New Ways of Analyzing Variation, the world’s largest annual event in variationist sociolinguistics, held its 53rd annual conference at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor from November 5–7, 2025.
This year’s theme was sociolinguistics, conflict, justice, and peace. As such, many presentations centered on variation in underrepresented, minoritized, and oppressed communities; language in zones of political and social conflict; and language study as a mechanism for the promotion of justice and peacemaking. And new to this year’s NWAV was a focus on scholarly teaching of sociolinguistics and the scholarship of teaching and learning as it relates to sociolinguistics.
The plenary speakers were Profs. Sharese King (UChicago), Alicia Backford Wassink (UWashington), and Lal Zimman (UCSB).
As always, there was strong presence from the University of Toronto. Both current and former members of the department delivered talks, poster presentations and project launches:
Hilary Walton (Post-doc) and Naomi Nagy (faculty)
Ethnolinguistic identity and indexical VOT in Heritage Italian
Jessica Göbel (NYU) and Ailís Cournane (PhD Alum, now at NYU)
The development of linguistic bias: How does accent affect children’s friendship preferences?
Gemma McCarley (Post-doc) and Sali A. Tagliamonte (faculty)
Can you explain it? Yeah, for sure: Variable sure in Canadian English
Justin R. Leung (PhD Student)
A multidimensional approach to heritage languages: Cantonese classifier constructions in Toronto
Nick Haggarty (PhD Student)
Queer speech in contemporary Toronto: Multimodal approaches to voice, identity, and archive-building
Costanza Vallicelli (PhD Student)
Standardization in homeland and heritage Italian: Loss of regional markedness in possessives
Laura Escobar (PhD Student)
Does she sound cute or shy?: The effect of pitch and breathiness on English and Japanese listeners’ perception of female voices
Aaron Dinkin (former faculty, now at SDSU)
Systems of change: The case of rhotic back vowel systems in New Orleans English
Sali A. Tagliamonte (faculty), with Patricia Cukor-Avila (UNT), Gillian Sankoff (UPenn), Guy Bailey (UTexas-RGV), and John Baugh (RiceU), was also part of a panel session, It all began with William Labov: A session in tribute to an NWAV founder.
You can check out the program and read the abstract through the Oxford Abstracts portal.
Thank you to Justin for sharing these photos!