The 28th annual North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics (NACCL–28) organized by Brigham Young University will be held at the Provo Marriott Hotel and Conference Center from May 6th to May 7th in Provo, Utah. NACCL is the largest conference on Chinese linguistics in North America, held at a different North American university each year, and it draws international participation.

Abstracts are invited for 20-minute talks (plus 10 minutes for discussion) in all research areas of Chinese linguistics: theoretical, experimental, and applied. Abstracts should be submitted online no later than 11:59 pm, January 15th, 2016. For details on submitting abstracts, please go to the Call for Proposals page. The languages of the conference are English and Chinese.

Information on previous conferences can be found on the permanent NACCL site at http://naccl.osu.edu.

Conference website: http://www.chineselinguistics.byu.edu/naccl28
For further information, please send e-mail to naccl28.byu@gmail.com.

Call for Proposals
The 28th North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics (NACCL-28) will be held at Brigham Young University, Provo, UT May 6-7, 2016.

The theme of the conference will be Language Diversity and Language Variation. There is a long tradition of examining and documenting the myriad varieties of the Chinese language. However, until more recent decades, most of the work on variation has been in the form of traditional dialectology and–––to a lesser extent––through the lens of language policy. In addition to policy and dialect studies, there is now a substantial literature in the sociolinguistics of Chinese, including work on language contact, multilingualism, and other related disciplines. By its nature the study of variation interfaces with all the major linguistic sub-disciplines (e.g., phonology, morphology, syntax, pragmatics, and lexicography) and variation can be approached in many ways, including through traditional fieldwork and through natural language corpora. Moreover, understanding the nature of variation also impacts how Chinese is taught as a second language, particularly at the higher levels. Specifically, the existence of variation in everyday language raises questions about how teachers of Chinese mediate standard language in the classroom and how much they expose students to non-standard language in preparing them for interaction in the broad Chinese-speaking world.

Following the variation theme, conference organizers welcome all topics related to Chinese linguistics, but especially seek papers for presentation at NACCL-28 on the following topics:
1) Research that directly addresses the interface of language and culture;
2) Traditional Chinese dialectology
3) Language Contact, Multilingualism, Language policy, and Inter-language, and Code-switching
4) Historical linguistics and grammaticalization

Abstract submission

Abstracts are invited for 30 minute presentations (including questions);
Abstracts should be submitted to the conference email address: naccl28.byu@gmail.com. Only electronic submissions are accepted;
The abstract should be in either plain text format or in MS Word format;
In the abstract, please give 2-3 keywords to identify some general research areas, e.g. phonetics/phonology, syntax, lexicon, semantics, discourse, pragmatics, corpus linguistics, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, heritage language, Language Contact, Multilingualism, Language policy, and Inter-language, and Code-mixing, and so forth;
Abstracts should be limited to a single page and be accompanied by a cover page with the title of the paper, 2-3 keywords (see above), author’s name, affiliation, contact information (including email). The abstract itself should be anonymous without any identifiable author information.

Key Deadlines

Abstract submission: January 15, 2016.
Notice of acceptance: February 12, 2016