Conferences: ACAL 2017 & two BAAL events

Here is some information on three upcoming conferences that deal in one way or another with African language topics. The first, the 48th Annual Conference of African Linguistics (ACAL), will be held at the University of Indiana in Bloomington, Indiana, US on March 30 - April 2, 2017 (CFP already passed). The other two are organized by groups connected with the British Association of Applied Linguistics (BAAL): The BAAL - Cambridge University Press Seminar Series (BAAL-CUP), will be held at Aston University in Birmingham, UK on 27-28 April 2017 (CFP deadline Feb. 20); and the BAAL - Language in Africa Special Interest Group (BAAL-LIASIG) Annual Conference, will be held at the University of Reading in Reading, UK on May 12, 2017 (CFP deadline March 31).

ACAL 48

The ACAL, run since 2013 by an organization with the same acronym, the Association of Contemporary African Linguistics, is a major annual academic meeting on African languages and linguistics. I personally had the chance to present at ACAL 35 in 2004, and to attend ACAL 38 ten years ago.

This year's conference is hosted by the Department of Linguistics at Indiana University. "The conference will focus on all aspects of African linguistics, from linguistic description to theoretical analysis and sociolinguistics."

Links to registration and the program page (though the latter was blank at the time of this writing).

BAAL-CUP

The BAAL-CUP seminar has as its theme "Minority Languages in New Media: Towards language revitalisation in Europe and Africa." The term "minority language" is a little tricky, but in the African context, I read it as applying to most if not all African languages.

Per the seminar information, it "is intended to identify and discuss emerging trends in the study of minority languages in new media and technology. This includes the ways in which minority languages are supported through their presence in new media, and how minority language users are making use of their languages in digital landscapes traditionally dominated by global languages such as English."

"New Media  refers to digital communication platforms such as online news  sites, blogs, wikis, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, and other Social Media."

Links to the CFP and registration.

BAAL-LIASIG 2017

The LIA SIG conference this year has the theme "Language without Borders: Multilingual Communication in Africa and the Diaspora."

Per the CFP, topics addressing the theme may include for example: oral communication; multilingualism; language choice; codeswitching; translanguaging in education; and translation.

Links to the CFP and registration.

Two upcoming meetings on language & ICT in Africa

Here are summaries of CFPs for two meetings to be held later this year which treat different aspects of the meeting of African languages and ICTs (information and communication technologies). There may yet be others, but for these, basic information from the calls for participation (CFPs), including dates and links, follows:

BAAL Language in Africa SIG, London, 6 May 2016

With the theme "Technology and Media: Emerging Trends in Africa and the Diaspora" the annual meeting of the Language in Africa Special Interest Group of the British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL) will be held at the University of East London on 6 May 2016.

Papers are invited on the general theme of the conference, and "could include, for example:

• Technology and education, including language learning
• Networking over time and space – Africa and the diaspora
• Technology and migration
• New uses of technology in research
• Language corpora
• Electronic translation
• Representation of  African languages and cultures using new technologies such as the web and digital video"

Abstracts of proposed papers, of up to 250 words, due by 28 March 2016. Send to Annette Islei, Convenor LiA SIG, annetteislei at gmail dot com

For more information, see the Language in Africa SIG page on the BAAL site (scroll down for the "Annual meeting" CFP)

Interspeech 2016 Special Session, San Francisco, 8-12 Sept. 2016

Entitled "Sub-Saharan African languages: from speech fundamentals to applications" this special session of the Interspeech 2016 conference (8-12 September 2016) "aims at gathering researchers in speech technology (automatic speech recognition, text-to-speech synthesis…) and researchers in linguistics (field linguists, phoneticians…) working in language documentation and fundamentals of speech science." "Such a partnership is particularly important for Sub-Saharan African languages which tend to remain under-resourced, under-documented and often also un-written."

"Prospective authors are invited to submit original papers in the following areas:

• ASR and TTS for Sub-Saharan African languages and dialects
• Cross-lingual and multi-lingual acoustic and lexical modeling
• Applications of spoken language technologies for the African continent
• Phonetic and linguistic studies in Sub-Saharan African languages
• Zero resource speech technologies: unsupervised discovery of linguistic units
• Language documentation for endangered languages of Africa
• Machine-assisted annotation of speech and laboratory phonology
• Resource / Corpora production in African languages"

The deadline for submission is 23 March 2016 (same as for the rest of the conference).

For further information on this Interspeech 2016 special session, see pages on

• the African Language Technology (AfLaT) site, and
• the African Languages in the Field speech Fundamentals and Automation (ALFFA) site