Call for papers: 8th LRI Workshop for Early-Career Researchers: Oral Communication and Plurilingualism, Merano, Italy, 11-12 June 2026. Submission deadline: 15 January 2026.
The Linguistic Colloquium Language, Region, Identity aims to foster scientific exchanges within the Alpine region and beyond. It is specifically targeted at early career researchers (PhD students and post-docs). The colloquia, jointly organised by a team from six universities and research centres in Austria, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland, intend to offer a forum for discussing current and recently concluded projects. The biennial editions are organised around three keywords: language, region and identity.
Each Linguistic Colloquium workshop has a specific topic of interest. The 8th edition will address topics related to oral communication and plurilingualism. In contexts characterised by territorial multilingualism and/or increasing levels of linguistic diversity, language manifests itself as a complex dialogical process involving multiple resources – registers, varieties, and discourses – which speakers select to engage in processes of meaning-making, identity negotiation, and to act upon their realities.
With this in mind, organizers welcome contributions that deal with orality and spoken language, focusing in particular on oral communication in connection with:
• communicative acts within a specific genre of private or institutional communication, e.g., family talk, communication at school and university, with public authorities, medical practitioners, etc.;
• the linguistic features of spoken language from a phonetic-phonological, lexical, morphological, syntactical, pragmatic, or interactional point of view; this may also include the contrast between different languages and varieties or between spoken and written languages;
• the teaching and learning of oral competences in formal and informal contexts;
• the positioning of speakers from a sociolinguistic or variational linguistic perspective;
• translanguaging and mediation practices among plurilingual speakers in private or institutional settings;
• oral communication and spoken language in experiences of mobility and migration;
• methodological, epistemological and/or ontological challenges in research on oral communication and spoken language.
Different languages and varieties in the Alpine region will provide the focal points of the workshop; however, the workshop is also open to related topics and projects, including overarching dimensions such as language ideologies and Artificial Intelligence in connection with spoken language and orality.
Center for Intercultural Dialogue 