“Contactos linguísticos como continuum e continuidades epistemológicas na linguística de contacto”

“Contactos lingüísticos como continuum y continuidades epistemológicas en la lingüística de contacto”

“Sprachkontakte als Kontinuum und epistemologische Kontinuitäten in der Sprachkontaktforschung“

“Language contact as a continuum and epistemological continuities in language contact research”

The 20th Annual Conference of the ACBLPE was held at the University of Augsburg in the Friedensstadt  Augsburg, Germany from September 8 - 10, 2022 (see the Conference poster  here). This annual meeting was the main event devoted to language contact during a week that also included two smaller events: the workshop Creole studies in motion, which served as a prelude to the ACBLPE, and the Second Meeting of the  Red Internacional BayMis. The realization of the ACBLPE Conference received funding from the Albert Leimer-Stiftung and from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), through its programme International Scientific Events (Ref. Nr.: GU 1846/2-1). For this funding we would like to express our gratitude.

First and foremost, we would like to thank the nearly 80 creolists and scholars working on language and cultural contact who participated in the congress. Our warmest gratitude goes to those who travelled from other continents, as well as to our four keynote speakers: Peter Bakker, John M. Lipski, Nicolas Quint and Armin Schwegler (who gave his Abschiedsvorlesung as a part of this conference). 

We also invite you to check out the photos of the event for what we hope will be great memories here and here.

As the conference name suggested and the  Call for Papers  made explicit, we discussed the continuity between the different results of contact-induced language restructuring: ranging from second language acquisition and interlanguage fossilization processes to creolization, and from code-switching phenomena and different types of lexical and grammatical borrowing to the formation of mixed languages. Similarly, we addressed the continuity between contact linguistics and related domains such as anthropology, sociology, population genetics, etc. A further area of interest was the historical configuration of (Ibero-)creolistics as a linguistic (sub)discipline, one which can be regarded as more or less autonomous and is generally situated at a crossroads between different research areas (Ger. Fächer) like Romance, African and Austronesian studies. You can download the program  here and the Conference Reader (incl. abstracts)  here .

As for the cultural program, it included a guided tour of the city of Augsburg (focusing on the history of the  Fugger and  Welser families and their transatlantic impact during the Early Modern period), as well as the concert by Saartje Michiels, leading female singer of Krontjong Toegoe, who performed several songs in Indonesian and in the Portuguese-lexified Creole of Tugu (Java, Indonesia) (see the presentation  here  about the history of the keroncong music genre and about the music band Krontjong Toegoe). The latter event took place right after A. Schwegler’s lecture in the late-baroque  Kleiner Goldener Saal (built by the Augsburg Jesuits).

We will regularly upload to this website the presentations and additional materials of those participants who wish to do so. You can already watch, for example, the film Fala, pomerano, fala by José W. Nunes by downloading the document  here .  

Looking forward to meeting you soon, in and out of Augsburg,

The organizing committee:

Dr. Miguel Gutiérrez Maté (Augsburg)

Prof. Dr. Joachim Steffen (Augsburg)

Prof. Dr. Evelyn Wiesinger (Tübingen)

Dr. Eduardo Tobar Delgado (Vigo)

Leonie Ette (Augsburg)

Christian Wilson (Augsburg)

Patricia de Ramos (Augsburg)

Niklas Schmidt (Augsburg)

Follow us on  @acblpe20