Historical language contact and emergent / emerging varieties in the Indian Ocean DEADLINE EXTENDED

The aim in this workshop is to take a look at the historic language contact situations and the emergent / emerging contact varieties or codes through input talks, round table discussions and keynote addresses. This event is concerned with historic language contact in and around the Indian Ocean including the geographic spaces of East Africa, Mauritius and the Seychelles, the Arabian Gulf, India, Sri Lanka, Southeast Asia and Australia, all of which are sociohistorically interrelated through many layered networks.
The Indian Ocean from a point of view of human interrelations is a very old and, despite its vastness, strongly interrelated Oceanic space. The space is characterized by multiple (trade) networks from early on. It was colonized in parts or in its entirety variously over a long period of time often in form of trade hierarchies by such groups as the Arabs, Ottomans, Malay, Chinese, Portuguese, Dutch and British. Through these interrelations we have a dense linguistic space with many languages from various linguistic families creating multiple (historic) contact situations that persist next to each other as well as overlapping and creating many levels of simultaneous and subsequent contact induced processes of mutual influence and change.
Various historical primary sources from differing (although often overlapping) culture areas give insight into the area and its sociocultural as well as trade and political history, the earliest sources maybe being such works as the Periplus Maris Erythraei in the 1st C and the writings of Aetius of Amida in the 6th C. Much information also came from travelogues from Europe, Arabia and China. These include Ibn Battuta, Zeng He, Fa Shien, Alberuni, Duarte Barbosa, Marco Polo, Vasco da Gama, Andre Pires, Dom Joao de Castro, van Linschoten, Georg Forster, Isabella Lucy Bird to name just a few. And of course many other types of documents from the Indian Ocean we can find all over the world render valuable information.
Early linguistic sources, amongst which stand out missionary grammars and treatises and researchers such as Hugo Schuchardt and Sebastiao Dalgado, or Yule & Burnell still furnish us with important analyses.

To show the interrelatedness of the concerned space and peoples within it and foster exchange and discussion in the scientific community, the format of the workshop will include round tables at which professors, researchers, PhD students and postdocs can exchange ideas. The tables will be started off by two or three short (max. 15 min.) input talks. These round tables will alternate with keynote speaker addresses.

The Call for Papers is for 15 min. input talks on topics concerning the outlined program. The abstracts for open submission should not be longer than 500 words and should include a short outline of the topic and research question, as well as a brief description of methodology and possible conclusions. It should state the time period, geographical space and languages in question and give a brief idea as to their relations with other spaces or time periods within the Indian Ocean.

Keynote speakers: Bernd Heine – Swahili-Based Pidgin Varieties in Eastern Africa
Ralph Ludwig / Sibylle Kriegel – title pending
Hugo Cardoso – South Asian-Portuguese varieties beyond the Portuguese: diffusion and absorption
Clancy Clements – Typological comparison between the South Asian Portuguese-based Creoles and Nagamese
Peter Mühlhäusler – title pending
Eeva Sippola – Contact ecologies of Spanish- and Portuguese-based creoles in South East Asia
Stéfano Manfredi – title pending

Conference location: University of Bremen, Germany
Conference date: 01.-03.10.2021
Deadline for open abstract submission: 31.03.2021
Contact for abstract submission and further questions: Dr. Tabea Salzmann, University of Bremen, Germany, t.salzmann@uni-bremen.de