A brief history of SALA (by Hans Henrich Hock with help from Alice Davison)
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. The LSA that year held 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, and thus SALA was born. 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 meeting, 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. The following of SALAs held so far in reverse order:
- 2019 INALCO, Paris
- 2018 University of Konstanz, Germany
- 2017 Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland
- 2016 University of Lisbon, Portugal
- 2015 University of Lancaster, UK
- 2014 University of Hyderabad, India
- 2011 Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore, India
- 2009 Northern Texas University, Denton
- 2008 South Asia Meeting, Madison, Wisconsin
- 2006 Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore, India
- 2005 University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
- 2004 SUNY, Stony Brook,
- 2003 University of Texas, Austin
- 2002 University of Iowa, Iowa City
- 2001 University of Konstanz, Germany
- 1999 University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
- 1998 York University, UK
- 1997 Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
- 1995 University of Texas, Austin
- 1994 University of Pennsylvania
- 1993 University of Iowa, Iowa City
- 1992 Stanford University
- 1991 University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
- 1990 University of California, Berkeley
- 1989 University of Wisconsin, Madison
- 1988 University of Washington, Seattle
- 1987 Cornell and Syracuse Universities
- 1986 University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
- 1985 University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
- 1984 University of Texas, Austin
- 1983 University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
- 1982 Syracuse University, Syracuse
- 1981 University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
- 1980 University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
- 1979 University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
The 36th South Asian Languages Analysis Roundtable (SALA-36) will be held in Kathmandu, Nepal.