Sociolinguistic Events Calendar

Ever start something that becomes so successful you can't manage it at some point? Welcome to the lives of the people who started the Sociolinguistic Events Calendar. Dave Sayers just posted this to the Variationist List (go here to subscribe). Help these folks out if you can and become a calendariser (calendarizer?).

Hello one and all, and happy new year!
The Sociolinguistic Events Calendar (http://www.baal.org.uk/slxevents.html) is now bustling with events across the world, and has also been linked to by a number of event organisers, including NWAV: http://linguistics.utoronto.ca/nwav44/. Meanwhile the synopsis on academia.edu is apparently in the top 3% of viewed pages this month (http://academia.edu/9619924). My co-calendariser - Jonathan Kasstan - and I are overwhelmingly honoured by all this success, acclaim and esteem, which has helped us keep plugging away at it, but... we are kinda getting a little overworked with it all. Help us! We're looking to recruit volunteers to help keep this resource going, since it's not altogether clear how long we can keep going just the two of us.

We're hoping to gather a team of about 5-7, thinking that one person could cover the various calls that come up on each day of the week. The commitment per person would be about half an hour a day (plus an hour or so of initial training on how events are formatted in the calendar). The daily workload is manageable, but pretty constant - although I suppose it'll vary depending on the time of year (there probably aren't so many calls in the summer for example).

Please please get in touch if you'd like to step up to this exciting level of responsibility and celebrity :)
Dave

--Dr. Dave SayersSenior Lecturer, Dept Humanities, Sheffield Hallam University, UKHonorary Research Fellow, Arts & Humanities, Swansea University, UK (2009-2015)dave.sayers@cantab.net | http://swansea.academia.edu/DaveSayers 

Patrick Stevenson lecture: The Times of Their Lives: Time, Place and Space in Central European Language Biographies

For our readers in Wisconsin with an interest in language in its social context, we're hosting a Worldwide Universities video seminar by Professor Patrick Stevenson (University of Southampton):

The Times of Their Lives: Time, Place and Space in Central European Language Biographies

Time: 10:00-12:00
Pyle Center, 702 Langdon St.
Thursday, 6 May

Abstract
Two kinds of story are typically told about language in the complex and volatile region of Central Europe. One involves small-scale language contact phenomena studied by sociolinguists working on linguistic variation and change. The other, studied by sociologists and historians, concerns ways in which language myths are worked and re-worked in support of competing national interests. Both kinds of story - about the history of language and about language in history - rest on tensions between movement and stasis and are built around variables of time, place and space: how do linguistic variants travel and re-shape linguistic landscapes? how do the ebbs and flows of human migrations impact on the linguistic configuration of societies and communities?

However, in the search for generalizations both kinds of story tend to neglect both the agency and the experiences of individual language users, who themselves have their own stories to tell. Focusing on German-speakers in eastern Central Europe, I will try in this talk to show how such language (auto)biographies can contribute to our understanding of the dynamics of language in social life and how they serve to arrange individual lives in temporal and spatial terms.

He'll be speaking from Southhampton with a video link to Madison and several over universities. We've done this become and the technology is remarkably good — the Q&A allows good interaction even intercontinentally.

The talk is free and open to the public. A handout for the talk is available here, and references are available here.

Broadening our set of sociolinguistic variables

I had honestly never considered this, but there's a point in it:

Sometimes it's not so much what you say, but how you say it. Also, whether you're naked, high on methamphetamines, and standing in an abandoned parking lot at the time.

Yup, The Onion, horoscope for PISCES in the latest issue.

LINGUIST list challenge

Hey, Joe, I love language change, too -- that's why my support would have to be behind sociolinguistics.

And speaking of that, check out the following (from the ACLS website):

The American Council of Learned Societies is pleased to announce the publication of the 2009 Charles Homer Haskins Prize Lecture by William Labov. Entitled “A Life of Learning: Six People I Have Learned From,” the lecture is distinctive in both form and content. Dr. Labov, professor of linguistics and director of the Linguistics Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania, presents the voices and stories of six Americans who have enriched and transformed the English language. The lecture is presented in text with audio highlights at http://www.acls.org/publications/audio/labov/default.aspx?id=4462. An audio file of the complete lecture is also available.

In case you aren't familiar with the Haskins lectures:

Named for the first chairman of ACLS, the Charles Homer Haskins Prize Lecture has as its theme "A Life of Learning." The lecturer is asked “to reflect on a lifetime of work as a scholar and an institution builder, on the motives, the chance determinations, the satisfactions (and dissatisfactions) of the life of learning, to explore through one’s own life the larger, institutional life of scholarship.”

Labov's lecture is great.