Call for papers

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Department of Language and Cultural Studies
Faculty of Education & Humanities
University of Guyana

Language Rights in Guyana 

Call for Contribution: Colloquium 2016 Proceedings Languages of Guyana

The Informal Working Group for Language Policy and Language Rights will be publishing the papers presented at the Colloquium 2016: Languages of Guyana—Theory, Policy and Practice in Education and beyond.

We invite you to submit an abstract for a paper compatible with the goals of Colloquium 2016 for inclusion in this collection, even if you did not present a paper at Colloquium 2016. We are aiming for a document that will appeal to teachers and any other citizens seeking to increase their knowledge about language matters but who may not have had much exposure to linguistics.

Description: Colloquium 2016 was held on August 10 and 11, 2016. The colloquium was an initiative of the informal working group for language policy and language rights, a group with members from both inside and outside the Faculty of Education and Humanities. Our goal was to engender a shift from colonial deficit perspectives to multilingual difference perspectives, moving native Guyanese speakers of languages other than English from the margins to the centre of the discourses of the humanities.

This publication can be seen as the revival of a project begun in the 1970s but stultified by both mass emigration of our foremost linguists and negative attitudes towards Guyanese Creole. The panelists and participants at the conference reflected on matters relating to Creolese and indigenous languages of Guyana, teaching language and literacy in Guyana, and language policy and practice in Guyana. These will be the main areas of focus of the publication.

The discussions will educate the public about the languages of Guyana – language and culture, attitudes to language, language and power, language and ethnicity, language and national identity, etc. It will also promote research carried out in Guyana, both within the University of Guyana and the international academic community.

We encourage you to submit an abstract of your chapter on or before March 31.

Please submit to Tamirand De Lisser by email at guyanalanguagesunit@gmail. Your abstract should not exceed 150 words. Papers should be no longer than 6000 words, excluding endnotes. Use the font Times New Roman, size 12 points, and CMS formatting (see: http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html).