VALS-ASLA, the Swiss Association for Applied Linguistics, is a forum for the exchange of knowledge and information in the field of Applied Linguistics, an interdisciplinary field of linguistics in which language-related challenges and real-life problems are examined and results are applied in both practice and theory development.

The theme of the 2024 conference in Bern is “Asymmetries and Inequalities in Language”. With this theme, we seek to highlight the ways in which language and language issues reflect and reproduce social divisions, but also how linguistic analyses can help to uncover and sometimes even redress inequalities in society. We aim to showcase research on language and social issues from a wide range of theoretical, methodological and geopolitical perspectives, and to encourage discussions on the role that asymmetries and inequalities play in our research.

First Call for Papers

We invite abstracts for oral presentations drawing on original research related to any sub-discipline of sociolinguistics or applied linguistics (including critical sociolinguistics, variationist sociolinguistics, interactional sociolinguistics, conversational analysis, language policy, and language teaching and learning, among others). We particularly encourage submissions related to the conference theme. We aim to showcase a diversity of theoretical and methodological approaches as well as linguistic and cultural contexts. Oral presentations will last 20 minutes (with 5 minutes for questions and discussion) and can be given in German, French, Italian or English.

Abstracts should be submitted via our website. Abstracts (in German, French, Italian or English) should not exceed one page of text. References, examples, and images may appear on a second page. Abstracts should be submitted as PDF documents and be fully anonymized. The deadline for submission is Friday, June 30, 2023. All abstracts will be evaluated by the scientific committee.