Conference Info

NWAV51 was at Queens College, CUNY October 13-15, 2023

The Conference Theme will be Variation in the World’s Languages

Thank you to all who attended!

Our Plenary Speakers:

Veneeta Dayal	John Singler	Ricardo Otheguy
Yale University	New York University	CUNY – Graduate Center & RISLUS
_{Crosslinguistic Variation in Article Systems}	_{Is variationist sociolinguistics first-world problem-solving? Quantitative theory/methodology and African languages}	^{Revisiting contact and switching in bilingual New York from a speaker-centered translanguaging perspective}

Welcome to NWAV51:

Variation in the World’s Languages

The 51^st Annual New Ways of Analyzing Variation Conference is hosted by Queens College (QC) and the Research Institute for the Study of Language in Urban Society (RISLUS). QC is the one of the 25 campuses of the City University of New York, the largest urban public university in the US. The college’s 18,500 students are mostly 1^st and 2^nd generation immigrants who speak over 94 home languages. RISLUS, housed at QC, was set up by CUNY to support research into the linguistic diversity that gives rise to those numbers and the educational and social opportunities and challenges that diversity presents.  

Over the last few decades, population movements have made multilingualism and multidialectalism bywords in virtually all postindustrial cities, making linguistic contact a central concern in the field. However, Queens stands apart not only in the scale of the phenomenon but in the way immigration has become integrated into the borough’s identity. Long seen as a peripheral part of the city with little distinctive identity, Queens has rebranded itself as “The World’s Borough.”  

Given this location, “Variation in the World’s Languages” is almost inevitable as our conference theme. At NWAV-51, we encourage the study of language contact, multilingualism, and of variation in different domains across many languages, including those that have been understudied. Moreover, given the interdisciplinary nature of RISLUS, that goal also includes expanding the variationist enterprise methodologically and theoretically. 

Abstract Book

Program