CFP: African Languages in a Global World: From Description to State Policies

AIM AND SCOPE

Faithful to its well-established tradition, WOCAL furthers its research concerns with the status of African languages in the modern world. The particular focus of WOCAL9 centers on the nature and manifestations of the impact of globalization on African languages. In the face of such a transformative globalization wave, societies are being radically deconstructed, giving birth to new societal forms and practices. Languages of course are no exception to this trend; they, in particular, are involved in the process both as objects to and agents of change. The main aim of the conference is to bring under in-depth scrutiny a wide range of linguistic and cultural phenomena and factors that influence African languages within the context of global change. Special emphasis will be given to the status of endangered languages.

Program Organization

The congress will be organized as plenary sessions for keynote addresses from invited speakers and thematic parallel sessions for presentations of papers. Poster sessions will also be scheduled during the conference days. We invite abstracts for presentations or posters on the following sub-themes:

  • African linguistics (phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, etc.)
  • Language contact and diversity
  • African languages in legislation and policies.
  • Amazigh studies
  • Arabic in the African continent: Language contact phenomena (Impact of Arabic on African languages; Arabic script, lexis, etc.)
  • Language and development
  • African languages and technology
  • African sociolinguistics (Language planning, policy/ policy implementation, linguistic landscaping, etc.)
  • Dialectology and isoglosses
  • African Languages in education
  • African languages and translation
  • African Sign Languages