January 2012
Dear friends
Jacob’s mail about our SS 19 panels earlier today reminded me that the SLICE End of January News is overdue.
I can report that Media Strand Slicers in Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark are busy these days putting together an application to NOS-HS (a Nordic research foundation) for a SLICE Media Strand project in the Nordic countries. Our deadline is February 15.
Otherwise, not much to report on from Copenhagen, apart from extremely low temperatures, but I know that’s no news anywhere in Europe at the moment.
So let me just try and warm you a little, and ease my bad conscience: SLICE Volume II as well as our Homepage are high on the agenda this spring.
February 2012
Dear friends
For once Slice News is out too early! The reason is that votre vieux rédacteur s’en va en vacances tomorrow and intends to stay away from his computer for a couple of weeks. So here is the February news:
SS 19
The reviewing of abstracts for SS 19 is now in progress. From the conference organizers, we have received 18 abstracts to be assessed for inclusion in the Media Panel, and 15 abstracts to be assessed in the Experiment Panel. More than 10 of these submissions involve slicers.
Every submission for a panel is reviewed by a member of the Scientific Committee in addition to being reviewed by the panel convenor(s). At this stage, no limit has been given to the number of papers per thematic session. The deadline for the review process is March 15.
NordCorp
As reported in the previous newsletter, slicers in Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark have been busy working on an application to NOS-HS (a Nordic research foundation) for a SLICE Media Strand project in the Nordic countries. The application was submitted a whole day before the February 15 deadline.
We have learned that the foundation received 190 applications. 8-10 projects will be funded – so please help us cross our fingers.
March 2012
Dear friends
The End of Marts News is just a seasonal greetings card. I hurry to send it before the Norwegians surrender to their national character and drar på ski i påskefjellet (leave for skiing in the Easter mountain).
Whatever your plans may be – vacation or work, mountain or sea – please receive my best wishes for the coming week!
April 2012
Dear friends
SLICE News can this time reveal the proposed, preliminary programs for the two SS 19 panels in which many SLICERS are involved as organizers and participants. Please find them attached [1, 2].
I look forward to attending these panels and to seeing many of you in Berlin.
May 2012
Dear SLICE friends
The summer just visited Copenhagen for a few days and left again. If the same happened to you, here comes the End of May SLICE news to cheer you up.
The best of wishes, especially to those of you who are busy these days writing up your contributions to the SLICE 2 volume on “Experimental studies of changing language standards in contemporary Europe” J
Tore
Noel Ó Murchadha, PhD
Idé-eolaíocht agus Daonteangeolaíocht na Gaeilge: Aird ar éagsúlacht teanga na Gaeilge
[Ideology and Folklinguistics of Irish: Perception of linguistic variation in Irish]
The very good news arrived in a May 11 mail from Tadhg:
“I am delighted to let you know that Noel Ó Murchadha successfully defended his thesis at his viva voce exam this morning. [Examiners…] praised the research and recommended that Noel should prepare it for publication as soon as possible as it will undoubtedly be a key reference for future research in this field”.
On behalf of all your SLICE friends: Comhghairdeas ó chroí le Noel!
Consulting for the Danish Broadcasting Corporation
Jacob Thoegersen sends this interesting message:
I have been contacted by the Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR) and asked to act as a consultant on an attitude survey they are conducting. The DR is by their public service contract obliged to guarantee “high quality in the language they broadcast”. Furthermore, they must “safeguard the use of Danish”. To gauge how well they are fulfilling these (somewhat abstract) requirements, the DR language editor has commissioned a survey. And it is the analysis and interpretation of this, that I have agreed to participate in.
The actual questions and the results are all very hush-hush for now, but I think it is positive that we SLICERs are invited to collaborate with the DR and that we are not seen as the annoying no-it-alls. Also, a good relationship with the DR may come in handy in future research projects and applications…
HERA application for SLICE work
Only a few of you heard about it, but we did submit an outline proposal to HERA’s Joint Research Programme on “Cultural Encounters”. You can find the text of the proposal attached (Nik Coupland did a marvellous job on “anthologizing TK”, as he glossed it). The size of the SLICE network makes it meaningless to construe applications with Principal Investigators from all countries, so we operated with 2 PIs for the ‘media strand’ (Jan-Ola Östman and Jannis Androutsopoulos) and 2 for the ‘experimental strand’ (Stef Grondelaers and TK). If we are invited to submit a full proposal – and eventually get some money (max 1 million Euros), it will be used in a common SLICE and ‘pan-European’ spirit.
