LCES 2017

LCES 2017
Language Contact and the Early Slavs
Dates	2017/10/19 (iCal) - 2017/10/21
Location
Location:	Prague, Czechia
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Important dates
Submissions:	2017/05/31
Table of Contents

The workshop Language Contact and the Early Slavs is addressed to one of the most controversial issues in contemporary medieval studies, which is the very fast expansion of the Slavic language across great parts of Europe in the Early Middle Ages. While traditional scenarios assume unity of language, ethnicity and material culture, leading alternative models emphasize the active role of material culture, through which ethnic identity was constructed to mobilize linguistically extremely heterogeneous populations. Traditionalists explain the spread of the Proto-Slavic language by migrations in the 6th–7th century and associate that with specific material culture and with early mentions of ethnic Slavs in written sources. Alternative hypotheses attribute the same material culture and written references to linguistically and genetically quite varied communities and associate the later spread of Proto-Slavic with its status as an ‘official’ language or ‘koiné’. In other words, early ethnic Slavs did not speak Proto-Slavic, no Slavic ‘Urheimat’ ever existed and Slavic speakers may not have common roots.

• Workshop Chair
  • Tomáš Klír, Institute for Archeology, Charles University

Conference proceedings:

Klír, Tomaš – Boček, Vít – Jansens, Nicolas (eds.). New perspectives on the Early Slavs and the rise of Slavic (Empirie und Theorie der Sprachwissenschaft 6). Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2020. 353 s. ISBN 978-3-8253-4707-9.