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Call for Papers

International Conference

Orality in All Its Forms Across the World's Languages:

Linguistic, Literary, and Sociocultural Challenges

📅 November 20–22, 2025
📍 University of Sousse/Faculty of Arts and Humanities (Tunisia)

Conference languages: French, Arabic, English

Conference co-organized by FLSHS (School and Literature Laboratory, University of Sousse), LLL

(University of Orléans), ELLIADD

(University Marie and Louis Pasteur), and CRLAO-CNRS (Inalco-Ehess)

As the primary manifestation of human language, orality is omnipresent: spontaneous or codified, ephemeral or memorable, intimate or public, it permeates all communication spaces. Whether natural or refined, formal or informal, face-to-face or mediated, it shapes daily exchanges, all forms of discourse (academic, cultural, political, etc.), artistic practices, and technological innovations.

Despite its ubiquity, orality remains elusive, embedded in the flow of time and destined to vanish upon utterance (verba volant, scripta manent). Unlike writing, which fixes and materializes language, orality exists only in the dynamics of its enunciation. Analyzing it thus requires translating it into spatial terms: transcribing, segmenting, and freezing it into a graphic representation that inevitably alters its fluid and spontaneous nature.

Indeed, the transition from oral to written language is not merely a matter of transcription but a genuine transformation, where each medium imposes its own constraints and redefines the very structure of language. The difference between oral and written language is not only functional but also material and cognitive. Orality is a sonic flow, immediate and contextual, supported by intonation (pauses, rhythmic variations, etc.) and multimodality (gaze, body posture, gestures—see Jacques Cosnier, 1996). Shaped in real time, its syntax is co-constructed and adjusted (see Peter Auer’s concept of syntax on-line, 2000). Writing, on the other hand, is a spatial inscription, segmented and independent of the context of enunciation. It aims to translate the temporal flow into structural progression, smoothing out hesitations, eliminating redundancies, and presenting a self-sufficient syntax at both the sentence and text levels.

Between orality and writing, there is thus not mere transcription but adaptation, sometimes reinvention.

The differences between orality and writing, initially medial, must be distinguished from how they are perceived and represented, whether in grammar, public opinion, or literary productions, where orality is often reconstructed, stylized, or staged according to the constraints and aesthetics of writing. The work of Peter Koch and Wulf Oesterreicher (2001) proposes viewing orality and writing not as a binary opposition but as a communicative continuum structured around two poles: the language of proximity, associated with orality, characterized by spontaneity, direct interaction, and flexible syntax, and the language of distance, associated with writing, involving more deliberate structuring and discursive autonomy. This perspective allows for an exploration of the diverse relationships between orality and writing across languages and usages. In French, where spontaneous orality and standardized writing show marked syntactic gaps, the transition between the two requires significant reformulation. In Arabic, only the standard form is written and taught, while so-called dialectal varieties, primarily oral, remain socially undervalued, creating a diglossic situation that can sometimes be contentious. Other systems, such as Chinese, exhibit relative autonomy between writing and phonetics, while some languages with strong oral traditions have only recently developed writing systems.

[In this context, Langlois (2012: 99) identifies a duality and a form of "companionship" between orality and writing since the latter's emergence. Speech is indeed primary, innate, and defining for the human species, but language has been refined and has evolved alongside the technology of writing, just as it now adapts to new communication technologies (Hagège, 1985: 89–91). There is thus an inevitable interdependence between these two tools of thought. If humans are homo sapiens, acting consciously, they are first and foremost homo loquens, "dialogical beings," biologically predisposed to become "beings of speech," who may, but not necessarily, become "beings of writing" (Hagège, 1985: 198). In summary, while there is no radical dichotomy between orality and writing, there are real differences, both in terms of value and cognitive benefits (cf. Langlois, ibid.).]

These various models of the difference between orality and writing are themselves being challenged today by the advent of digital humanities, which redraw the boundaries between the two. In terms of usage, digital technologies foster hybrid forms of communication, such as voice messages, automatic subtitles, or voice interfaces, where orality and writing constantly intertwine. On a scientific and methodological level, new computational approaches allow for the direct analysis of sound signals without transcription, using models like wav2vec 2.0 or HuBERT. These advances challenge the primacy of writing in the study of language and pave the way for a better inclusion of languages with limited written resources.

Themes for Reflection

In addition to welcoming studies on orality, this conference invites an exploration of the processes of transformation and interaction between orality and writing through several themes:

1. Orality and Language Structure

How do the inherent characteristics of orality (prosody, gestures, rhythmic variations) influence discourse construction? How does orality shape the syntactic and pragmatic structures of languages? What are the boundaries between orality and writing in languages where these distinctions are particularly marked (diglossia, plurigraphism)?

2. From Orality to Corpora: Transcription and Annotation

The annotation of oral data, of which transcription is a key component (see Abouda, Lefeuvre & Badin, forthcoming), structures and interprets speech to enable analysis. But any textual representation involves selection: what granularity should be adopted? How can quantitative measurement and the "grain" of language (cf. Rastier, 2011) be reconciled?

Orality, fluid and multidimensional, resists complete fixation. Transcription and annotation, by highlighting certain phenomena—prosody, syntax, interaction—are like maps of language, each privileging a particular perspective. But the map is not the territory: it guides interpretation as much as it structures the data. How, then, can these choices be made to ensure the most relevant representation possible?

3. Norms, Representations, and Hierarchization of Language Forms

For centuries, writing has been upheld as the model of linguistic legitimacy, relegating orality to a secondary position. How has this hierarchy been established across cultural and historical contexts? To what extent do speakers evaluate their own oral usage and that of others in relation to written norms? How do educational, academic, and media institutions contribute to this structuring?

