PhD Courses in Denmark

Dates and time: 9 - 13 March 2026 from 9:00 - 17:00.

The LANCHART Centre and the Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics at the University of Copenhagen once again invite applicants for a PhD winter school in sociolinguistics. The winter school will take place from the 9th to the 13th of March 2026 at the University of Copenhagen.

The overall theme for the course is sociolinguistics understood broadly, and the participants will gain insights into different research fields within contemporary sociolinguistics. Focus is on newer developments and we will address themes and questions raised within the study of language, variation and indexicality as well as discourse oriented studies of language, diversity and social media. These issues will be discussed both from a theoretical and an empirical perspective.

Each day will consist of presentations of PhD projects from participants, discussions, and lectures from teachers (see title and abstracts from invited guest teachers below).

Invited guest teachers:
Sinfree Makoni, Professor,  Department of Applied Linguistics, Penn State University
Sari Pietikäinen, Professor, Department of Language and Communication Studies, University of Jyväskylä
Emma Moore, Professor, Department of English, University of Sheffield

Local teachers:
Marie Maegaard, Professor, Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen
Lian Malai Madsen, Professor, Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen

Course organisers:
Janus Spindler Møller, Associate Professor, Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen
Malene Monka, Associate Professor, Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen
Marie Maegaard, Professor, Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen
Ida Bzorek, PhD fellow, Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen

Riverine grammars: and building sociolinguistic knowledge outside the university

Sinfree Makoni
Penn State University

This seminar is part of a project I am engaged in with colleagues at Pennsylvania State University, Canada, Kenya and Zimbabwe. The objective of our argument is to make connections between language, water conservation and youth in urban African contexts. Even though the locus of the project is Africa it has implications beyond it.  Africa is the youngest continent in terms of demographics, with 70% of the continent’s population under the age of 30.  Yet at the same time, the African continent is also associated with scarcity and attrition of resources, as well as with language extinction events. The research has wider implications, as the rest of the world increasingly experiences what Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff have theorized in their 2012 book Theory from the South Or, How Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa. They argue that, as nation-states in the Northern Hemisphere experience economic crisis, political corruption and racial tension, it seems as though they might be evolving into the kind of societies normally associated with the Global South. Their work inspires us to consider how we might understand these issues by using theories developed in the Global South in socio-linguistics, in particular theories developed by ordinary civilians. We are making the argument that languages can be understood and theorized using water images. The dominant scholarship on language focuses on regional (earth) metaphors, dividing languages by region and geographical spread. What can be gained, we ask, if we think of languages instead as liquid, taking the metaphor of the “language fluency” of everyday citizens further. This research theme will pay attention in particular to youth vernaculars (for example Sheng in Kenya), using these vernaculars to make a series of arguments about language change over time, language renewal, and language shift. Bodies of water such as rivers can move their origin or source, can have sub-terranean reserves and have multiple identities at one moment. We aim to make the innovative argument that languages can be understood in riverine rather than terrestrial or geographically bounded terms. We select case studies that show that language are diverse and ever-renewing, in response to a range of factors.

Listening Arctic Salmon: Blue Sociolinguistics for Climate Change

Sari Pietikäinen
The Arctic University of Norway, The University of Jyväskylä

Anthropogenic climate change, driven by human activity, is not only an environmental phenomenon but an assemblage of ecological, social, political, and economic forces. These transformations reconfigure relations between humans and nature, as well as the knowledge systems we rely on to understand and explain them. Nowhere is this more urgent than in the Arctic, which is warming four times faster than the global average and serves as the frontline of planetary change. Arctic ecosystems and communities provide vital insights into current socio-ecological crises, with salmon rivers emerging as early indicators of these transformations.

For researchers, these emerging reconfigurations highlight the need for new theoretical and methodological approaches to adequately address complex, entangled processes and to inform the development of new practices and policies in this moment of planetary crisis. In this session, I discuss how blue sociolinguistics—i.e. research on the connections and interdependencies between seas, rivers, and water ecologies, and the language practices, discourses, and communities they shape—can help us understand accelerating climate change not only as an environmental crisis but also as a profound reconfiguration of human–nature relations. Drawing on my ongoing multispecies ethnography in the Arctic Tornio River, I apply a critical assemblage analysis (Pietikäinen 2024) to show how material, discursive, and affective aspects of the salmon-river assemblage simultaneously produce ruptures as well as possibilities for imagining and acting toward more sustainable futures of salmon rivers. Furthermore, we will discuss how “listening to Arctic salmon,” offers a way to engage with a post-humanistic view of listening, expanding it toward multispecies sociolinguistics attuned to climate change.

Socio-syntax: Exploring the social life of grammar

Emma More
University of Sheffield

We have a reasonably rich understanding of the complex social meanings associated with phonological variables (Eckert & Labov 2017; Pharao & Maegaard 2017; Hall-Lew, Cardoso & Davies 2021), but we have been slower to understand the social meanings of grammatical variation. One reason for this is the difficulty in circumscribing the variable context for grammatical items (Tagliamonte 2012: 06–207) when compared to phonetic items: how can two grammatical items be “two or more ways of saying the same thing” (Labov 1972: 271) when differences in structure fundamentally change what is semantically and pragmatically conveyed by utterances? Rather than being the poor relation to sociophonetics, the field of socio-syntax is beginning to flourish on its own terms, precisely because it forces us to interrogate what we mean by ‘meaning’. Whilst all types of linguists attend to semantic and pragmatic meaning, historically, only sociolinguists have concerned themselves with social meaning (meaning that is enacted performatively to create social reference). However, I argue that social meaning is not a separate kind of meaning that should be left to sociolinguists, but – drawing on Eckert (2019) – that semantic, pragmatic and social meaning are interdependent and range along a continuum. Understanding all three are vital to the linguistic enterprise: social meaning (and its necessary companion, linguistic variation) is not just an optional extra of language, it is a fundamental of language. In this session, we will think about different types of grammatical variation and how they function socially. This will require us to think about social meaning as rooted in the decoding of alternative utterances: bringing us into the realm of pragmatics, information structure and discourse. What makes a grammatical construction linguistically and socially marked, and how can we draw on pragmatic principles to decode that markedness? How does the embodiment of grammatical structures by human participants affect their meaning and use? By the end of the session, we will have considered these questions and more. In particular, we will have explored the extent to which syntactic variation is a form of social practice. Ultimately, this will allow us to better understand human language capabilities.

Academic aim:
Understanding of newer developments within sociolinguistics
Getting substantial feedback on selected parts of own Ph.D.-projects
Participating in ongoing discussions in sociolinguists

Target group: 
Mainly PhD students of sociolinguistics, PhD students from the humanities and social sciences are also welcome

Language: English

ECTS: 5.3 for participation with paper presentation

Max. numbers of participants: 30

Applications:
Applications for the winter school should consist of a 1-page presentation of your PhD project, pointing out which questions/themes you would like to present and discuss as part of the winter school. Please submit your application via email to janus@hum.ku.dk no later than 1 December 2025

Important dates:
1 December 2025, deadline for applications
31 December 2025, deadline for notification of acceptance

Further information: For more information about the PhD course, please contact the course organisers

Literature
To be announced (The readings are to be decided by the three international guest lecturers)