The Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE) is a Europe-focused professional society for linguists. It was founded in 1966 [1] to advance linguistics, the scientific study of human language. The SLE has over 1,000 individual members and welcomes linguists of all kinds. Through its website, its annual meetings, and its journals Folia Linguistica and Folia Linguistica Historica , the SLE works to disseminate current research in linguistics and facilitate communication within the discipline.
The first president of the SLE was André Martinet, elected in 1966. Particularly active members in the first decades were Werner Winter (president in 1991) and Jacek Fisiak (president in 1972 and 1982). In the years before 1990, the SLE was an important meeting place for linguists from western Europe and eastern Europe. Meetings and presidents alternated between western Europe and eastern Europe.
The SLE publishes two journals, Folia Linguistica (on all areas of general linguistics) and Folia Linguistica Historica (specifically on historical linguistics).[ citation needed ]
The SLE organizes an annual four-day conference in the summer, with a program of talks, plenary speakers, symposia, and poster sessions for researchers to share their work. In 2020 and 2021, the Annual Meetings of the SLE took place digitally, due to the COVID-19 restrictions on traveling and gatherings. The 53rd Annual Meeting did not take place as originally planned, from 26 to 29 August 2020 at the University of Bucharest. As a result the 55th Annual Meeting is now expected to take place from 24 to 27 August 2022 at the University of Bucharest. [2]
Meeting | place | start date | end date |
---|---|---|---|
58 | University of Bordeaux, Bordeaux, France | 2025 | 2025 |
57 | University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland | 2024 | 2024 |
56 | National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens, Greece | 29 August 2023 | 1 September 2023 |
55 | University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania | 24 August 2022 | 27 August 2022 |
54 | Digitally | 30 August 2021 | 3 September 2021 |
53 | Digitally | 26 August 2020 | 1 September 2020 |
52 | Leipzig University, Leipzig, Germany | 21 August 2019 | 24 August 2019 |
51 | University of Tallinn, Tallinn, Estonia | 29 August 2018 | 1 September 2018 |
50 | University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland | 10 September 2017 | 13 September 2017 |
49 | University of Naples, Napoli, Italy | 31 August 2016 | 3 September 2016 |
48 | Leiden University, Leiden, the Netherlands | 2 September 2015 | 5 September 2015 |
47 | Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland | 11 September 2014 | 14 September 2014 |
46 | University of Split, Split, Croatia | 18 September 2013 | 21 September 2013 |
45 | Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden | 29 August 2012 | 1 September 2012 |
44 | University of La Rioja, Logroño, Spain | 8 September 2011 | 11 September 2011 |
43 | Vilniaus Universitetas, Vilnius, Lithuania | 2 September 2010 | 5 September 2010 |
42 | University of Lisbon, Lisboa, Portugal | 9 September 2009 | 12 September 2009 |
41 | University of Bologna, Forlí Campus, Italy | 17 September 2008 | 20 September 2008 |
40 | University of Joensuu, Joensuu, Finland | 28 August 2007 | 1 September 2007 |
39 | University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany | 30 August 2006 | 2 September 2006 |
The following persons have been president of the Societeas Linguistica Europaea: [3]
André Martinet was a French linguist, influential due to his work on structural linguistics.
The Prague school or Prague linguistic circle is a language and literature society. It started in 1926 as a group of linguists, philologists and literary critics in Prague. Its proponents developed methods of structuralist literary analysis and a theory of the standard language and of language cultivation from 1928 to 1939. The linguistic circle was founded in the Café Derby in Prague, which is also where meetings took place during its first years.
Mario Alinei was an Italian linguist and professor emeritus at the University of Utrecht, where he taught from 1959 to 1987. He was founder and editor of Quaderni di semantica, a journal of theoretical and applied semantics. Until 1997, he was president of Atlas Linguarum Europae at UNESCO.
Marianne Mithun is an American linguist specializing in American Indian languages and language typology. She is professor of linguistics at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where she has held an academic position since 1986.
Eric Pratt Hamp was an American linguist widely respected as a leading authority on Indo-European linguistics, with particular interests in Celtic languages and Albanian. Unlike many Indo-Europeanists, who work entirely on the basis of written materials, he conducted extensive fieldwork on lesser-known Indo-European languages and dialects, such as Albanian, Arbëresh and Arvanitika; Breton; Welsh; Irish; Resian and Scots Gaelic.
Vitaly Victorovich Shevoroshkin is an American linguist of Russian origin, specializing in the study of ancient Mediterranean languages. Shevoroshkin was born in 1932 in Georgia (USSR). In the 1960s he tried to decipher Carian inscriptions and proved that their language belonged to the Anatolian languages. In the 1970s he emigrated to the United States. He is now a professor emeritus of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Linguistics at the University of Michigan.
Alfredo Augusto Torero Fernández de Córdova was a Peruvian anthropologist and linguist.
Robert Paul Austerlitz was a noted Romanian-American linguist. Born in Bucharest, he emigrated to the United States in 1938. In June 1950, he received a Master of Arts from Columbia University, where he studied under André Martinet. With funding from the Ford Foundation, he studied the Uralic and Altaic languages at the University of Helsinki from 1951 to 1953 and Nivkh and Hokkaido at the University of Tokyo from 1953 to 1954.
Witold Mańczak was a Polish linguist. He was a member of Polish Academy of Learning and the Polish Academy of Sciences. He is best known for his historical linguistics work on identifying, via statistical methods focusing especially on well-studied European languages, overarching tendencies in analogical change. He has also argued that Gothic is closer to German than to Scandinavian, and suggests Goths originally hailed from somewhere around present day Austria, rather than from Scandinavia."
Robert Henry Robins, FBA, affectionately known to his close ones as Bobby Robins, was a British linguist. Before his retirement, he spent his entire career at the Department of Phonetics and Linguistics at the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London.
Anna Siewierska was a Polish-born linguist who worked in Australia, Poland, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. She was professor of linguistics at Department of Linguistics and English Language Lancaster University and a leading specialist in language typology.
Viacheslav Chirikba is a linguist and politician from Abkhazia. He was Minister for Foreign Affairs of Abkhazia between 2011 and 2016.
Ranko Bugarski is a Serbian linguist, academic and author.
Johann Karl Werner Winter was a German Indo-European specialist and linguist.
Olga Fischer is a Dutch linguist and an expert on the English language. She is Professor Emerita of Germanic Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam and former president of the International Society for the Linguistics of English.
Matti Juhani Rissanen was a Finnish professor emeritus and researcher in English linguistics. Rissanen worked at the University of Helsinki as a docent of English philology 1969–1970, an assistant professor 1970–1977 and as a professor 1977–2001. He was also chair of the university's language centre.
Bridget Drinka is an American linguist who specializes in Indo-European and historical linguistics. She is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
Katarzyna Dziubalska-Kołaczyk is a Polish linguist and professor of English linguistics at Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland. She is the editor-in-chief of Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics. A festschrift in her honor titled Approaches to the Study of Sound Structure and Speech. Interdisciplinary Work in Honour of Katarzyna Dziubalska-Kołaczyk edited by Magdalena Wrembel, Agnieszka Kiełkiewicz-Janowiak, and Piotr Gąsiorowski was published in 2020 by Routledge.
Mira Ariel is a professor of linguistics at Tel Aviv University, specializing in pragmatics. A pioneer of the study of information structure, she is best known for creating and developing Accessibility Theory.