July 2012
Dear SLICE friends
To be able to alert you about the announcement of the SS 19 programme (promised for July 1), I waited and waited… so that this ended up as a Mid-July issue of SLICE News.
SS 19
The programme is now to be found at http://www.sociolinguistics-symposium-2012.de/, and if you are going to the Berlin conference and have not registered yet, you should do so today if you want the reduced price.
Status of applications
Here is some information about the status of various attempts at gathering money for our SLICE endeavours…
– This has not been mentioned in the SLCE News before, but I was fairly sure that I would be able to tell you very good news this time about big money for a sociolinguistics centre here in Denmark – money that SLICE would have benefitted by. We came very close and did believe in it, but it ended with a major disappointment in mid-June. (The message here is not ‘we give up’, it is ‘we keep trying’ J).
– Whether we will be invited to submit a full proposal to HERA based on our outline proposal will be announced this month.
– The NORDCORP decision has been postponed to September due to the vast amount of applications.
New book by slicer Stephen Leonard
If you don’t know what book to bring to the beach, let me suggest Steve’s monograph on “Language, Society and Identity in early Iceland” which was published last month.
http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1118294963.html
I hope you can find the summer somewhere close to you. It is not hiding in Denmark.
Anyway, I hope you have a good time and look forward to seeing some of you in Berlin in August.
I just received two good reasons for disturbing your summer with a Supplement to the other day’s Mid-July issue.
In compensation, you’ll be spared from receiving an End of July issue.
Tore
Invitation to submit a Full Proposal to HERA
We made it to the Alpes; now there is a hors catégorie climb in front:
“For your information, we received 593 Outline Proposals, out of which 89 have been invited to the second stage of the selection process. This represents a success rate of 15 %. In total, upon the completion of the second stage of the selection process, approximately 18 proposals will be funded.”
Invitation to go to India
Jacob sends this:
Slicers Jan-Ola (Finland) and Jacob (Denmark) have had their panel on "the role of 'experts' in late modern media' accepted for the 13th International Pragmatics Conference, and they encourage Slicers to submit paper proposals for the panel. The conference will be held in New Delhi from 8-13 September 2013: http://ipra.ua.ac.be/main.aspx?c=.CONFERENCE13. The panel aims to widen the view on ideology within the media beyond merely the media's role as disseminators of standard language and other varieties. We try to widen both the definition of "media" and the definition of "ideologies" to look at how media shape our norms and ideologies in general and how norms and ideologies of the media are changing. Needless to say, a language perspective on the issues (e.g. "the role of language experts in the media" or "the media as language experts") is most welcome. You can read more about the theme of the panel in the attached abstract.
We want to mention the rules of the conference upfront. To submit a proposal and present at the conference, you must be a member of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA). Since submission happens in 2012 and the conference is in 2013, effectively you have to be a member for at least two years to participate. Membership is 75€ per year, http://ipra.ua.ac.be/main.aspx?c=*HOME&n=1266. If you are already a member, this of course is not an issue.
If you are interested in participating in the panel, please send us the word and a preliminary title/abstract by 1 September 2012. We should have time for approx. 10 papers, hopefully, several of these will be from fellow Slicers.
September 2012
Dear SLICE friends
Let me begin with an attempt to spread some good SLICE vibrations (to make up for being two weeks behind with what should have been the End of August Newsletter):
1) It was a pleasure to meet you last month at SS19 in Berlin, wasn’t it? SLICE activists were active all over the place, in particular in the two panels organized by Nicolai Pharao and Marie Maegaard on ‘Experimental methods in the study of social meaning’ and by Jacob Thoegersen, Jan-Ola Östman and TK on ‘Changing linguistic norms in the audiovisual media’. It was a pleasure, indeed, to see that some of the work that has been, or is in the process of being, published in SLICE volumes 1 and 2 was presented at the conference.
2) It certainly IS a pleasure, in the wake of SS19, to be able to welcome four new SLICERs to the mailing list: Spiros A. Moschonas, Sarah Van Hoof, Jürgen Jaspers, and Mathias Arden, who all participated in our ’media’ panel.
Volume 3 in our SLICE book series: call for papers
It is also a great pleasure to be able to announce that the plans for SLICE volume 3 are to gather papers on “Standard language and language norms in the media” (working title), dealing with changing language norms in the media and their wider effect on issues of language standardization and language norms. Like volumes 1 and 2, SLICE volume 3 will be divided into two parts, with Part 1 consisting of reports from empirical studies, and Part II consisting of papers with a more theoretical purpose.
