Dear SLICE friends Here is what happened in February:
- We thought more about ‘SLICE working papers’. Jacob reports below.
- SLICE Experimental strand held a workshop in Copenhagen. Votre vieux rédacteur reports below. Best wishes from Copenhagen Tore
SLICE working papers
For a while now, we have been thinking about establishing a series of working papers online. ‘SLICE working papers’ do now exist as an entry at the SLICE website
The first appearances here will be presentations from the SLICE Experimental workshop which took place in Copenhagen last week [see report below]. The purpose of the workshop was to share experiences and good ideas and to share mutual inspiration. For non-participants (and non-experimentalists) the presentations also give a good overview of the current status of the SLICE Experimental projects in the various countries in which such projects are up and running or are about to kick off. The presentations will be made available as their authors submit them (if they chose to do so, of course).
In the working papers series we will try to continually document the history and development of the project(s). We also plan to soon expand on the working papers by inviting edited collections from various SLICE related events. We have been present at a number of themed panels at conferences and it would seem a good idea to get the word on these events out in the relatively quick and informal and non-exclusive format of a series of online working papers. If you have ideas for the series or for an edited collection, let us know.
SLICE Experimental strand meeting, Copenhagen February 24-25, 2014
Purpose
The purpose of this meeting was to strengthen contact and mutual support between SLICE members who are presently carrying out, or preparing for carrying out, ‘SLICE experimental studies of language attitudes’.
In the invitation to the meeting, the basic concern of such studies was spelled out as follows:
SLICE experimental studies aim to obtain data which can be compared across communities, built on distinctions concerning the possible existence of... * two language-ideological systems which may differ largely depending on the elicitation conditions in terms of levels of awareness or consciousness (and the further hypothesis that subconscious attitudes are important to language (de)standardization processes in ways that conscious attitudes are not) * two subconscious evaluative dimensions to do with social values in terms of ‘superiority vs. dynamism’ (a distinction which, hypothetically, emerges from the restructuring of the public sphere – and of the public/private relationship – as the modern media universe is added to the institutions of the traditional establishment). Thus, the overarching questions which framed the contributions and discussions focused on how to conceptualise and operationalise these basic SLICE distinctions in our different communities:
(1) How do we investigate whether attitudes differ at different levels of awareness or consciousness – in order to establish the possible existence of two language-ideological systems with different impact on language variation and change, including (de)standardization processes?
(2) How do we investigate whether subconsciously offered attitudes (if such attitudes can be obtained) differ in terms of superiority vs. dynamism values – in order to shed light on the relevance of this value distinction for the study of language variation and change, including (de)standardization processes?
Participants
Quite a few and quite different communities were represented at the meeting, yielding an intriguing pool of experiences to learn from and issues to be solved. Three different ‘stages’ in the process of establishing and completing SLICE experimental work were represented by the following people, who all had prepared presentations of their ongoing or planned for projects:
(1) People who have had funding for some time and are somewhere in the process of collecting and analyzing data – Helge Sandøy, studies in western Norway. – Loreta Vaicekauskienė, studies all over Lithuania.
(2) People who have recently obtained funding and are somewhere in the process of preparing for collecting and analyzing data – Therese Leinonen, studies in Swedish-language Finland. – Benedikte Vardøy, studies in Russia.
(3) People who have prepared project proposals and are applying for funding – Christoph Purschke, studies in Austria. – Lena Wenner, studies in Sweden. – Rosa Doublet, studies in Eastern Norway
Stefan Grondelaers presented results from his own (with colleagues) efforts to empirically establish the emergence of an evaluative dimension of ‘dynamism’ in the language-ideological reality of the Lowlands.
In addition, several people in Copenhagen participated with their knowledge about SLICE experimental studies in general, and in Denmark in particular: Frans Gregersen, Jacob Thøgersen, Marie Maegaard, Nicolai Pharao, Nikolas Coupland, and Tore Kristiansen – including also Ursula Ritzau, previously a student of sociolinguistics in Copenhagen, now working in Zürich and planning a language attitudes project there.