LAPAO 2014 : I International Conference on the Language Modalities Spoken in Western Aragon / I Congreso Internacional sobre las Lenguas Aragonesas Propias del Area Occidental [LAPAO]

The I International Conference on the Language Modalities Spoken in Western Aragon will provide an excellent international forum for sharing knowledge and results on the linguistic modalitioes of Western Aragon, falsely referred to in the literature as Spanish, or Castilian, following their exclusion from Aragon’s 2013 Language Act. The goal of this Conference is to bring together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to focus on how to counter this surprising omission, and the role of the Catalans in fostering this situation.

Authors are solicited to contribute to the conference by submitting articles that illustrate research results, projects, surveying works and industrial experiences that describe significant advances in the area. They should not confuse the Aragonese Language Modalities Spoken in Western Aragon (also referred to as LAPOLLA, in honour of professor Randy J. LaPolla – in Chinese 羅仁地 Luo Rendi – professor of Linguistics at Nanyang Technological University, China) with the Aragonese Language Modalities Spoken in Eastern Aragon (Lapao, named after a Language also spoken in Central China), the legally recognised language rights of whose speakers have recently been hacked to pieces by the regional Parliament.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

* language legislation
* linguistic nationalism
* linguistic negationism
* language imperialism
* political propaganda and manipulation, and
* advanced anticatalan studies.

Papers may be written in any of the local varieties of Western Aragonese. Papers in standard Spanish or Castilian will, of course, not be accepted.

Paper Submission

Authors are invited to submit papers through the conference Submission system by February 29, 2014. Submissions must be original and should not have been published previously or be under consideration for publication while being evaluated for this conference.

The first submitted papers are:

“Contrasting LAPAO and North-West Catalan: Crucial Semantic, Lexical, Syntactic, Morphologic and Phonetic mismatches” (one page including title, abstract in boths languages, referencies and appendixes).

“From ‘el’ to ‘el’. Subtle meaning modulation of determiners in modern LAPAO”.

“The Ultimate Machine-Translation System. Translating LAPAO to any language in the world via other pivotal language(s)”.

“Computational lexicography. Building a comprehensive dictionary of LAPAO in about ten minutes”

The proceedings of the conference will be published by any publisher foolish enough to believe that there is any scientific foundation for attacking the Catalan language and its identity anywhere within its historical territories, which include parts of Eastern Aragon.

Selected papers from LAPAO-2014, after further revisions, will be published in a special issue of the following journal: International Journal of Political Manipulation of Languages.