Living Tongues linguist Dr. Luke Horo will present at the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2019) in Melbourne, Australia in early August 2019. This is the first time that the Congress will be held in the Southern Hemisphere since its inception in Amsterdam in 1932. The conference is being hosted by the Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association. All program and event details are listed on the official website.

Before the main conference begins, there is a very interesting ICPhS satellite workshop taking place entitled “Intonational Phonology of Typologically Rare or Understudied Languages“. There, Dr. Luke Horo will be presenting a joint paper he wrote with Dr. Greg Anderson entitled “Towards an intonational phonology of Sora” on August 4th during the poster sessions (read the abstract here).

The satellite workshop organizers write, “For over two decades, the intonation systems of many typologically varied languages have been analyzed in the framework of the Autosegmental-Metrical (AM) model of intonational phonology. However, there remain many languages whose intonation system has not been analyzed, including languages with typologically uncommon systems. […] Any work related to the intonational phonology of typologically rare or understudied languages is welcome, but we especially welcome languages in the Austronesian, Mayan, Slavic, Tibeto-Burman, and Turkic families as well as other languages of the Americas and Central Asia. We also welcome any language whose intonation system challenges the assumptions made in the AM framework of intonational phonology.”

As part of the main ICPhS conference program, Dr. Luke Horo’s presentation is entitled “Vowel dispersion as a cue for prominence in Sora” which will take place on Thursday, August 8th as part of a panel on “Field methods in Phonetics”. See full poster listings here.

Regarding the theme of the conference, ICPhS chair Marija Tabain writes, “Our conference themes for ICPhS 2019 are “Endangered Languages, and Major Language Varieties”. Australia is home to many Aboriginal languages; a very wide variety of migrant languages from Europe, Asia, and more recently Africa; and with our cousins in New Zealand, two major “New World” varieties of English. I really hope you’ll find time to explore more of our wonderful big country, and at the very least to appreciate what an exciting city marvellous Melbourne really is!”

Congrats to Dr. Horo on his presentations at ICPhS and we look forward to sharing photos from the event in upcoming posts.