New vistas: The intersection of endangered languages and language change at the 23rd International Conference on Historical Linguistics

University Of Texas At San Antonio, San Antonio TX

Investigators

Abstract

Scientists estimate that at least half of the 7,000 languages worldwide will cease to be spoken by the end of the current century. Statistics published in 2016 by Glottolog, an online reference guide to the languages of the world, notes that this represents 242 distinct language families and 188 families with only one member ("isolates"). Scientific knowledge of how languages are related to one another and how languages change (known as "historical linguistics") has focused primarily on one language family, the Indo-European family, which includes English, Spanish, among others. How do studies of other language families, particularly those that are endangered, inform scholarly research about the way languages change? And how does the field of historical linguistics advance scientific understanding of endangered languages? This workshop will address these two questions as part of an international conference on historical linguistics. Broader impacts include funding to support the participation of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. Broader impacts also include dissemination through the inclusion of online materials which will widen access, and submission of select conference papers to be published in a peer-reviewed journal. The University of Texas at San Antonio will host the 23rd International Conference on Historical Linguistics (ICHL 23). Bridget Drinka, along with collaborator Patience Epps, of the University of Texas at Austin, will organize a conference program that includes a special focus on endangered languages and historical linguistics. ICHL 23 will include plenary speakers and discussants, drawing from endangered language researchers who comprehensively represent different geographic regions, language families, and typological diversity. The speakers will bring a breadth of methodological and theoretical expertise relating to the study of language change, spanning traditional reconstruction, approaches to language contact, phylogenetic methods, and other perspectives. Additional presentations at the conference will touch on the intersection of endangered language study and historical linguistics. Participating researchers will include junior scholars whose participation will be funded by this award. ICHL 23 will focus attention on the exciting new directions in which these fields are moving. A relatively recent subfield of linguistics, language documentation has been gaining ground in recent years. As language documentation continues to develop its depth of engagement with and contribution to other subfields, the value of this area amongst scholars and members of the general public will grow. Likewise, the subfield of historical linguistics has much to gain from the exciting new directions offered by work in underexplored language families and regions of the world. These new vistas of exploration promise to deliver fresh perspectives and innovative approaches to the discipline of historical linguistics, which will benefit significantly from this reinvigoration.