NWAV 52 in Miami Beach, Florida

New Ways of Analyzing Variation 52, the world's largest annual event in variationist sociolinguistics, was held in Miami Beach, Florida from November 7th to 9th, co-hosted by Florida International University and the University of Miami. 

Official poster of NWAV 52 (taken from the conference's website)

The program can be accessed here: NWAV 52 program

There was strong presence from the University of Toronto! Both current and former members of the department delivered talks, poster presentations, and project launches:

Sali A. Tagliamonte (faculty)

Clara grows up: Lifespan change from adolescence to middle-age

Xinyu Liao (PhD Student)

Asymmetries in the learnability of new dialect features across the lifespan

Atiqa Hachimi (faculty) and Gareth Smail (College of Charleston)

Stylized performance of ‘mock Berber’ in a Moroccan Stand-Up comedy talent show

Lee Jiang (PhD Student)

Resistance to singular ‘they’ in Reddit communities

Vanina Machado (PhD Alum, Spanish and Portuguese, now at California State University Channel Islands) and Chandan Narayan (York University)

Sociolinguistic dynamics in a bilingual border community: Investigating the acoustic properties of palatal liquid vocalization in Uruguayan Portuguese

Aaron Dinkin (former faculty, now at San Diego State University)

A lack of a New York State Accent: Perceptual change echoing dialect change

Miriam Neuhausen (former visiting scholar, now at Heidelberg University)

Identity work in language shift settings: Socio-spatial distance from the Old Order Mennonites

Erin Hall (PhD Alum, now at CSU San Bernardino), Lisa Ly (CSU San Bernardino), Patrick Nocon (CSU San Bernardino), David Ramos (California Baptist University), Kendra Tallchief-Stanley (CSU San Bernardino), Jonathan Robinson (CSU San Bernardino)

Using automated alignment with Spanish-influenced English data

Alexandra D’Arcy (PhD Alum, not at the University of Victoria)

What is dad’s job in language change?

Marisa Brook (PhD Alum, former faculty, now at St. Mary’s) 

Becoming a ‘Treehouser’: Identity, power, and language variation in a small online community

Here are some photos from NWAV (Thanks to Xinyu for sharing these with us!)

Xinyu giving a talk on the adoption of second dialect features

Lee giving a talk on singular they

Miami Beach