The 9th International Contrastive Linguistics Conference will be held in Santa Margherita Ligure, Italy, on May 14-15, 2020. As a part of this conference, I will organize the small workshop The Syntax of West Iberian Languages: Philological and Sociolinguistic Aspects. The topic of the workshop is very broad, and contributions are accepted on any aspect of the syntax of the western Iberian languages, as long as they are treated in a contrastive perspective (for the sake of consistency with the orientation of the Conference); therefore, the authors will be free to choose the specific topic they prefer.
The workshop has two objectives. On the one hand, it aims to bring together academics who are interested in the study, preservation and promotion of the regional and minority languages spoken in the Iberian Peninsula. On the other hand, it aims to draw attention to the rich linguistic diversity that characterizes the west Iberian space, now endangered by the diglossic, asymmetric environment, which tends to favor the use of Spanish (or Portuguese, in the case of Miranda do Douro) in every context. I also believe that it may be important that events of this type are also organized outside the Iberian Peninsula.
Paradoxically, to facilitate the attendance of all the participants of the Conference, the languages of the workshop will have to be limited to English and Spanish. However, I plan to edit a volume including the contributions of the workshop, possibly as a special issue of a journal of linguistics or Romance philology. In this case, it is not excluded that articles are admitted in the languages that constitute the subject of the workshop. I also plan to record some interviews to upload to my YouTube channel about languages, as I did last August in Leipzig with Professor Augusto S. Da Silva, who spoke about the situation of Portuguese as an international language.
Enrico Torre 