Vol. 41.2/2027 [Open]
Special issue – Discourses of everyday life
Submission Deadline: December 2026
(The journal welcomes submissions on a rolling basis for the “Varia,” “Review,” and “Interview” sections.)
Guest editors: Maria Aldina Marques (ELACH e Centro de Estudos Humanísticos da Universidade do Minho); Rui Ramos (Instituto de Educação e Centro de Estudos Humanísticos da Universidade do Minho), José Teixeira (ELACH e Centro de Estudos Humanísticos da Universidade do Minho) & Conceição Varela (ELACH e Centro de Estudos Humanísticos da Universidade do Minho)
This thematic issue, entitled Discourses of Everyday Life, aims to bring together articles that, drawing on a range of objects of study, perspectives and theoretical approaches, contribute to an understanding of everyday discourse in all its diversity and complexity.
Everyday life is, at its core, made up of discourses. Because we are beings of words, discourse provides the foundation for social life. These are diverse modes of expression, oral, written, visual and multimodal, typically constituted by brief interactions, spontaneous and informal to varying degrees, often consisting of routines that punctuate the functioning of life in society. They are also an expression of a culture, of a way of being and of speaking a language. While giving primacy to oral communication, the everyday life of social communities also consists of interactions mediated by writing, to which the new possibilities afforded by social media must be added.
Only relatively recently, and under the influence of theories emerging from different fields within the Social Sciences and Humanities, have everyday discourses attracted sustained attention in the Language Sciences. In 2001, in her paper Interactions ordinaires dans les petits commerces : éléments pour une comparaison interculturelle, Véronique Traverso referred to the social (dis)prestige of this everyday dimension of language use, remarking, with some irony, and undoubtedly drawing on social stereotypes that remain highly prevalent today, that she was studying banal uses of language, so banal, in fact, that speakers were not even aware of their importance as social and discursive events.
Yet significant progress has already been made, and there can be no doubt that these ways of speaking have become a fundamental strand of research in Language Sciences.
The Discourses of Everyday Life conference, held in July 2026, was a significant event for the discussion of this field of enquiry. The publication of this issue of Diacrítica continues and further enhances the visibility of this line of research.
Contributions in the following languages will be accepted: Portuguese, Spanish, French and English.
Authors must comply with the journal's submission and formatting guidelines: Diacrítica.
