Conference Report on Evolang 11

Abstract

The 11th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (Evolang 11) was hosted at the Lavin-Bernick Center for University Life at Tulane University in New Orleans, LA, USA, from 21 March to 24 March 2016. The University of Southern Mississippi organised the conference, with Heidi Lyn as Chair of the local organising committee. Over 200 delegates gathered for this second American Evolang, and were treated not only to a wide range of current research in language origins and evolution, but also to local ‘NOLA’ food and culture as well. Evolang hosted a reception at Mardi Gras World—a stylised warehouse storing numerous Mardi Gras floats and costumes, where guests were serenaded with a brass band and committee members threw beads into the amused, cocktail-sipping crowd. The conference banquet was held at the colonial-era-style Audubon Tea Room with live jazz and a swing dancing lesson led by Thom Scott-Phillips. Post-conference events included a ghost tour, swamp tours, and a plantation tour. This was the 20th anniversary of the very first Evolang, held in Edinburgh in 1996, and saw the release of the first issue of the Journal of Language Evolution . With a 20-year history, it is hardly surprising that there has been a strong ‘self-reflective’ tendency at recent Evolang conferences, as witnessed, for example, in the ‘Perspectives on Evolang’ section in the proceedings of Evolang 10 (Cartmill et al. 2014), as well as in some of the contributions in the first issue of JoLE (Dediu and de Boer 2016; Hammarstrom 2016). Something that is repeatedly mentioned in these publications is the observation that ‘work on language evolution has become much more rigorous: we are discovering methods by which questions we could formerly only speculate about can now be investigated empirically’ (de Boer 2014). These ‘self-reflective’ tendencies were also exemplified …