The project aims at highlighting and strengthening Dutch research into the diversity of the world’s languages from a historic and a cognitive perspective. We will organize three major international conferences. A special focus is on activities to make the Dutch aware of Africa’s linguistic richness, with special emphasis on the languages of Africa and their presence in the Caribbean.

The three conferences will take place at the KNAW in Amsterdam and will be prepared in international workshops. The conferences are multidisciplinary and strive to bring the world’s top scientists together. The themes are:

• Patterns of diversification and contact: a global perspective - State of the art in content and method of the classification of the languages of South-East Asia, South America and Africa. (11-14 December 2012)
• Diversity and universals in language, culture and cognition - In what way and to what extent can the world's linguistic diversity be understood by cognition and culture? (May 2013)
• Macro- and micro-diversity of Europe and the Middle East: Integrating and exploring databases. (September 2013)

We hope to enrich Dutch research in language diversity by strengthening the multidisciplinary approach and getting inspired by contemporary cutting edge research. The aim is to put this research at the foreground of the Dutch research agenda and make the Dutch citizen aware of our research.

• cognitive linguistics
• historical linguistics
• linguistic diversity

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