4. Orality and Technology: Hybridizations and Reconfigurations

Far from a rigid opposition between orality and writing, contemporary digital practices reveal a continuum between these two modes of expression. Orality is now recorded, automatically transcribed, archived, replayed, or even simulated by artificial intelligence. Meanwhile, writing borrows codes of orality through texts, instant messages, emojis, or automatic subtitles. How do these practices redefine the specificities of orality and writing? What challenges do they pose in terms of linguistic normativity, memorization, and discourse authenticity? How do digital humanities challenge traditional distinctions between these two modes of expression?

5. Orality and Literary Creation

To what extent does literature seek to capture orality, stylize it, or recompose it? What techniques are used to render speech in text, whether in narrative, theater, or poetry? How does literature play with the boundaries between the language of proximity and the language of distance? Is orality a constraint, a resource, or an artifice in literature?

A central dimension of this relationship lies in the often fantasized representation of popular language, which oscillates between fascination and distancing. Far from being a mere reflection of linguistic practices, the transcription of orality in literature often involves a reconstruction that accentuates certain traits while erasing others, thereby interrogating the hierarchies between writing and orality. This staging of orality reflects a tension between a legitimist approach, seeking to preserve written norms, and a more populist stance, advocating the expressiveness of an oral language deemed more authentic or aesthetic, more conducive to stylistic inventiveness. How do these issues manifest in authors' stylistic and aesthetic choices? To what extent does literary orality reflect linguistic ideologies and social representations of language?

6. Diachrony of Orality

As William Labov describes historical linguistics as "the great art of making the best use of bad data" (1994: 11), it is because "the further back in time we go, the sparser, more discontinuous, less diverse, and sometimes poorly documented the data, necessarily written, become" (Marchello-Nizia et al., 2020: 34). Linguistic change, originating and spreading primarily orally, seems particularly difficult to document over the long diachrony, which, at best, has only written data. Hence the emergence of the field of represented orality (Marchello-Nizia, 2012; Lefeuvre & Parussa, 2020), which seeks to uncover traces of orality in available written texts, and that of micro-diachrony of orality (Abouda & Skrovec, 2022), which aims to bridge long diachrony and variationist sociolinguistics. What clues allow for the reconstruction of vanished oral forms? To what extent do ancient texts stylize orality rather than reflect it? How has the gap between orality and writing evolved over time? How does documenting linguistic change in real time on recent oral data consolidate methods of long diachrony? This theme invites an exploration of ways to analyze orality from a diachronic and micro-diachronic perspective, between documentation, linguistic reconstruction, and literary staging.

7. Teaching Orality

School is a place of constant verbal exchange (Langlois, 2012), but orality occupies a paradoxical status there: omnipresent in interactions, it is both a tool and an object of learning, without yet establishing itself as a discipline in its own right (Nonnon, 1994). Despite its recognition in official documents, its didacticization remains complex, notably due to the predominance of writing in school learning (Gadet & Guérin, 2008).

Studies in sociolinguistics and variation remind us of the importance of considering the diversity of oral usages and their actualizations in the classroom. Should orality be taught through specific functional situations, or does its acquisition primarily rely on informal learning through interaction? These questions extend to both the mother tongue and foreign language learning, where mastery of oral skills is central.

In this perspective, research on the grammar of orality (Weber, 2013) and contemporary communication modes (Weber, 2019) opens new avenues for integrating orality into learning. The interplay between prosody, nonverbal communication, and gestures plays a key role in this teaching. The concept of the "learning body" (Lapaire, 2022) and enactive approaches (Aden, 2016) underscore the importance of sensorimotor dimensions in the acquisition of oral skills. Similarly, work on "pedagogical gesture" (Tellier, 2013) shows how teachers' gestures support comprehension and language appropriation.

How can the learning of orality be articulated with other linguistic skills? What tools and frameworks allow for better consideration of nonverbal communication? To what extent do multimodality and new forms of communication transform the teaching of orality?

8. Translating Orality: Between Spontaneity, Fidelity, and Technologies

“The conference interpreter must be able to provide an exact and faithful reproduction of the original speech. Deviation from the letter of the original is permissible only if it enhances the audience's understanding of the speaker's meaning” (Jones, 2002: 4). The translation of orality, whether interpretative or automatic, poses a constant challenge between faithful reproduction of the source discourse and the necessary adaptation for communicative effectiveness. Unlike written translation, which allows for in-depth reformulation, oral translation requires instant, fluid, and context-adapted restitution, with no possibility of revision.

Simultaneous, consecutive, or whispered interpretation mobilizes specific skills that account for temporal constraints and the ephemeral nature of oral discourse. But what happens to the oral specificities of discourse when it is translated live? Is the speaker's spontaneity preserved or sacrificed for the sake of clarity and effectiveness? To what extent do the type of discourse and the context of interpretation influence the treatment of orality in the target language?

Moreover, technological advancements are transforming the practices and challenges of oral translation. Artificial intelligence, voice recognition, and machine translation tools offer new approaches that redefine the skills required of interpreters and translators. Faced with these developments, how can the training of future professionals be adapted? Which pedagogical tools should be prioritized to develop rapid analysis and precise restitution skills? To what extent can technologies complement, or even compete with, human expertise in linguistic mediation?

An Interdisciplinary Conference

This conference is aimed at linguists, literary scholars, anthropologists, historians of language, and media specialists working in the world's languages, who wish to explore these issues in all their diversity. It invites a confrontation of different linguistic and literary traditions to reflect on the multiple ways in which orality and writing interact, transform, and reconfigure themselves.

We encourage proposals adopting theoretical, descriptive, or applied approaches, as well as case studies illustrating the plurality of relationships between orality and writing in different languages and cultures.

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