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.
", held on July 23-24, 2011, at the Linguistic Institute at the University of Colorado. The Linguistic Institute is a summer school held every other year (at a different US university) focusing on language and linguistics; it is attended by several hundred graduate and undergraduate students, from the US and other countries, and about a hundred faculty teaching courses in a broad range of subjects. It provides an opportunity for students and faculty to learn about new areas that may not be taught in depth at their home institution, for undergraduates at smaller colleges and universities to learn directly from leaders in the field, and for new research networks and projects to form naturally over a month of formal and informal interactions. It is an ideal setting for discussing new interdisciplinary research, because it offers a natural audience from among the many linguists and others in attendance. For the "Language in Space" workshop, a dozen speakers were invited from a range of fields including linguistics, geography, biology, and archaeology. Six were from the US (Andrea Berez, Hannah Haynie, Gary Holton, Brian Kemp, Johanna Nichols, Sergio Rey) and six were from Europe, Australia, and New Zealand (Mark Donohue, Russell Gray, John Nerbonne, Patrick McConvell, Loretta O'Connor, Benedikt Szmrecsanyi). About 20-30 other participants from the Linguistic Institute attended, asking questions after the presentations and interacting informally during coffee breaks and meals. We had very positive informal feedback afterwards, and we know that a number of scientific publications that have subsequently appeared represent work presented at this workshop. Our workshop had two major impacts. First, it promoted interactions across disciplinary and sub-disciplinary boundaries and among scholars with very different research methodologies and assumptions about data. For example, a couple of presentations examined European dialect data of the type that dialectologists have studied for decades, but using new quantitative methods for analyzing the data; a couple of other presentations evaluated language variation in North America and the Pacific using tools borrowed from entirely different fields. Similarly, there were several presentations that analyzed language shift and change over time, but in some cases from a global perspective and in others through very close description of specific cases. The differences in approach promoted a constructive engagement. Second, through its setting at the Linguistic Institute, this workshop exposed students to an area of research that is poorly represented in US linguistics education. Language diversity and variation are widely taught in the US, but the analytic approach is usually structural or typological. By emphasizing ways that language diversity is also geographically structured, as well as tools for geographical analysis that come from outside the field, we were able to give students some exposure to a powerful new area of research.
