The first ISOCTAL was held in 2015 at Newcastle University, and it was a successful and fruitful conference; we hope we can turn it into a regular biennial meeting.

ISOCTAL-2 hopes to feature papers on many topics in Chinese linguistics, understood broadly as covering all Sinitic languages, e.g. Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese and all regional varieties, including syntax, morphology, phonetics and phonology, semantics, language variation and sociolinguistic studies, diachronic change, language contact, typology and comparative studies, child language acquisition, second language acquisition and teaching, applications of translation and code-switching to pedagogy.

There will be a thematic session on child language acquisition with emphasis on research that has cross-linguistic implications and empirical work that refers to Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese and other languages spoken in Chinese communities.