ESF SCH Exploratory Workshop:

Documenting convergence and diversity - Mande and Atlantic languages in contact

London ( United Kingdom ), 5-9 September 2008

Convenor : Friederike Lüpke

The workshop brings together scholars from diverse national and disciplinary backgrounds in order to integrate anthropological, sociolinguistic, structural and historical perspectives on language contact between Mande and Atlantic languages of West Africa . The workshop aims at increasing communication between national research schools and disciplines that have led largely independent lives in the past in order to develop an interdisciplinary research agenda investigating language contact not just in its consequences on the linguistic structure of individual languages but taking into account the sociolinguistic profiles of multilingual speech communities as well as the identities and ideologies created by and in turn motivating their linguistic practices. At the end of the workshop, the possibilities for creating an international research network dedicated to the study of language contact between Mande and Atlantic languages will be explored.

The workshop consists of five thematic panels :

• The panel on sociolinguistic dimensions of language contact will discuss the linguistic practices of the mainly multilingual speech communities in the area and the attitudes underlying them, looking at language contact as a mental and societal phenomenon of speakers in contact with (speakers of) different languages.
• The contributions to the panel on methodological dimensions of language contact will be concerned with the role of contact in language documentation in general as well as offering specific case studies on the challenges of identifying contact phenomena in languages without extensive description and documentation.
• The panel on grammatical dimensions of language contact will be dedicated to those structural outcomes of language contact that concern grammatical structure.
• The panel on lexical dimensions of language contact will comprise case studies on lexical influences between languages in contact.
• A final panel on historical dimensions of language contact will evaluate to what extent language contact needs to be taken into account when retracing the diachronic development of Atlantic and Mande languages.

The European Science Foundation (ESF) is an association of 77 Member Organisations devoted to scientific research in 30 European countries. The Mission of ESF is to provide a common platform for its Member Organisations in order to a dvance European research and to explore new directions for research at the European level. Through its activities, the ESF serves the needs of the European research community in a global context.