April 12, 2004

UA Hosts Major Symposium on Language Variety in the South April 15-17

How did distinctively Southern ways of using language develop? How is the speech of Southerners represented in popular culture? What other languages besides English have been spoken in the South? How is language changing in the South?

These and many other questions will be examined at UA during a three-day symposium on "Language Variety in the South, LAVIS III: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives" April 15-17 in the Ferguson Center. This symposium is part of the yearly spring meeting of the Southeastern Conference on Linguistics.

The conference will include more than 100 different presentations on language and dialects of the South. More information and a complete schedule is available on the conference website at www.as.ua.edu/lavis. The conference is free to UA faculty and students and to the general public, who are welcome to attend any presentations that interest them.

Organizers of the event are linguists Dr. Michael Picone of the UA department of modern languages and classics, and Dr. Catherine Evans Davies of the UA department of English. Linguistics bridges the social sciences and the humanities; funding for the conference comes from the National Science Foundation, regional humanities centers, and the UA College of Arts and Sciences.

The conference includes everything from Kathryn Tucker Windham telling stories (Friday from 1-2 p.m.), to a lecture that gives an overview of Native American languages of the Southeast (Saturday morning), a paper on "A Hundred Years of Sound Change in Alabama" (Thursday at 11:20 a.m.), a paper on "The Sound Symbolism of Self in Innovative Naming Practices in an African-American Community" (Saturday at 11:20 a.m.), a lecture on "Spanglish" (Friday morning). In addition, there will be videos of Southern dialects and Cajun French shown on Friday and Saturday in Ferguson Theater.

The Saturday program has been approved by the Tuscaloosa City Schools and the Tuscaloosa County Schools for professional development hours for K-12 teachers. UA is pleased to offer this service to the community in tight budget times for local school districts.

The main goal of the conference is to provide an important forum of exchange for researchers concerned with language variety in the South. Important issues include the relationship between black and white speech in the South, applications of technology to the analysis of linguistic data, past and present linguistic diversity, and the relationship between language and identity. For more information and conference details, contact Dr. Michael Picone, UA professor of French and linguistics, at 348-8473 or mpicone@bama.ua.edu and Dr. Catherine Evans Davies, UA associate professor of linguistics, at 348-9522 or cdavies@bama.ua.edu.

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