Our Projects

Building on the success of previous editions in Bangor (2013), Turin (2016), and Amsterdam (2018), the 4th edition of the Contested Languages in the Old World (CLOW) conference series will take place in Warsaw 24–25 May, 2024. The conference, jointly organized by  Dr Nicole Dołowy-Rybińska (Polish Academy of Sciences), Marco Tamburelli (Bangor University) and Mauro Tosco (University of Turin) will bring together scholars and activists working on the current status and future prospects of contested languages, as well as on issues of corpus and status planning, and how these impact on the speaker communities themselves and on the academic world. Read the call for papers.

The conference will be accompanied by a one-day workshop, designed particularly (but not exclusively) for PhD students and early career researchers. The workshop will serve to better understand the concept of “contested languages” as well as the differences and similarities between contested languages and other forms of languages minoritization or endangerment.

We are currently working on a Special Issue of the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development dedicated to Contested Languages, co-edited by Marco Tamburelli and Mauro Tosco.

Due to appear in 2023, this Special Issue aims to develop a further understanding of Contested Languages and the dynamics of language contestation from a theoretical, empirical and methodological perspective. Contributions to the Special Issue will examine the attitudes and assumptions that lie behind language contestation as well as investigate potential routes to escape it.
Overall, this Special Issue will build on the work of Craith (2006) and Wells (2011) as well as address and further investigate issues that have been raised in the recent volume on Contested Languages (Tamburelli & Tosco, 2021).

The call for papers can be found here

(Please note: this has now closed)

Theme: Supporting maintenance, use, and development of newly recognised regional languages

A number of knowledge exchange workshops were organised by Marco Tamburelli in collaboration with third-sector partners who are involved in the maintenance and development of Lombard following recent institutional recognition from the regional government.

After the previous editions in Bangor (2013) and Turin (2016), the 3rd edition of the Contested Languages in the Old World (CLOW) conference series took place in Amsterdam on May, 3-4, 2018. The conference, jointly organized by Federico Gobbo (University of Amsterdam), Mauro Tosco (University of Torino) and Marco Tamburelli (Bangor University), brought together linguists, political scientists, legal experts, writers, activists and other scholars working on the current status and future prospects of “contested languages”, starting from the reflections by Nic Craith (2006). A special parallel panel was devoted to mobility and inclusion of contested languages in Europe. The conference programme is available here: http://www.multilingualism.humanities.uva.nl/clow3

A themed Panel discussion organised by the Research Group was featured as part of the First International Conference on Revitalization of Indigenous and Minoritized Languages held in Barlcelona (19-20 April 2017).

The panel focused on the minority (some of them highly endangered) languages of Italy, with a special attention to those which are not recognized (nor supported) by the Italian Government. Key points included:

the official language policy of Italy, language discrimination, language ideology and the ambiguous role of academic institutions vis-à-vis languages and dialects, the effects (and results) of official support for recognized minority languages, as well as grassroots approaches to the standardization and development of unrecognized languages and new developments on the net.