Language in Space: Geographic Perspectives on Language Diversity and Diachrony

University Of California-Berkeley, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

This grant will support a small conference, "Language in Space: Geographic Perspectives on Language Diversity and Diachrony", to be held in July, 2011, at the Linguistic Institute in Boulder, Colorado. The conference will bring together scientists in disparate fields - scholars specializing in language diversity, prehistory, and human geography - with the goal of synergizing research in an emerging interdisciplinary field. Intellectually this is timely for several reasons, notably because of the growing attention paid by linguists to the quantitative analysis of global typological patterns, the engagement by linguists and evolutionary biologists to computational modeling of population movement and language diversification, and the broad applicability of new geographical tools and analytic methods in the study of language. This conference will contribute to understanding how people and their languages spread across small-scale and broad-range geographical spaces. The conference will take full advantage of its venue, the 2011 Linguistic Institute. This is a biennial month-long summer school attended by about 400-500 linguists from the U.S. and around the world, most of them students. There is no other setting where a two-day conference with fewer than two dozen speakers could find such a large audience, especially of undergraduate and graduate students in linguistics. Students attending the Institute will find the meeting valuable as a part of their education in linguistics, giving them exposure to ideas and approaches they might not otherwise encounter and letting them meet influential scientists in a range of allied fields.