Full Title: Taal & Tongval colloquium 2024: Language and inclusion

Date: 22-Nov-2024 - 22-Nov-2024
Location: Ghent, Belgium
Contact Person: Chloé Lybaert
Meeting Email: [email protected]
Web Site: https://www.taalentongval2024.ugent.be/

Linguistic Field(s): Sociolinguistics
Subject Language(s): English (eng)

Call Deadline: 15-Apr-2024

Meeting Description:

The 2024 edition of the annual Taal & Tongval colloquium will take place at the Royal Academy for Dutch Language and Literature (KANTL) in Ghent on 22 November 2024. With ‘Language and inclusion’ as its theme, the colloquium focuses on empirical approaches to the relationship between linguistic diversity and societal inclusion.

Call for Papers:

Sociolinguists and applied linguists have for a long time taken an interest in the pivotal role of language in (un)equal opportunities, access to resources, and life outcomes. The rise of activism for social justice has in recent years reignited the interest in the importance of language for the inclusion, emancipation and participation of disadvantaged groups, including ethnic minorities, LGBTQIA+ people, people with disabilities and the low literate.

Numerous studies have demonstrated that perceptions of accents or other linguistic markers of one’s socio-economic, regional or ethnic background can feed into discriminatory behavior or unfair judgments, for instance in employment contexts (Spence et al. 2022). Ethnographic and interactional-sociolinguistic research has demonstrated the complex role of language and multilingualism in gatekeeping situations such as job interviews (Roberts 2013; Van de Mieroop et al. 2021), medical consultations (Cox & Maryns 2021; van Hest & De Wilde, 2021), asylum interviews (Maryns 2006) and education (Van Avermaet et al. 2018). Experimental studies have corroborated calls for gender-fair language (Redl 2021; Sczesny et al. 2016; Vervecken et al. 2015) and have demonstrated the advantages of simple language (Pander Maat & Gravekamp 2022).

However, studies on language and inclusion have also addressed tensions, ambiguities and contradictions that may emerge. Stereotypical perceptions of language variation may not automatically lead to discriminatory judgments (Levon 2020; Lybaert et al. 2022). In many institutional language policies, emancipatory principles have to be reconciled with practical and financial constraints, which may render full inclusion or equality difficult to achieve. The linguistic strategies that are advocated as the inclusive ones may not be comprehensible to everyone, may have unintended exclusionary effects (e.g., desexed terms in communication about pregnancy and newborn care, Gribble et al. 2022), or may not have the same inclusive potential cross-culturally (e.g. the use of ‘person-first language’, Buijsman et al. 2023). Given the highly politicized nature of debates on inclusivity and language, the value of empirical work on the topic cannot be underestimated.

We therefore welcome the submission of abstracts for 20-minute presentations of empirical studies on language and inclusion. The approach adopted can be quantitative as well as qualitative and the focus can be on Dutch or other languages.

Possible topics include:
- Accent bias
- Language-based discrimination
- The role of language in (un)equal outcomes or (un)equal access for minority groups in various settings
- The development of attitudes towards language variation and diversity across the lifespan
- Gender-fair language and other types of inclusive language use
- Language variation and multilingualism in education
- Translation and interpreting for equal access
- Language technology as a means for inclusive communication
- Low literacy and inclusion
- Sign language and inclusion
- Decolonizing language in different types of discourse
- Methodological challenges in the study of language and inclusion
- Inclusion in linguistic research and language pedagogy (e.g. diversifying datasets and studied languages)

Keynote speakers
We welcome Erez Levon (University of Bern, topic: accent bias), Henk Pander Maat (Universiteit Utrecht, topic: readability and text comprehension) and Katrijn Maryns (Universiteit Gent, topic: multilingualism in the Belgian asylum procedure) as keynote speakers this year.