N'CLAV Nordic collaboration on language variation is a network of researchers and research students in theoretical, descriptive and applied linguistics focussing on variation across the Nordic languages. Some have a mainly theoretical, structural approach, others a sociolinguistic approach; there are individuals and groups that focus on dialect-geographic issues whereas others have a background in language technology and computational linguistics. N'CLAV aims to strengthen the cooperation between all of these and become a powerful arena for co-operation and research training and a base for broad cross-theoretical research, matching international networks and collaboration of the same kind.

Participants in N'CLAV will each year gather for a four day Grand Meeting. In combining scientific input with concrete project work, the N'CLAV grand meetings will play an important role in developing strategies for obtaining funding for future projects from national, Nordic, and European sources, thus increasing the possibilities for young researchers to pursue high level research.

N'CLAV will also arrange one field trip to an area of special interest each year where special focus will be on giving research students and young researchers hands-on experiences with conducting empirical groundwork and, in the aftermath of the activity, produce high level output in the form of scholarly papers on the basis of the data collected.

Both types of activities will thus focus on researcher training and recruitment, on the one hand through providing a forum for presentation and exchange of ideas (the grand meetings) and on the other through schooling in methods for theoretically informed data collection (the fieldwork trips).

As stated above, N'CLAV will bring researchers with different backgrounds and persuasions together in one network. This focus on collaboration during practical fieldwork and in grand meetings can be viewed as a proactive and innovative approach to researcher training, and as a revitalization of the field of language variation in particular and linguistics and the Humanities in general.

Navn: group leader, Copenhagen

Body type: Researcher network