The University of Macau’s (UM) Department of Portuguese will hold the Second Conference on Language Contact in Asia and the Pacific on Wednesday 14 September and Thursday 15 September. The conference aims to provide a platform for experts and scholars to exchange knowledge from multidisciplinary research on the different facets of language contact and multilingualism in Asia and the Pacific.

Papers in the fields of descriptive linguistics, linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, and language documentation, maintenance and revitalisation, will be presented. The keynote speeches and conference participants’ presentations will cover topics related to contact linguistics, namely (1) description of specific linguistic phenomena as a result of the contact between languages, with case studies in Hong Kong, Taiwan, The Philippines, Malaysia, Macao, mainland China, and Indonesia, (2) social and cultural consequences and contexts of contact between groups of speakers of different languages in certain Southeast and East Asian regions, and (3) documentation and preservation issues related to endangered minority languages, with focus on Malaysia, Singapore, and Macao.

There will be four keynote speeches, namely ‘Layers of Language Contact and Language Change’ by Prof Peter Austin from the SOAS University of London Sasak, ‘Periphery in the Age of Reimagining: Vernaculars and Vitality in Urban and Online Communities’ by Prof Lisa Lim from the University of Hong Kong, ‘Minority Portuguese-lexified Creoles in Asia: Internal and External Challenges to the Survival’ by Prof Alan Baxter from the University of Saint Joseph, and ‘Documenting Malacca Portuguese Creole (Cristang)’ by Prof Stefanie Pillai from the University of Malaya.

The opening ceremony will take place on 14 September, at 9:00am, in Room G012, E22 Building. The conference will be conducted in English. For enquiries or more information about the event, please visit https://fah.umac.mo/portuguese/fah-dport-conferencia-lcap2016/ or contact Dr Mário Pinharanda Nunes at 88228908.


Source: Faculty of Arts and Humanities


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