The theme of this year’s ASIALEX2018 is ”Lexicography in the Digital World”. The event will be held from the 8th to the 10th of June 2018 in Krabi, Thailand. Lexicography is much more than simply compiling a dictionary. The field brings together computational linguists, translators, educators, software developers, technical companies, and publishers whose knowledge and experience enrich our understanding of the intricate relationship between dictionary and digitalization. The 12th International Conference of the Asian Association for Lexicography aims to expand the horizons and encourage discussion and cooperation among the many specialists who take different approaches to this field of studies. Researchers working within the area of lexicography are encouraged to send in their abstracts (max. 250-300 words) by the 1st of April 2018. Details on abstract submission can be found at the website.

This year’s guest speakers include:

• Pedro A. Fuertes-Olivera (University of Valladolid, Spain)
• John Simpson (University of Oxford, United Kingdom)
•  Pam Peters (Macquarie University, Australia)
• Virach Sornlertlamvanich (Thammasat University, Thailand)

From the 24th to the 27th of September 2018, the 53rd Linguistics Colloquium will be held at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense, Denmark. The theme of this year’s conference is “Linguistic Variation and Diversity”. The colloquium is open to any theoretical approaches.Abstracts for papers (20 minutes presentation plus 10 minutes discussion) or posters should be written in English or German and have a length of 300-500 words including references. The deadline for abstracts is the 12th of March 2018. The website for the colloquium can be found here.

Relevant topic areas of the conference include, but are not limited to:

• intra- and inter-linguistic variation
• cross-linguistic comparison – typological, contrastive, historical
• language contact
• multilingualism – individual, institutional, societal
• language policies and minority languages
• linguistic variation and diversity in the media
• linguistic variation and diversity in language teaching
• translation of linguistic variation

On September 17 and 18, 2018, an international conference on the topic of name geography will take place in the Academy of Sciences and Literature Mainz. The reason for this is that the German Family Name Atlas (DFA) was finished in July 2017 with the publication of the sixth volume. The aim of the project was to record the most common surnames in Germany in their spatial distribution on the basis of grammatical and lexical questions. Thus, the atlas could not only show the distinctive regional distribution of many family names, but it also proves to be a catalyst and model for further family name geographical and lexicographic projects in Germany and abroad. Examples are the “Digital Surname Dictionary of Germany”, the “Surname Atlas of Rhineland-Palatinate, Saarland, Hesse”, the “Luxembourg Family Name Atlas” or the “Luxembourgish family name dictionary”. In addition, it turns out that the geographical evaluation also leads to new insights in other branches of onomastics, as investigations, for example, on call, settlement, guest house or street names show.

Possible topics are:
· Evaluations with material from the DFA, interpretation of DFA maps, including the inclusion of adjacent disciplines.
· Presentation of work in progress, completed or planned name geographical projects (family names and other name types) at home and abroad.
· Geographical studies in areas that have not been researched so far, such as business names.
· Lectures from neighboring disciplines such as dialectology, geography, digital humanities, computational linguistics, computer science, which contribute to the further development of the name geography (compulsory is graphic material).
· Methodical possibilities, technical solutions, visualization of name data.

The deadline for abstract submission is March 31, 2018. Abstracts can be sent by e-mail to namengeographie@adwmainz.de. More information can be found here.

From the 4^th to the 6^th of June 2018, researchers working within the area of post-colonial studies are encouraged to attend a special conference in Zurich, Switzerland.  The interdisciplinary conference, “Postcolonial Language Studies: Changes and Challenges”, will encompass the fields of anthropological linguistics, historical linguistics, language documentation, and sociolinguistics. Researchers who are interested in presenting a formal paper are encouraged to submit a 300-word abstract (excl. references) to iacpl@es.uzh.ch by January 28, 2018.

From the 17^th to the 19^th of May 2018, the city of Timisoara, Romania will be the host of an international conference on British and American Studies.  Among the topics of discussion at this scientific gathering are translation studies, British and Commonwealth Literature, Cultural Studies, and American Studies.  Researchers who are interested in presenting their scholarship are encouraged to submit a 60-word abstract by the 15^th of February 2018.  More information on the submission process and the conference can be found via the conference website. The Call for Papers can be found here.

The 4^th Workshop of the Linguistic Colloquium: Language, Region, Identity (LRI 4) will be held from the 7^th to the 8^th of June 2018 in Merano, Italy.  The purpose of this colloquium is to foster scientific exchanges within the Alpine region of Italy, Austria, Germany, and Switzerland.  The specific areas of linguistic research to be covered in the workshop include Applied Linguistics, Language Documentation, and Sociolinguistics. The theme of the workshop is “Language Policy – Language Use – Language Standard”.  New researchers (PhD students and post-docs) are especially encouraged to submit an abstract for possible presentation.  The deadline for submission is February 15, 2018.  You can find the official Call for Papers here, and more information at the LRI website.

In New Orleans, Louisiana (USA), the 7th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (SEM2018) will be held from the 5th to the 6th of June 2018, co-located with NAACL 2018. The purpose of this conference is to bring together researchers working in the fields of semantics of natural languages and its computational modeling. The conference embraces symbolic and probabilistic approaches. The Call for Papers can be found here. Paper submission are due March 2, 2018.