Full Title: Local Varieties of Standardized and Nonstandardized Languages: Documentation and Research Issues

Date: 23-Oct-2025 - 25-Oct-2025
Location: Moscow, Russia
Contact Person: Varvara Nerush
Meeting Email: [email protected]

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

Call Deadline: 15-Jun-2025

Call for Papers:

The Laboratory for Study and Preservation of Minority Languages is pleased to announce the conference “Local varieties of standardized and nonstandardized languages: documentation and research issues”, which will be held at the Institute of Linguistics (Russian Academy of Sciences), Moscow, on 23–25 October 2025. This year’s meeting is commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Institute of Linguistics (RAS) and the 130th anniversary of the birth of Glafira Makarievna Vasilyevich, a distinguished researcher of Evenki dialects and culture.

The purpose of the conference is (1) to showcase current trends in research of local varieties of both standardized languages with a longstanding writing system and nonstandardized languages without a (well-established) writing system; (2) to exchange experiences in documenting and studying dialects of various degrees of vitality and numbers of speakers.

At the conference the following topics are supposed to be discussed:
- “language and/or dialect” problem,
- “borderline” dialects in contacting regions: the problem of matching a dialect with a particular language;
- dialects, sub-dialects and other idioms: demarcation and description issues;
- sociolinguistic aspects of functioning of polydialectal languages (including within one and the same settlement);
- issues of study and description of individual dialects (lexicon, grammar, phonetics, etc.);
- dialect vitality and documentation degrees, sticking points in documentation of dialect mosaic;
- issues of language standardization: choosing the base dialect, codification, mono- or polycentric standardization, relation between the language standard taught at school and the local dialect;
- views on the language and dialect in linguistic traditions of different countries;
- ethnolects: functioning and issues of description;
- anguage identity and language activism of dialect speakers.

One of the conference sections will be completely dedicated to the issues of documentation and study of local varieties of Tungusic languages in memory of Glafira Makarievna Vasilyevich.

The conference programme will include three plenary talks and oral presentations by other conference participants (20 min. for presentation and 10 min. for discussion). It will be held in a hybrid format: offline participation at the Institute of Linguistics, RAS (Moscow) and online participation via Zoom. The languages of the conference are English and Russian. Submissions are limited to one individual and one joint abstract per author.

Participation fee is 500 RUB for students and 1000 RUB for other participants. Instructions on ways of payment will be given later.

Invited Speakers:
1. Natalia B. Aralova (Kiel University, Germany), Brigitte Pakendorf (Laboratory “Dynamique Du Langage”, The French National Centre for Scientific Research, France) "Verbal categories in Even: detecting hidden dialectal variation with corpus data"
2. Diana Forker (Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany) “A closer look at the Jar dialect of Avar spoken in Azerbaijan”
3. Mahendra Kumar Mishra (Language and Learning Foundation, New Delhi, India) "Language varieties and standardization with reference to the Saora language of South Odisha"

Those who would like to take part in the conference should send their anonymous abstracts to the e-mail address [email protected] by June 15, 2025. The abstract should not exceed one A4 page (Times New Roman, 12 pt, single-spaced, 2.5 cm margins; .pdf, .doc(x) or .rtf formats), one more page can be used for examples and references. Notification of acceptance will be sent out no later than July 21, 2025.

The following information should be provided in the body of the e-mail:
- title of your presentation,
- the authors' first and last names and affiliations,
- your email address and phone number.

Important Dates:
June 15, 2025: deadline for submissions
July 21, 2025: notification of acceptance
October 23–25, 2025: conference (Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow; online via Zoom)

Programme Committee:
Tatiana Agranat (Institute of Linguistics, RAS)
Oleg Belyaev (Institute of Linguistics, RAS / Lomonosov MSU)
Leyli Dodykhudoeva (Institute of Linguistics, RAS)
Anna Dybo (Institute of Linguistics, RAS)
Evgeny Golovko (Institute for Linguistic Studies, RAS)
Olga Kazakevich (Institute of Linguistics, RAS / RSUH) (chair)
Zaira Khalilova (Institute of Linguistics, RAS)
Andrej A. Kibrik (Institute of Linguistics, RAS / Lomonosov MSU)
Timur Maisak (Institute of Linguistics, RAS)
Evgeniya Renkovskaya (Institute of Linguistics, RAS)
Natalia Serdobolskaya (Institute of Linguistics, RAS)
Andrey Shluinsky (Humboldt University of Berlin)
Nikolai Vakhtin (European University, SPb)

Organizing Committee:
Elena Budyanskaya (Institute of Linguistics, RAS)
Anton Buzanov (Institute of Linguistics, RAS / HSE)
Anastasija Gruzdeva (Institute of Linguistics, RAS / Lomonosov MSU)
Anna Danilina (Institute of Linguistics, RAS)
Anastasija Evstigneeva (Institute of Linguistics, RAS)
Mark Zimin (Institute of Linguistics, RAS)
Daria Mordashova (Institute of Linguistics, RAS / Lomonosov MSU) (chair)
Varvara Nerush (Institute of Linguistics, RAS / Lomonosov MSU) (secretary)
Konstantin Polivanov (Institute of Linguistics, RAS)
Feudor Sadkovsky (Institute of Linguistics, RAS / Lomonosov MSU)