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.
Keynote Speakers
We are pleased to announce that the following keynote speakers have confirmed their participation:
Ermenegildo Bidese - Università di Trento, Italy, with a talk about:
Genetic waves and areal waves in the Germanic-Romance language contact region in the Northeast Alps
Yaron Matras - Aston University, Birmingham, UK, with a talk about:
From multilingual repertoire to language change: A critical approach to feature spread, borrowing and language ecology
Eeva Sippola - University of Helsinki, Finland, with a talk about:
Decolonial approaches to language contact
Call for papers
We invite abstracts for talks (20 minutes, followed by 10 minutes of discussion) or posters. Each individual may submit a maximum of one abstract as first author (or sole author), and a maximum of two abstracts in total.
The abstracts of max. 400 words (references excluded) must be anonymised to omit all information about the author(s) and submitted via EasyAbs: easyabs.linguistlist.org/conference/NILCS2025/
Please add also up to 5 keywords.
Abstracts will be blindly peer-reviewed by an international panel of reviewers.
There will be no fee for participants. We intend to publish selected papers from the conference.
Timeline
Extended deadline for abstract submission: 20 October 2024
Notification of acceptance: 20 November 2024
Online registration for accepted papers: 30 November 2024
Final registration for accepted papers: 15 February 2025
Programme issuing: 1 March 2025
Registration for non-presenting participants: 1 March – 15 May 2025
Contact
For all updates, please visit our website: https://scienzeumane.univaq.it/index.php?id=nilcs2025
For any questions, please write to: nilcs2025@gmail.com
Organising Committee:
The NILCS research group:
Barbara Hans-Bianchi
Chiara Truppi
Barbara Vogt
