AIMS AND OBJECTIVES OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF GEOLINGUISTICS

The American Society of Geolinguistics was founded in 1965 by Dr. Mario A. Pei, a noted linguist and polyglot and Professor of Romance Philology at Columbia University, New York City. Among Dr. Pei's chief objectives was the desire to make linguistics intelligible to the educated non-specialist and to stress the practical importance of linguistics.

The Society aims to gather and disseminate up-to-date knowledge concerning the world's present-day languages, their distribution and use among the population, their relative practical importance, usefulness and availability from the economic, political and cultural standpoints, their genetic, historical and geographical affiliations and relationships, and their identification and use in spoken and written form. The Society is particularly interested in linguistic geography, languages in contact and conflict, language planning and politics, language education and the broader aspects of sociolinguistics-"macro-sociolinguistics."

The Society meets several times yearly in New York City and holds an annual luncheon near the College in May. It also publishes an annual journal that is distributed to all paid-up members. Articles for the journal are welcomed from members and non-members alike. Articles should be reasonably intelligible to educated non-specialists. All submissions should be typed single-spaced, with double spacing between paragraphs, notes and bibliography at the end, in camera-ready form. A diskette formatted for Word for Windows (any version) must accompany the manuscript.

The Society has in the last decade arranged several conferences at which scholars have read papers and had opportunities to exchange views. Papers from these conferences have appeared in Geolinguistic Perspectives, Language in Contemporary Society and Constructed Languages and Language Construction ( edited by Jesse Levitt, Leonard R. N. Ashley and Kenneth H. Rogers) and Language & Communication in the New Century (edited by Jesse Levitt, Leonard R. N. Ashley and Wayne H. Finke).