From the 27th to the 29th of June 2018, the 23rd International Conference of the African Association for Lexicography (AFRILEX 2018) will be held in Cape Town, South Africa. The conference is hosted by the Department of Language Education, University of the Western Cape, Bellville, Cape Town. More information can be found at the website.
Speakers include:
- International speaker: Prof Vincent Ooi (Department of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore)
- Speaker from Africa: Dr Willem Botha (Bureau of WAT, Stellenbosch, South Africa)
- Special PanSALB Session: Dr Rakwena Monareng (CEO of PanSALB, South Africa)
Snake Serum and Dragon’s Blood – not names you’d first associate with a high-end skincare range. When Maria Hatzistefanis decided after several years in business to give her beauty products more eye-catching names she knew it might be risky. It worked, though. Not only did the names create a talking point, they led to the products flying off the shelves. Hatzistefanis, 47, says a key ingredient used in her products, syn-ake peptide, replicates the reaction to a snake bite, resulting in a mild freeze-like effect in facial muscles. “One day, I brainstormed with my team and, as one of the ingredients mimicked the effect of snake venom I said, ‘let’s go crazy and see what happens’.
The language of place names creates a striking snapshot of New Zealand’s history. A new map, created by researchers at Te Punaha Matatini (a centre of research hosted by the University of Auckland) as well as Dragonfly Data Science, shows how Maori and English names are distributed on the North and South islands. 
From the 20th to the 22nd of June 2018, the 25th annual symposium organized by the Language of the Graduate School Language & Literature Munich at LMU Munich will be held in Munich, Germany. The theme of the conference is “Language Variation – Research, Models, and Perspectives”. Among those topics to be addressed include lexicography, dialectology, and identity.
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A book project entitled “A pre-handbook on literary onomastics” is looking for contributors. The book is a project of Martyna Katarzyna Gibka, a literary onomastician. The purpose of the book to present theories, tools, their application, and ideas for theoretical development of this field as well as remarks of people who contributed to literary onomastic and literary translation onomastics in a practical way. Researchers who are interested in potentially contributing to this work are asked to complete