EL Publishing is introducing a new article series that will appear in the journal Language Documentation and Description called Language Contexts.
This series focuses on the contexts in which a language or variety is spoken, providing social and cultural information that complements other linguistically-focused sources (such as Ethnologue or Glottolog). Articles will include information about the speaker population, social organisation, cultural aspects, linguistic ecology (including multilingualism and factors influencing language choice), language vitality, and language use and transmission in the community, diaspora and cyberspace. Contributors to the series will have detailed knowledge of a community and its language use but have not so far had an avenue to publish about it – typically, they would be researchers, including community members, who have worked on language documentation, revitalisation, text collections, descriptive grammars, or ethnographic descriptions.
Articles in this series form a subset of EL Publishing’s regular Language Documentation and Description journal volumes. Lauren Gawne and Peter Austin are the editors of the Language Contexts series. Articles are expected to normally be 5,000-7,000 words and we strongly encourage the inclusion of images, maps and other illustrative material, especially links to online resources and material available in repositories or archives. It is also possible to include media samples (audio, video clips). The articles will be double-blind peer reviewed and will be published under a Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC (Attribution-NonCommercial), which means they will be Open Access, at no expense to the author, and free to download.
The first article in the series is now available online: Lauren Gawne (2017). Language Contexts: Syuba, also known as Kagate (Nepal). Language Documentation and Description 13, 65-93.
For more details on the series see the Language Contexts web page or contact the editors at elpublishing2017@gmail.com.