Language contact in the circumpolar world

Institute of Linguistics RAS, Moscow, Russia; 27-29 October 2017

The circumpolar world includes the Arctic as defined by AMAP (Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program) with adjacent areas. This vast territory has a number of common features that set it apart from any other part of the world: extremely harsh climate conditions, low population density, large distances between speakers of different languages or even of the same language, seasonal migrations for hundreds of miles, prevalence of hunter-gatherers with absolutely no traditional farming, etc. While language contact has been a popular topic of linguistic research in the last couple of decades, there have been few studies that would concentrate on the circumpolar region and specifics of language contact in the area.

The ‘Language contact in the circumpolar world’ conference will bring together researchers studying language contact in the North, and discussions of any aspect of the topic are welcome. Of particular importance is the question of whether language contact in the circumpolar world is different from that of other areas, and if so, in which particular respects.

The conference will feature papers selected by the Organizing committee, invited lectures by leading international experts specializing in the topic, and two extended tutorials on particular parts of the circumpolar world, ‘Language Contact in Arctic Canada & Greenland’ by Michael Fortesque (University of Copenhagen) and ‘Language Contact in Arctic Europe’ by Jussi Ylikoski (The Arctic University of Norway & University of Oulu).

The conference is organized by a new research group on Language Contact in the Circumpolar World at the Institute of Linguistics, supported by the Russian Science Foundation, see http://iling-ran.ru/main/departments/typol_compar/circumpolar/eng for more details.