THE EVENT

28th Annual Meeting of the South Asian Language Analysis Roundtable
University of North Texas, October 9-11, 2009

The South Asian Languages Analysis Roundtable (SALA) is the premier conference on South Asian languages with regular meetings held at venues worldwide since 1978. The conference is a showcase for the most recent advances in different areas of South Asian language and linguistics.

The call for papers and panels can be found on http://www.linguistlist.org.

CONFERENCE TOPICS

The conference will cover all areas of general linguistic interest which focus on most recent advances in different areas of South Asian language and linguistics. We encourage individual papers and/or panel proposals from diverse frameworks and especially welcome those with interdisciplinary focus, including but not limited to:

—  Endangered language documentation —  Multilingualism and language maintenance —  Language ideology and language policy —  Language and literature —  Language pedagogy —  Discourse analysis —  English in South Asia —  Developments in different theoretical models

PLENARY SPEAKERS

• Gregory Anderson, Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages
• Tista Bagchi, University of Delhi, Delhi
• Peter Hook, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
• Anvita Abbi, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi

OTHER INVITED SPEAKERS

• Paul Kiparsky, Stanford University
• George Cardona, University of Pennsylvania
• Hans Henrich Hock, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
• S. N. Sridhar, State University of New York, Stonybrook

HIGHLIGHTS

The Endangered Languages of South Asia

A focus of the conference will be the Endangered Languages of South Asia; with a special presentation by Gregory Anderson including a screening of the recent PBS/National Geographic special in which he is featured, "The Linguists". The conference will be held on the UNT campus from October 9-11.

An endangered language — that is, a language which is danger of losing all its speakers in the recent future — is a precious resource, just a precious as an endangered species of squirrel or lichen. Each time a language dies we lose information that can help us reconstruct the linguistic and social history of a community; each time a language dies, we lose information on the structural possibilities that a human languages can have; each time a language dies we lose all the cultural information that goes with that language. By some estimates, once every two weeks the last speaker of some language around the world dies, while others in the same community have shifted to a dominant language.

The study of endangered languages is an emergent interdisciplinary field with linguistics as the core field and concepts and methods from anthropology (implications for social behavior), language pedagogy (language maintenance and revitalization), history and political science (restructuring of tribal societies) as crucial ancillary fields.

The South Asian Languages Analysis Roundtable conference will be a capstone event for the newly formed Department of Linguistics and Technical Communication, bringing into focus an already strong research program at UNT on endangered language documentation, as reported in the Spring 2009 issue of "Research".

In memory of Professor Prem Singh

South Asian Language Analysis roundtable XXVIII is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Professor Prem Singh (1935-2008).

Prem Singh — an intellectual of immeasurable depth and breadth; a master of many classical and modern languages such as Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, Persian, Avestan, Old German, Old English, Punjabi, Hindi, and Urdu; a great mentor to many, an individual of high character... The loss of this great scholar will be dearly felt.

Invited speakers, both friends and colleagues will present on topics of interest to Professor Singh. The speakers for this session will be:

Paul Kiparsky, Stanford University

George Cardona, University of Pennsylvania

Anvita Abbi, Jawaharlal Nehru University

Peter Hook, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Hans Henrich Hock, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

S.N. Sridhar, State University of New York, Stonybrook

Tista Bagchi, University of Delhi

English in South Asia

A panel of papers is dedicated to the discussions of English in South Asia. Presentations will include: the use of English in fiction; language ideology and linguistic variation; the structure of English in South Asia; and the teaching English in South Asia. The invited participants for this session are:

S.N. Sridhar, State University of New York, Stonybrook