40th South Asian Languages Analysis Roundtable (SALA-40)

The South Asian Languages Analysis Roundtable (SALA) is a prestigious annual international conference for linguistics in this field. It was founded by Prof. Hans Henrich Hock in 1978 in the Linguistic Institute of the Linguistic Society of America at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Since then, SALA is hosted each year at different locations around the world. This year, SALA 40 is hosting by Project A03 „The creative listener. Interpretation at the interface of prosody, syntax and information structure“ of the CRC 1646 „Linguistic Creativity in Communication“ at the Bielefeld University. The central theme of the conference is „Creative Interpretation of Variability“, pertaining to the enrichment of intrinsic variation found in South Asian languages. The conference covers a wide range of topics in linguistics, including (but not limited to) phonetics, morphosyntax, typology, and semantics. The keynote lectures will be held by Professor Indranil Dutta from the School of Languages and Linguistics at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India and Professor Sandhya Sundaresan from the Department of Linguistics at Stony Brook University, New York, USA. For the aims and scope of the conference see also the interview with Farhat Jabeen at the Bielefeld University Blog from 25th August 2026.