In this interview, we talk to Beijia Chen about the citation networks binding the Neogrammarians as a school.
Read more ›12th International Conference on Missionary Linguistics – Early Linguistic Encounters between Europe and Asia
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.
Posted in Conferences and workshops
Recent publications in the history and philosophy of the language sciences – March 2025
Joby, Christopher. 2025. Christian Mission in Seventeenth-Century Taiwan. A Reception History of Texts, Beliefs, and Practices. Leiden: Brill (Brill Series in Taiwan Studies, 3). ISBN 978-90-04-71635-3
Publisher’s website
This is the first book-length study of the reception of Christianity and the epistemic outcomes of contact between Protestant and Catholic missionaries and Indigenous Austronesians in the contact zone of seventeenth-century colonial Taiwan.
In the Age of European Expansion, Dutch Reformed and Spanish Catholic missionaries attempted to win the souls of Indigenous Austronesian people in Taiwan. Christopher Joby examines the strategies that the missionaries employed to overcome the gap between their own cultures and languages and those of the Indigenous Austronesians or Formosans in the contact zone of seventeenth-century Taiwan, and evaluates the success of these strategies. As such, this book is a reception history of the texts, beliefs, and practices that Reformed Protestant and Catholic missionaries introduced to convert the Formosans to their mode of Christianity. Using many linguistic and non-linguistic examples, this approach allows for a ‘complementary colour perspective’ by comparing the epistemic outcomes of the Dutch Reformed and Spanish Catholic missions.
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Podcast episode 44: Ian Stewart on the Celts and historical-comparative linguistics
In this interview, we talk to Ian Stewart about modern ideas surrounding the Celts and how these relate to historical-comparative linguistics.
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Posted in Podcast
Recent publications in the history and philosophy of the language sciences – February 2025
Dubourg Glatigny, Pascal, ed. 2024. Esperantists in the Twentieth Century: Making Connections in an Age of Division. [Special issue] Cultural History 13(2). ISSN 2045-290X
Publisher’s website
Introduction: Esperantists in the Twentieth Century: Making Connections in an Age of Division
Pascal Dubourg Glatigny
Two Communist Esperantists: A Bulgarian-Japanese Dialogue
Ulrich Lins
Revolutionary Tongues: Esperanto, Marxist Linguistics, and Anti-imperial Struggles in East Asia, 1930s–1940s
Edwin Michielsen
Facing the Choice of Language in Esperanto Literature: Edwin de Kock, Hasegawa Teru and Julius Balbin between Emotion and Ideology
Pascal Dubourg Glatigny
Posted in Publications
Cfp – XV Congreso Internacional de la Sociedat Española de Historiografía Lingüística XV CISEHL2026
Date : 17-20 March 2026
Place : Barcelona (Spain)
Prescriptivism and descriptivism from the peripheries
The Department of Translation and Language Sciences of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, with the collaboration of the research group Infolex, is pleased to announce the celebration of the XV Congreso Internacional de la Sociedat Española de Historiografía Lingüística, with the title: Prescriptivismo y descriptivismo desde las periferias. It will be held at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Poblenou campus) on 17, 18, 19 and 20 March 2026.
Following the consolidated trajectory in the holding of on-site conferences, this event will include plenary lectures, round tables and communications. This edition will deal particularly with the historiography of prescriptive and descriptive works, although the general topics of linguistic historiography (history of theoretical problems, history of linguistic models and theories, etc.) will be present, as usual in the international congresses that the SEHL dedicates to this discipline.
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Posted in Announcements, Conferences and workshops
Cfp – (Hi)stories of meaning: The “Semantic Century” and Its Roots (CISPELS III)
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.
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Posted in Conferences and workshops
Funding for MA degrees in the language sciences available at Université Paris Cité
Funding for MA degrees in the language sciences is available at Université Paris Cité, through the Paris Graduate School of Linguistics.
The Paris Graduate School of Linguistics (PGSL) is a Paris-area graduate program covering all areas of language science.
It offers several comprehensive Master curricula integrating advanced study and research, in close connection with PhD programs as well as with the Empirical Foundations of Linguistics consortium.
Research plays a central part in the program, and students also take elective courses to develop an interdisciplinary outlook. Prior knowledge of French is not required.
The relevant track to choose for students interested in history of linguistics and in an affiliation with the Histoire des théories linguistiques research group is called Theoretical and experimental linguistics and Phonetics.
For more details, please see https://paris-gsl.org/index.html
New funding opportunity: https://mobility.smarts-up.fr/
Deadline for grant applications : January 17th 2025 (Program start date: September 1st 2025). Note that funding is only available for non-French citizens and for students who do not hold a French university degree. Citizens of some countries (those requiring visas for study in France) must additionally and simultaneously apply to Campus France, as explained on the application portal.For more information, contact aimee.lahaussois@cnrs.fr
Posted in Jobs and funding
Recent publications in the history and philosophy of the language sciences – December 2024
Carey, Hilary M. 2024. The Colonial Bible in Australia. Scripture translations by Biraban and Lancelot Threlkeld, 1825-1859. Berlin: Language Science Press (History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences). 260 p. ISBN ISBN: 978-3-96110-486-4. DOI DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.14007559
Page de l’éditeur
Book in open access
This book provides an extended introduction to the scripture translations of Biraban, an Awabakal man, and the missionary Lancelot Threlkeld. It examines Threlkeld’s linguistic field work in Raiatea prior to coming to New South Wales. It places the translations he undertook in the context of Australian missionary linguistics and the rapid advance of the settler frontier, for which he was a key eyewitness. It analyses the motivation and collaboration between Biraban and Threlkeld in the light of discoveries of new manuscripts, including that of the Gospel of St Matthew, as well as Threlkeld’s personal diary, neither of which have previously been analysed. The review includes a linguistic and ethnographic analysis of the complete corpus of Biraban and Threlkeld’s collaboration. It includes a complete list of the Threlkeld manuscripts and the many printed editions, including those available online. For historical purposes, it includes a copy of the unique standalone edition of the Gospel of Saint Luke, presented by the editor, James Fraser, to the British and Foreign Bible Society. The original is now in Cambridge University Library. It also includes a full digitisation of Threlkeld’s autograph manuscript, illuminated by Annie Layard, in Auckland City Library.
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Podcast episode 43: Judy Kaplan on universals
In this interview, we talk to Judy Kaplan about universals in American linguistics of the mid-20th century.
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Posted in Podcast
History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences 