Slice news letter October 2016
Dear SLICE friends
Here is SLICE News back on your screens! In case some of you have wondered why you have not received any issue of our monthly newsletter since the End of March issue, the reason is not that you have been removed from the mailing list (as someone wrote and asked me), but that the one-issue-per-month frequency had become an inexpedient straitjacket. It seems more reasonable and useful to distribute SLICE News irregularly, when there is something to report. So this is how it is going to be from now on.
It is not that nothing has happened since March ... so some unjustifiable far niente on the part of votre vieux rédacteur is part of the picture. He could/should certainly have written something about the 21th Sociolinguistics Symposium, held at the University of Murcia, June 15–18, which under the general theme of Attitudes and Ideology featured contributions from many SLICE members. Let me at this point in time just note that all information about the SS21 program, including all abstracts, can be found at https://www.conftool.pro/sociolinguistics-symposium-2016/sessions.php ... and move on to other good news:
First of all it is a great pleasure to be able to welcome to our SLICE network colleagues who focus on language standardization and standard language ideology in the Slavic Lands
Marian Sloboda (Marian.Sloboda@ff.cuni.cz)
Department of Central European Studies, Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Nam. Jana Palacha 2, CZ - 11638 Praha 1. http://kses.ff.cuni.cz http://languagemanagement.ff.cuni.cz
has joined the network and writes about himself:
“I am interested in language standardization (particularly the current challenges to the language cultivation theory of the Prague School, and I also teach the formation of standard languages in East-Central Europe)”.
Tomislav Stojanov (tstojan@ihjj.hr)
Institute of Croatian Language and Linguistics, Department of General Linguistics
has submitted an application for a MARIE SKŁODOWSKA-CURIE fellowship at LANCHART in Copenhagen with a particular focus on the South Slavic Lands within a project entitled “Orthographic standardisation in Europe between national language identity and ideology”.
Standard Language Ideology in the Slavic Lands. An International Symposium
The organizers of this symposium, Motoki Nomachi (mnomachi@gmail.com) (Hokkaido University, Japan) and Bojan Belić (bojan@uw.edu) (University of Washington, USA)
send the following report (see program with abstracts of presented papers in the attached file):
“On August 5 and 6, 2016, an international symposium, entitled Standard Language Ideology in the Slavic Lands, was held at Hokkaido University’s Slavic-Eurasian Research Center in Sapporo, Japan. With a particular focus on the various Slavic languages, the two-day symposium attempted to address the following major issues: (1) the concept of a standard language itself; (2) the relationship between the concepts of standard language and literary language, of which the latter appears to be used more frequently in the Slavic lands; (3) the notion of language standardization, as well as the significance of the phenomena of destandardization and demotization; and (4) the possible relevance for languages in the Slavic lands, if any, of the supposed paradigm shift in the way language standardization is viewed by the Committee of Experts of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages.
Leading experts gathered in Sapporo and offered a detailed look at every single land’s standard language ideology, minority Slavic languages included. This was a successful start of what should be a continuing collaboration of scholars, which is ultimately to allow for possible generalizations regarding the standard language ideology in the Slavic lands. The immediately following step in the collaboration will be a publication of the symposium proceedings, which will contain both papers presented at the symposium and papers written specifically for the proceedings”.
It is no less pleasure to be able to forward a report from the SLICE stronghold in Lithuania
The best language in the media – idealizations and realizations
Dear colleagues,
In connection with a conference of applied linguistics in Vilnius, September 28th-29th, we arranged a panel "The best language in the media – idealizations and realizations". Four Lithuanian and two Nordic members of the network (Giedrius Tamaševičius, Jacob Thøgersen, Jenny Stenberg-Sirén, Laima Nevinskaitė, Loreta Vaicekauskienė, Ramunė Čičirkaitė) presented their research on journalists’ attitudes as well as linguistic and discursive features that have been characterizing the development of language in the broadcast media in Lithuania, Denmark and Swedish-speaking Finland during the last decades. You can find the titles of the presentations in the attached announcement of the panel.
Best
Loreta Vaicekauskienė
Lietuvių kalbos institutas/Research Institute of the Lithuanian Language VU Skandinavistikos centras/Centre of Scandinavian Studies, Vilnius University http://www.sociolingvistika.lt/loreta-vaicekauskiene.htm
Best wishes from Copenhagen
Tore