LINGUIST List 12.2951

Mon Nov 26 2001

Calls: Jewish Lang Variety, Native American Literature

Editor for this issue: Renee Galvis <reneelinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Sarah Bunin Benor, Call for papers: Jewish varieties of contemporary languages
2. SWANN BRIAN, Algonquin Reader

Jews often have unique ways of speaking their local language. Jewish
varieties of English, French, Spanish, Russian, and Turkish, for
example, include influences in lexicon, syntax, phonology, and
discourse from Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino, and/or Judeo-Arabic. I am
coordinating a panel on this phenomenon for the first Annual Meeting
of the Israeli Association for the Study of Language and Society.

Questions to be addressed by this panel include:

- What can contemporary Jewish varieties of English, French, etc.,
tell us about the development of Jewish languages?
- What can they tell us about the communities that speak them?
- What role does ideology play in the development of these varieties?
- What social factors (e.g., religiosity, learnedness, gender,
interaction with non-Jews, generation since immigration) affect
variation within these varieties?
- Can these varieties be considered Jewish languages?

The conference will take place May 5-6, 2002, at Tel-Aviv University
in Israel. The general theme of the conference is Language and
Identity in a Multicultural Society. Conference papers may be
presented in Hebrew or English.

To submit a paper to this panel, please send a preliminary description
of your paper to Sarah Bunin Benor <sbenorstanford.edu> by December
20, 2001. Final abstracts will be due to the Association in February.

If you research the way Jews speak or write a contemporary language,
but cannot attend this conference, please contact me for information
on future events and to be added to the Jewish-Languages listserv.

Sarah Bunin Benor
Stanford University

Brian Swann is hoping to gather enough good material for an ALGONQUIAN
READER, along the lines of his COMING TO LIGHT: CONTEMPORARY
TRANSLATIONS OF THE NATIVE LITERATURES OF NORTH AMERICA (Random House,
1996), and his VOICES FROM FOUR DIRECTIONS: CONTEMPORARY TRANSLATIONS
OF THE NATIVE LITERATURES OF NORTH AMERICA (University of Nebraska
Press, forthcoming). He is looking primarily for new translations and
retranslations of stories, songs, oratory, and so on. The tentative
deadline will be about a year from now, late fall 2002, though
proposals and/or samples should be sent as soon as possible or by late
spring of next year. Please contact him with ideas, suggestions,
questions, leads at: Faculty of Humanities, The Cooper Union, Cooper
Sq., Ny, NY 10003, or 212.353.4279, or swanncooper.edu.