Organized by National Science and Technology Council, R.O.C.; Institute of History, NTHU; Institute of Linguistics, NTHU; Institute of Taiwan Languages and Language Teaching, NTHU; Center for Sustainable Development of Linguistic Diversity in Taiwan (SDLD); Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences, NTHU; Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, HU Berlin.

Dates: 28-30 March, 2025
Place: Hsinchu (Taiwan) 
Information and program: https://sites.google.com/gapp.nthu.edu.tw/icmlxii/home

The 12th International Conference on Missionary Linguistics will take place in Hsinchu (Taiwan) from March 28 to 30, 2025, organized by the Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences and the Center for Sustainable Development of Linguistic Diversity in Taiwan (SDLD) of National Tsinghua University. Situated at the intersections of linguistic historiography, historical linguistics and historical sociolinguistics, research in the field of Missionary Linguistics aims at understanding how and for what purpose Western missionaries documented and analyzed hitherto unknown languages of Asia, Africa and the Americas. Covering the period from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, primary sources of interest are grammars, dictionaries, and teaching manuals. 

The aim of the conference is to bring together researchers who study historical language change, the historical development of linguistic terms and concepts, early ideological conceptualizations of language or other relevant topics through the lens of missionary documents. As with the previous conferences in Oslo, São Paulo, Macau/Hong Kong, Valladolid (Spain), Mérida (Mexico), Tokyo, Bremen (Germany), Lima, Manila, Rome, and Santa Rosa (Argentina), the conference aims to cover a broad spectrum of regions and periods.  

Università della Calabria (Italy), 9–11 October 2025

“Meaning” is one of the most debated terms in linguistics, particularly in its historical dimension. On the one hand, the focus on meaning—and its public or objective nature—constituted a defining feature of twentieth-century linguistic thought, encompassing the so-called linguistic turn, and the rise of language as a central theme in the humanities (from Frege to Wittgenstein, from Bréal to Saussure, from Peirce to Morris). Yet, this momentum seems to have waned in the current century. On the other hand, meaning as a domain, theme, and problem has long been in existence (even prior to Bréal’s coining of the term science of meaning) and continues to occupy the background, even though the words “semantics” and “meaning” have fallen out of fashion in contemporary discourse.