Atma Jaya Catholic University of Indonesia will host the International Symposium on the Languages of Java (ISLOJ 10) on June 5-6, 2025.

Call for papers ISLOJ 10

The island of Java is home to several major world languages. Javanese—spoken mainly in Central and East Java— is among the world’s most widely spoken languages in number of native speakers. It has one of the oldest and fullest recorded histories of any Austronesian language. It also has been of considerable interest to scholars because of its unique speech level system. Sundanese—spoken in West Java— has over 27 million speakers, and Madurese—spoken on the neighboring island of Madura and throughout parts of East Java— is the third largest local language, with up to 13 million speakers. Geography, history, and typology bind these languages with linguistically related languages on the neighboring islands to the east, Bali, where Balinese is spoken, and Lombok, where Sasak is spoken, each by about 3 million speakers. Each of these languages displays a range of dialects, isolects, continua, and contact varieties and yet they have received relatively little attention from linguists. With this symposium, we offer an opportunity for scholars working on any aspect of Javanese, Sundanese, Madurese, Balinese, Sasak, or any non-Malay language spoken on these islands, to come together and share their findings. We aim to encourage and promote continued research on these important and unique languages.

Abstracts are invited for papers to be presented on any linguistic topics dealing with the languages of Java and its environs—Javanese, Sundanese, Madurese, Balinese, and Sasak. Papers on other languages will be judged according to their relevance to the symposium topic. Papers are welcome from any subfield of linguistics and using any approach or theoretical background. Studies of non-standard(ized) versions, dialects, and isolects, including contact varieties, are particularly welcome. All papers are to be presented in English.

In addition to the main conference, as part of the joint conferences AFLA 32 and ISLOJ 10 will include an integrated special session on register, which broadly encompasses aspects of the register knowledge of the speakers of a language (such as which alternatives are available) and which situational parameters are relevant (properties of the surroundings, properties of the addressee, purpose of the interaction etc.).   This special session aims to better understand the role of register across languages that explains why certain grammatical variants differ by register, identifying cross-linguistically valid principles of register, and how might these be suitably modelled,  taking Austronesian languages in particular, of which several are known to have grammaticalized speech registers or speech levels.  Given that this is a joint special session, we invite papers on any Austronesian languages.

For this special session, we especially invite papers along two research tracks. The first track is how overt vs. implicit marking of grammatical features are distributed across registers, and more generally, how the grammatical properties of a language interacts with possibilities of register variation. This could include, for instance, different types of marking via reduplication, forms of address and politeness, or tense-aspect-mood marking, among others. The second track concerns modeling register in multilingual contact situations, with regard to the emergence of contact-induced grammatical variants and register-related language-mixing.  This special session aims to foster initial research within and across Austronesian languages, to relate to current research on register across other languages and across several disciplines (see, for further information, the Collaborative Research Centre 1412 on ‘Register’) < https://sfb1412.hu-berlin.de/>

Anonymous one-page abstracts (data and references may be on a second page) should be submitted as a pdf to the following address:

isloj.linguistics AT gmail.com

Please indicate your name, affiliation, and title of abstract in the body of the email. Please also indicate if you would like to participate in the special session on Register (see above).

Deadline for submission of abstracts: 10 January 2025

Notification: March 1, 2025