Understanding linguistic difference

This international workshop investigates the differences between closely related languages and varieties, focusing on speakers' agency, awareness, and perception. The organized event focuses on fine-grained differences and similarities in phonetics, phonology, morphology, and syntax, as well as on speakers' agentive linguistic behavior, which is motivated by underlying language ideologies. Our workshop brings together researchers interested in studying "difference" in African languages, e.g., Bantu, Western Nilotic, and Adamawa, through finer structural, dia/regiolectal, sociolectal, and stylistic patterns of variation. We are interested in the underlying ideologies of variation and will focus on approaches such as (for example) perceptual dialectology, semiotic processes, folk linguistic judgments, and awareness in language ideology to study how speakers accentuate, enhance, level, or negate differences in speech. Furthermore, we aim to understand when and where established, contested, or rejected boundaries between "languages" are stressed or abolished by speakers. This may occur through "engineering" languages, accommodating speech (Giles, Coupland, & Coupland, 1979), sounding like neighbors, employing different speech styles in interaction, or through a process known as "esoterogeny" (increasing distance from neighboring varieties). In this context, one may also consider ethnicity, nationality/citizenship, and discourses of "autochthony" vs "authenticity," as well as colonial and missionary ideas of grouping people based on their languages or other characteristics. Speakers' voices could be included in the analysis in order to highlight how they explain, understand, or make sense of differences. As Knipping (2024: 219) states, "It is indispensable ... to ask and listen carefully to people about what is meaningful to them and to analyze underlying ideologies of languages or language in use in order to get a more inclusive idea of how and why people speak the way they speak, on what basis they make meaning and produce knowledge." While the workshop will predominantly investigate specific empirical cases in which variation becomes or is perceived as "meaningful" and may lead to language change and contact, more theoretically oriented papers are also welcome. The collection of papers will result in a co-edited volume published by an international publisher or journal.