Leading language experts will descend on the University of Aberdeen next week for a key three-day conference.
The University’s Centre for Linguistic Research is hosting the fifth in a series of conferences focussed on research in language variation and change. Presentations will mainly relate to English, but will also look at a wide range of other languages including Scots, French, German, Dutch, Greek, Turkish, Chinese, Czech, Arabic and Japanese.
Scholars from places as diverse as Arizona, New Zealand, Cyprus, South Africa, Taiwan, and Japan will converge on Aberdeen between September 12 and 14 to discuss the latest findings in sociolinguistics (the study of the social functions of language), dialectology (the study of dialects) and historical linguistics (the study of language change and relationships between languages).
Papers dealing with the levelling of dialect differences in modern Britain will be presented, alongside others discussing the maintenance and acceleration of dialect diversity in the face of standardising pressures from the education system and the media.
Aspects of the spread of English as a global language, its influence on other major world languages, and the implications of English’s dominance for the survival of minority languages in the British Isles and beyond, will also be debated.
The meeting coincides with the BBC Voices season of radio and TV programmes and events celebrating variation in English and the other languages of the British Isles.
Dr. Carmen Llamas, a lecturer at the University of Aberdeen, is the originator of the Survey of Regional English (SuRE) method that the BBC has used for the Voices initiative, and which is also being used by academic researchers in Aberdeen and elsewhere in the UK for current projects on variation and change in dialects of English.
Dr Dominic Watt, a Lecturer in Linguistics at the University, has helped organise the event. He said: “'We're very excited to be hosting so many top researchers at the biggest linguistics conference ever held at Aberdeen, and are looking forward to three days of lively debate on a broad range of topics.
“Many of the issues that presenters will be talking about, such as language and ethnicity, legal and political aspects of language, and language death, are ones that affect us all, even in English-speaking countries where it's easy to believe that none of these apply to us very much.
“While some papers deal with quite technical theoretical matters, there is a lot in the programme that will be of interest and relevance to the general public.”
The conference programme and other information can be viewed at: www.abdn.ac.uk/langling/uklvc5/