Call for Papers

Contributions from all areas of youth language research are welcome. The focus of the conference will be, among others, on the following topics:

• Youth languages in urban centres – What effects do multilingualism, language contact with migration languages and conversations in multi-ethnical groups have on youth communication?
• Youth languages and dialect – Which role does the language use of young people play between the poles of standardisation and dialectalisation?
• Youth languages and empiricism – Which empirical methods, especially socio- and variation linguistic field methods, are suitable for current questions within youth language research?
• Perception of age-related language variation – Should the frequent use of particular features in youth communication be viewed as the reason for salience? If so, which linguistic characteristics are salient, and they be connected to aspects of language change?
• Youth languages and the media – To what extent can an interrelationship between written and spoken youth communication be observed? Which role do grown-ups play within media-communication?
• Social constructions of youth – Doing Youth, Doing Peer-group, Doing Gender are current key terms in youth language research. How can these procedures be described linguistically in an adequate way and can Undoing Youth/Peer-Group/Gender among young people potentially be determined by linguistic characteristics/structures?

We invite scholars and professionals to submit proposals (in English or German) before 15th May 2015. Conference languages are English and German.

Proposals (title of presentation only) should be submitted via email to jugendsprachen(at)uni-graz.at.

Abstracts will be demanded at a later date.

Subsequent to the conference a publication of results is planned.