History

A brief history of SALA

by Hans Henrich Hock with help from Alice Davison

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The foundation for SALA, the South Asian Languages Analysis Roundtable, was laid during the 1978 Linguistic Institute of the Linguistic Society of America, held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It consisted in a “Conference on South Asian Languages and Linguistics”, organized by Hans Henrich Hock and Braj B. Kachru, with support from Yamuna Kachru and Rajeshwari Pandharipande. The Conference attracted many of the top South Asian linguists from both North America and South Asia, and the response was so positive that it was decided to offer similar meetings in the future. There was to be a series of “International Conferences on South Asia” and a series of meetings with more limited, North American scope — SALA. Unfortunately, the tradition of international conferences was short-lived and ended after the third Conference, held 1982 in Mysore. As a consequence, there was an increasing tendency to broaden the scope of SALA beyond North America, with meetings in India (1997, 2005), the United Kingdom (1998), Germany (2001), and many other venues since then. (See the list of SALAs at the end of this page.)

From the beginning, SALA Roundtables were organized on an ad-hoc basis, without a formal organization behind them. The advantage has been that, even though the University of Illinois hosted the first three Roundtables, this was not interpreted as establishing a monopoly; and soon other institutions followed suit in hosting the Roundtables. The disadvantage is that there are no formal membership lists that can be drawn on for calls for papers, and there is no mechanism by which future host institutions can be easily identified. Nevertheless, through informal exchange of mailing lists and through a sufficiently large number of institutions volunteering to host SALA meetings (sometimes with some coaxing by Hans Henrich Hock), there has been an amazing and truly impressive succession of yearly meetings — only a few years (1996, 2000, 2007, 2012, and 2013) were without SALAs.

The first three meetings, held at the University of Illinois were organized by the same members of the UIUC Linguistics Department as the original Conference on South Asian Languages and Linguistics, with Hans Henrich Hock chairing the planning committee in 1979 and Yamuna Kachru in 1980 and 1981. After 1981, SALA began to be rotate between different universities, organized by local committees with support from national and international committees.

35.    2019   INALCO, Paris, France

34.    2018   University of Konstanz, Germany

33.    2017   Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland

32.    2016   University of Lisbon, Portugal

31.    2015   University of Lancaster, UK

30.    2014   University of Hyderabad, India

29.    2011   Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore, India

28.    2009   Northern Texas University, Denton

27.    2008   South Asia Meeting, Madison, Wisconsin

26.    2006   Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore, India

25.    2005   University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

24.    2004   SUNY, Stony Brook,

23.    2003   University of Texas, Austin

22.    2002   University of Iowa, Iowa City

21.    2001   University of Konstanz, Germany

20.    1999   University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

19.    1998   York University, UK

18.    1997   Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi

17.    1995   University of Texas, Austin

16.    1994   University of Pennsylvania

15.    1993   University of Iowa, Iowa City

14.    1992   Stanford University

13.    1991   University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

12.    1990   University of California, Berkeley

11.    1989   University of Wisconsin, Madison

10.    1988   University of Washington, Seattle

09.    1987   Cornell and Syracuse Universities

08.    1986   University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

07.    1985   University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

06.    1984   University of Texas, Austin

05.    1983   University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

04.    1982   Syracuse University, Syracuse

03.    1981   University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

02.    1980   University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

01.    1979   University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign