9-10 June: Workshop “The languagecultural conceptualisation of belonging”- FASOS

Organizers: Jolien Clijssen, Lotte Thissen, Vincent de Rooij & Leonie Cornips

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht University, The Netherlands

While the concept of ‘belonging’ has been much theorized across other fields, in the field of (socio-) linguistics it seems to have been transplanted as one of the components or, even, substitutes of ‘social identity.’ How can we, based on empirical data, conceptualise and operationalise this notion and see to what extent it has explanatory power in modern-day sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological studies. How can we approach this concept in a rigorous manner without pre-supposing that some linguistic features are inherently linked with belonging (Cornips & Strycharz 2014)? For sociolinguists, one of the challenges is to find out whether and how linguistic features (Jorgensen et al. 2011) we are less aware of take part in the construction of belonging as well.

Event page.