Register at the Interface of Socio-Geographic Variation

Call for Papers

This workshop, organised within SFB 1412: Register by Project A09 (https://sfb1412.hu-berlin.de), examines the intersection of register and socio-geographic variation, and how these dynamics relate to processes of standardisation, with a particular focus on Spanish and its varieties worldwide.

Project A09 investigates this interface in Canarian Spanish through three morpho-syntactic phenomena. The Canary Islands represent a linguistically complex space: politically part of Spain and exposed to Peninsular standard norms, yet historically and structurally connected to Latin American varieties. The situation has been described as diaglossic (Auer 2005, 2011), characterised by a dialect–standard continuum that may include intermediate varieties such as regional standards.

Building on recent work within SFB 1412 (e.g. Lüdeling et al. 2024), we approach register not as a separate layer added to dialect and diastratic variation, but as a dimension that interacts systematically with these structures. Register differentiation may reinforce supraregional norms, maintain local features, or reorganise variation patterns altogether.

Do shifts in formality correlate with shifts toward supraregional norms? Can regional standards be empirically identified through the patterned interaction of register, diastratic (e.g., education, age), and diatopic variables? And to what extent does ongoing standardisation reshape the internal architecture of register systems?

We welcome contributions that examine the interaction between diaphasic, diastratic, and diatopic variation, whether in spoken, written, or digitally mediated data on Romance languages — especially Spanish. We are particularly interested in work that integrates these various dimensions rather than analysing them in isolation, and that contributes to refining theoretical models of register within complex variation systems.

The workshop aims to reassess whether the traditional tripartite model of variation remains sufficient, or whether register should be understood as embedded within broader processes of socio-geographic stratification and linguistic change.