29/09/2010
KurdishMedia.com
The Conference Announcement with the list of speakers
The Kurdish American Education Society1 in Los Angeles will be hosting the first North American Conference on the Kurdish Language and Culture on November 5 or 12 of 2010. The Conference will bring to Los Angeles Kurdish and non-Kurdish linguists and scholars from different parts of the United States and Canada to address a wide spectrum of topics and research on Kurdish linguistic studies. Our guests and scholars will present their latest findings on a variety of topics related to the status and direction of the Kurdish language(s) We urge all those interested in research about theoretical linguistics, applied linguistics, psycholinguistics, lexicography, educational linguistics, language minorities, heritage languages, literacy, language and literature, language and gender to join us in sponsoring and contributing to the success of this conference. Information on line registration will be made available soon.
The primary goal of the conference is to stress the need for reviewing the existing trends, current challenges, and new linguistic and socio-linguistic and historical studies, recognize the achievements that scholars and practitioners have made in their respective fields of research, and open new possibilities for raising consciousness about and change the state of the language and its community of speakers both within and outside Kurdistan. We wish to bring multiple disciplines and voices together in this conference. We welcome proposals and papers on the following topics: Kurdish language and dialects, Kurdish sociolinguistics, Kurdish as a heritage language, language discrimination, historical linguistics, language and identity, Kurdish scripts and standardization. We will also use the conference as an occasion to honor and pay tribute to the memory of Dr.Vera Saeedpour who laid the foundation for scholarly and academic work on the Kurdish life and culture.
Unfortunately We do not have any funds to pay for the travel expenses of the speaker(s). We encourage participants to either seek institutional funding or independently pay for their travel expenses. Our members will be more than happy to provide accommodations for our guests. Interested participants should send their paper abstracts to sharifiamir@yahoo.com . A 300 word abstract should be sent for consideration by Oct 20, 2010.
1-The Kurdish American Education Society is a non-profit educational and cultural organization.
List of Sponsors
UCLA G.E. Von Grunebaum Center for Near Eastern Studies
UCLA Program in Indo-European Studies
UCLA Center for World Languages
The Center for Language, Interaction, and Culture
Department of Linguistics, California State University, Long Beach
Department of Anthropology, California State University, Long Beach
Ketab Publications, for publication and promotion of Iranian Books, Westwood. CA
Vision Marketing Communications, Long Beach California
Poetry, Prose, Poster
Contest
The Kurdish American Education Society (KAES) encourages the youth to learn about Kurdish history and culture and to express their understanding artistically. Students and youth (age range of 9-25) are invited to create posters, poems, and essays about Kurdish life, present and past. KAES will offer prizes (to be announced later) to those who produce the best poster, poem, and essay in a contest of creativity.
Entries and poster themes are guided by any topic or image of the participants’ own choices. All work should be submitted by October 25. A panel of judges will review and assess all the submissions based on originality of expression and artistic creativity. Posters should reflect some aspect of Kurdish life in concrete or abstract form. Entries will be evaluated on the basis of originality, visual effectiveness and theme. Awards will be distributed on the day of the conference. All poster submissions should be sent to Zuhdi Sardar and creative writing to Amir Sharifi, the Chairs of poster and essay Committee:
sharifiamir@yahoo.com
zuhdi@roadrunner.com
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