The volume will be edited by Jacob Thoegersen and Nikolas Coupland. They are interested in receiving proposals not only from those of you who presented ’language and media’ related papers in Berlin but from all interested SLICERs. In addition, they may also invite contributions from other scholars who do interesting work in this field.
Please announce your interest by sending Jacob (jthoegersen@hum.ku.dk) an abstract of your paper (no more than one page long), before November 15. If you have questions, Jacob will be more than happy to answer them.
After having received the proposals, the editors will send more information about the book as a whole and specify suggestions for each of the authors in the second half of November. The deadline for first drafts will probably be set at June 1, 2013 – with a possible publication at the end of 2013, or maybe more realistically in the spring of 2014.
As a kind of preliminary framework for the coming volume, I reproduce the description of the SS19 panel on “Changing linguistic norms in the audiovisual media” at the end of this mail.
Status of efforts to obtain funding
– As mentioned in the previous Newsletter, we were invited to submit a Full Proposal to HERA. Work on this is in progress. The deadline is October 11.
– It is now announced on the NOS-HS homepage that the NORDCORP decision has been postponed to October.
In Lithuania
SLICE member Giedrius Tamaševičius defended his PhD with success on September 25. Congratulations Giedrius from all of your SLICE friends!
(If you keep a SLICE News archive J Giedrius presented his PhD project in Slice News ultimo June 2010).
In Iceland
The 25 Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics will take place in Reykjavík from May 13-15 next year.
SLICE member Ásta Svavarsdóttir is the leader of the project “Language Change and Linguistic Variation in 19th-Century Icelandic and the Emergence of a National Standard” and announces that her proposal for a theme session on "Foundations of language standardization" has been accepted. The proposal is reproduced below. Abstracts should be submitted to the conference website before November 1. https://conference.hi.is/scl25/call-for-papers/.
25-SCL: 25th Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics
Reykjavík 13.- 15. maí 2013
Proposal for a theme session
Foundations of language standardization
Most European nation-states can be described as having „standard language cultures“ (Milroy 2001, 2012), and even if there are formal, functional and historical differences between the various standard languages, they have a similar status as a common supralocal norm of speaking and/or writing in their respective communities. In discussions on language, this status is frequently connected to prestige, but Milroy has pointed out that even if the standard language tends to have prestige in the community, it is not a linguistic feature, and he prefers to define standardization as „the imposition of uniformity upon a class of objects“ (cf. e.g. 2001:531). A common characteristic of standard languages would thus be their formal uniformity vis-à-vis other language varieties used in the same community. The „standard“ is a common point of reference in variationist studies, and scholars have maintained that the ideology of the standard language, prevailing in many societies, has affected linguistic descriptions and theories that tend to take standard languages as the object of investigation, ignoring the structural characteristics and histories of other varieties (see e.g. discussions in Milroy 2001, 2012 and Watts 2012).
The European national languages were mostly standardized in the period from the 17th to the 19th centuries. But even if standard languages tend to be more stable than other, less normative varieties, they do change as other languages do, and language standardization is thus an ongoing process. Furthermore, language standards can undergo more drastic changes through restandardization, and in certain cases, a destandardization can take place. Language standardization and standard languages have attracted considerable attention in sociolinguistics (cf. Daumert and Vandenbussche (2003) for a comparative overview of the Germanic languages, and Kristiansen and Coupland (2011) on the current situation in Europe). The session will address language standardization and its foundations from different perspectives. Papers on the linguistic, sociolinguistic, pragmatic and ideological foundations of standard languages, and the process of standardization are welcome. We seek presentations of diachronic as well as synchronic studies and on the development and interrelation of linguistic and sociolinguistic change and the prevailing language attitudes and ideology in the community.
References
Deumert, Ana & Wim Vandenbussche (eds.). 2003. Germanic Standardizations. Past to Present. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Kristiansen, Tore & Nikolas Coupland (eds.). 2011. Standard Languages and Language Standards in a Changing Europe. Oslo: Novus Press.
Milroy, James. 2001. Language ideologies and the consequences of standardization. Journal of Sociolinguistics 5/4:530-555.
Milroy, James. 2012. Sociolinguistics and Ideologies in Language History. In: Hernández-Campoy, J.M. & J.C. Conde-Silvestre (eds.), The Handbook of Historical Sociolinguistics, pp. 571-584. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Watts, Richard J. 2012. Language Myths. In: Hernández-Campoy, J.M. & J.C. Conde-Silvestre (eds.), The Handbook of Historical Sociolinguistics, pp. 585-606. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
October 2012
Dear SLICE friends
The good October news is that we managed to submit our HERA application on the morning of the deadline date, which was the 11th of the month. Many of you contributed in various ways to the process of putting together what I think ended by being a strong bid. Many thanks to all.
