Full Title: Turkologentag 2025 Panel: The other languages of Turkey: Multilingual vitality & language shift

Date: 18-Sep-2025 - 20-Sep-2025
Location: Mainz, Germany
Contact Person: Laurentia Schreiber
Meeting Email: [email protected]

Linguistic Field(s): Anthropological Linguistics; Language Documentation; Sociolinguistics

Call Deadline: 04-Dec-2024

Meeting Description:

The European Convention on Turkic, Ottoman and Turkish Studies (Turkologentag) is a biannual Turkological conference jointly organized by the Society for Turkic, Ottoman and Turkish Studies (GTOT) and a university usually in the German-speaking area.

Call for Papers:

This is a proposal for a panel to be held as part of the 5th European Convention on Turkic, Ottoman and Turkish Studies (Turkologentag 2025) between 18–20 September 2025 at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz.

Despite of the upheavals accompanying the formation of the Republic of Türkiye in 1923, followed by a century of official commitment to monolingual national language policies, Turkey has remained to this day a multilingual nation (see the seminal work by Andrews 1989). Nevertheless, many of the country's minority languages are currently endangered, and undergoing language shift towards Turkish, though to varying degrees and in varied contexts (see, e.g. individual case studies by Schreiber & Sitaridou 2017 and Schreiber Forthcoming on Romeyka; Haig & Öpengin 2018 on Kurmanji; Kutscher 2008 on Laz; i.a.). Although in the last years, a body of research evolved on the languages of the wider area (Bulut 2018; Haig 2017; Haig & Khan 2019) and considerable literature is available on Turkish in immigration contexts (Brizić & Yağmur 2008; i.a.), we still lack a thorough sociolinguistic account of the vitality of the ‘other languages’ of Turkey (cf. Yağmur 2001: 11).

The aim of this panel is to bring together existing knowledge on the current state of minority language communities in Turkey, and to search for commonalities and differences in the various responses and outcomes to the linguistic ecology of Turkey, including both sociolinguistic and structural aspects of multilingualism and language shift.

Research areas that participants should consider in their proposals include theoretical and conceptual perspectives with reference to, for example:
• Ethnographic vitality of speech communities and the role of social networks
• Forms of societal multilingualism, language use & language choice
• Individual language biographies
• Patterns of bi-/multilingual language acquisition and competence
• Structural change, language contact, and/or attrition
• Heritage languages vs. minority languages

We invite abstracts for 20-minutes presentations to be included in the panel proposal. Abstracts should be no longer than 250 words (references excluded) and should indicate three to five keywords. Abstracts should be sent to the convenors ([email protected] and [email protected]) by 4 December 2024. If the abstract is accepted, presenters will be asked to submit their abstract via the conference management platform (see https://turkologentag.uni-mainz.de/call-for-papers/) by 15 December 2024.