Dipartimento di Scienze Umane

NILCS 2025

International conference on

New Issues in Language Contact Studies

28–30 May 2025 – University of L’Aquila

NILCS 2025 is the second edition of this international conference on language contact after the first one initially planned for May 2020, then postponed to May 2021 due to the pandemics, and eventually held online only. NILCS 2021 was a very stimulating conference, some of the talks have now been collected in the volume: Speakers and Structures in Language Contact: Pluralistic Approaches to Change and Variation, published by the NILCS-team within the series Language Contact and Bilingualism (LCB vol. 31; De Gruyter), edited by Yaron Matras. Despite the success of NILCS 2021, we all missed the fruitful discussions that always arise during lunch breaks and conference-accompanying social and cultural activities. NILCS 2025 wants to make up for that shortage and bring people together in one place to enjoy a live and direct experience.

In the spirit of the past NILCS, we aim to bring together researchers studying any topic in language contact and working on any contact-related linguistic variety or contact scenario. Studies from any theoretical or methodological perspective are welcome. The diversity of the participants' perspectives will contribute to providing multifaceted and novel insights to the field. The conference language is English.

In particular, we encourage contributions regarding the following topics:

• description of contact-related phenomena in any area of grammar;
• field research in contemporary contact settings;
• research on contact varieties, such as pidgins, creoles, and mixed languages;
• construction of linguistic identity/ies in multilingual or postcolonial scenarios;
• new theoretical modelling of language contact and the related phenomena;
• studies on contact-related or contact-induced language change;
• diachronic research on language contact settings or scenarios.