research, fieldwork, the construction of new corpora, or results of empirical research containing data that are best presented in a visual format. A block of time will be designated when presenters are available to discuss their posters, to offer the opportunity for individualized informal discussions. The length of abstracts for posters is max. 500 words (including possible references).

For proposals regarding thematic panels, roundtables or workshops, we are open to any suggestions coming from the scholarly community. Ideally, such events follow the 30-minute build-up of the general conference, so that participants can switch between the general session and specific events. We strongly prefer shorter, focused events (e.g. a general introduction paper, 3-4 papers by different contributors, and a final discussion or reflection) than longer events. Panel organizers are expected to invite contributors, including potential discussant(s), in advance, and submit one full proposal which includes (1) the general aims and rationale of the event (max. 500 words), as well as (2) the names, affiliations and short abstracts (200-300 words) for each contribution (including introduction and/or discussion, although the abstract may be limited to just one or two sentences in those cases). The organizers take active responsibility for the quality of the contributions to their panel, and are expected to guide their participants through the process so that all formal requirements are duly fulfilled and the abstracts satisfy the expected international standards.

Organization

Main organizers:
Yasmin Crombez | Wim Vandenbussche | Julie Van Ongeval | Rik Vosters

Organizing committee:
Klaas Bentein (Universiteit Gent) | Anne Breitbarth (Universiteit Gent) | Yasmin Crombez (FWO & Vrije Universiteit Brussel) | Ludovic De Cuypere (Universiteit Gent & Vrije Universiteit Brussel) | Stefano De Pascale (KULeuven & Vrije Universiteit Brussel) | Chris De Wulf (Universität Zurich & Vrije Universiteit Brussel) | Christa Schneider (Vrije Universiteit Brussel & Universität Bern) | Mark Janse (Universiteit Gent) | Philipp Krämer (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) | Bart Lambert (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) | Eline Lismont (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) | Catharina Peersman (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) | Peter Petré (Universiteit Antwerpen) | Jill Puttaert (Universiteit Leiden & Vrije Universiteit Brussel) | Magda Serwadczak (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) | Mieke Vandenbroucke (Universiteit Antwerpen) | Wim Vandenbussche (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) | Iris Van de Voorde (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) | Julie Van Ongeval (FWO & Vrije Universiteit Brussel) | Charlotte Verheyden (FWO & Vrije Universiteit Brussel) | Ulrike Vogl (Universiteit Gent) | Rik Vosters (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)

Scientific committee:
Anne Breitbarth (Universiteit Gent) | Agnette Nesse (University of Bergen) | Alexander Bergs (University of Osnabrueck) | Alexandra D’Arcy (University of Victoria) | Andreas H. Jucker (University of Zurich) | Anita Auer (University of Lausanne) | Anna Havinga (University of Bristol) | Arja Nurmi (University of Tampere) | Bart Lambert (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) | Bridget Drinka (The University of Texas at San Antonio) | Carolina Amador-Moreno (University of Bergen) | Chris De Wulf (Universität Zurich & Vrije Universiteit Brussel) | Christopher Strelluf (University of Warwick) | Daniel Schreier (University of Zurich) | David Britain (University of Bern) | Donald Tuten (Emory University) | Ernst Håkon Jahr (University of Agder) | Fernando Tejedo-Herrero (University of Wisconsin) | Giedrius Subačius (University of Illinois at Chicago) | Gijsbert Rutten (Leiden University) | Gro-Renée Rambø (University of Agder) | Hanna Rutkowska (Adam Mickiewicz University) | Horst Simon (Freie Universität Berlin) | Ingrid Tieken Boon-van Ostade (Leiden University) | Israel Sanz-Sánchez (West Chester University) | Jacob Thaisen (University of Oslo) | Jane Hodson (University of Sheffield) | Javier Calle-Martín (University of Malaga) | Jennifer Hendriks (Australian National University) | Joanna Kopaczyk (University of Glasgow) | José Del Valle (CUNY) | Joseph Salmons (University of Wisconsin) | Josh Brown (University of Western Australia) | Juan Antonio Cutillas-Espinosa (University of Murcia) | Juan Camilo Conde-Silvestre (University of Murcia) | Juan Manuel Hernández-Campoy (University of Murcia) | Julia Fernández-Cuesta (University of Seville) | Klaas Bentein (Universiteit Gent) | Kristine Horner (University of Sheffield) | Laura Wright (University of Cambridge) | Ludovic De Cuypere (Universiteit Gent & Vrije Universiteit Brussel) | Mari Jones (University of Cambridge) | Marijke van der Wal (Leiden University) | Marina Dossena (University of Bergamo) | Mark Janse (Universiteit Gent) | Mark Richard Lauersdorf (University of Kentucky) | Markus Schiegg (University Friedrich-Alexander of Erlangen-Nurnberg) | Matylda Włodarczyk (Adam Mickiewicz University) | Memet Aktürk-Drake (Uppsala University) | Merja Kytö (Uppsala University) | Merja Stenroos (University of Stavanger) | Michael Schulte (University of Agder) | Michelle Waldispühl (University of Gothenburg) | Mieke Vandenbroucke (Universiteit Antwerpen) | Minna Nevala (University of Helsinki) | Minna Palander-Collin (University of Helsinki) | Nils Langer (Europa-Universität Flensburg) | Nuria Yáñez-Bouza (University of Vigo) | Peter Petré (Universiteit Antwerpen) | Peter Trudgill (University of East Anglia / University of Fribourg) | Philipp Krämer (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) | Randi Neteland (University of Bergen / Høgskulen på Vestlandet) | Rik Vosters (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) | Rita Franceschini (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano) | Samantha M. Litty (Europa-Universität Flensburg) | Sandrine Tailleur (Université du Québec à Chicoutimi) | Sarah Thomason (University of Michigan) | Stefano De Pascale (KULeuven & Vrije Universiteit Brussel) | Stephan Elspaß (University of Salzburg) | Susan Fitzmaurice (University of Sheffield) | Tamara García-Vidal (University of Murcia) | Tania Avilés Vergara (Universidad Católica de Temuco) | Tanja Säily (University of Helsinki) | Terttu Nevalainen (University of Helsinki) | Ulrike Vogl (Universiteit Gent) | Wendy Ayres-Bennett (University of Cambridge) | Wim Remysen (Université de Sherbrooke) | Wim Vandenbussche (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)

Contact

hison2023@gmail.com

Main organizers:
Yasmin Crombez
Wim Vandenbussche
Julie Van Ongeval
Rik Vosters