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The Swadesh Centenary Conference
Theme: The Swadesh Centenary Conference
 
 

Call for papers

The American linguist Morris Swadesh (1909-1967) made outstanding contributions in a number of linguistic fields, publishing over 200 books, articles and reviews. One of the pioneers of phonemic theory and of the methodical study of seriously endangered languages, he worked on dozens of languages of North and Central America and West Africa, contributed to the study of English phonology and to efficient ways of teaching languages to military personnel and civilians, and helped promote the cause of indigenous Mexican and other Native American languages to politicans and laypeople alike. He is most widely known for his interests in historical relations between language families across the world, and on quantitative historical linguistic techniques (glottochronology and especially lexicostatistics) using as data source diagnostic vocabularies which have become known as Swadesh lists.
Despite much bad press, lexicostatistics and glottochronology have lived on, seen various depevelopments, and have been applied to languages around the globe. Moreover, diagnostic wordlists from perhaps close to a third of the world’s languages have accumulated in the literature or on the internet, providing a unique resource for the investigation of the lexical behavior of languages in areal and genealogical perspectives.
We invite papers applying or discussing quantitatively oriented methods in historical linguistics, papers on the systematic investigation of languages and prehistory, and papers relating to Swadesh’s work. We expect to publish a book with a selection of the contributions.