The bad October news is that a strong bid is no guarantee for success: Our SLICE-NordicMedia proposal for the NORDCORP program was not among the 8 winners (out of 181 contestants) that were announced on the NOS-HS website on the 10th of the month. Losers were promised an evaluation. This reached me a couple of days ago. As the evaluation should be of value and help to all of us in future attempts, I reproduce it here for your information:
Scientific merit:
An earlier part of the project is embedded in the NOS–HS–funded element, but now the focus is directly on studying the (assumed) changes that are taking place in how Nordic languages are used within different kinds of media genres (such as news, youth programs and talk shows). Seemingly media here is almost exclusively synonymous with television. This aspect - the definition of media - could have been discussed more thoroughly in the application. Even in the national context (not to mention anything about diversities in the Nordic countries) ’media’ in general is a highly fragmented phenomenon, and so is TV for example divided into a plethora of different channels (broadcasting, cable, commercial, satellite, etc). This has implications on another level as well: the different tv-genres and their conventions. The overall impression is that these divergencies have been foreclosed when emphasizing the relevance of the research project. Other than that the expressed research questions and presumptions are highly timely in the Nordic and contemporary contexts.
Selected mark: 5 – Very good.
Project group:
The project group has a long and reputed experience in the kind of research applied.
Selected mark: 6 – Excellent
Feasibility
Most of the funding applied goes to research assistants and meetings.
Selected mark: B – Feasible
Dissemination and communication of results
The nature of the project already implies that the dissemination plans are tightly inscribed. However, ideas for popular publications addressing a more general audience, including even parts of the communication and entertainment industry in the field (media production and public relations personnel for example), might have had a more prominent role in this respect.
Selected mark: B – Good
Nordic added value
The Nordic added value is significant and it is discussed in the application from different perspectives.
Selected mark: A – Very good
Overall assessment
This is a well-established project with innovative parts and a tight link to previous work already accomplished. However, the attempt to dissolve various television genres within modes of using language in them (and how this might have effects in everyday life) is in a need of a bit more detailed and theoretically sensitive treatment.
Selected mark: 5 – Very good.
You are excellent people who do very good stuff!
December 2012
Dear friends
As SLICE old-timers will know, there should be a Mid-December issue of SLICE News before votre vieux rédacteur leaves for two weeks on skis in the Norwegian mountains.
With seasonal greetings and best wishes for 2013.
Tore
New SLICE members
I am happy to be able to start by welcoming three new members to our network:
Monika Bednarek
Joanna Thornborrow
Malcah Yaeger-Dror
SLICE volume 2
Some of you have asked for information regarding how SLICE volume 2 should be referred to. Here it comes:
Kristiansen, Tore and Stefan Grondelaers (eds.). 2012. Language (de)standardisation in Late Modern Europe: Experimental Studies. Oslo: Novus Press.
The volume is very close to being finished, but for various reasons - including the unforeseen and considerable amount of work that was put into the SLICE application for the HERA program earlier this fall - the volume will not appear this year as we have repeatedly said it would be. We apologize and hope this will not annoy any of you.
The 13th International Pragmatics Association conference
Jan-Ola and Jacob report that the SLICE-themed panel they proposed for the 13th International Pragmatics Association conference in Delhi in 2013 will include contributions from several fellow Slicers along with a couple of new friends. The contributors and their titles are:
Jannis Androutsopoulos: Constructing and constructed: Linguists in media discourse on ethnic styles of German;
Anette Becker/Anita Fetzer/Jacob Mey: Constructing, reconstructing and deconstructing expertise in mediated political discourse;
Geert Jacobs/ Luc van Doorslaer: Who exactly is speaking? An (auto-)ethnographic inquiry into the role of the invited expert commentator in a Belgian broadsheet newspaper;
Jürgen Jaspers: From unwanted to so-called expertise: ideologizing sociolinguistics in mainstream media;
Sirpa Leppänen: Expertise on social media: the capacity to play and transgress;
Tommaso Milani: The will to knowledge: The discursive construction of expertise in debates surrounding Swedish youth style;
Jenny Stenberg-Sirén: A diachronic study of the language choices by Finnish-speaking elite sources in Swedish-language radio news;
Jacob Thøgersen: Here are my sources, this is my world: Changing Danish news practices in a changing world;
Astrid Vandendaele/Ellen Van Praet: “Who’s the expert around here, anyway?” A linguistic ethnography of the role of the newspaper sub-editor.