American Dialect Society

The American Dialect Society, Midwest Region, with the Midwest Modern Language Association

November 4-7, 2010
Hyatt Regency McCormick Place
Chicago, Illinois

We welcome papers dealing with varieties of English and other languages spoken in the United States. Presentations may be based in traditional dialectology or in other areas of language variation and change, including sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, anthropological linguistics, folk linguistics, language and gender/sexuality, language attitudes and ideologies, pragmatics and politeness, linguistics in the schools, or critical discourse analysis.

March 15, 2010 is the deadline for abstracts. See below for abstract specifications.

Send abstracts to:

Susan M. Burt
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
American Dialect Society, Midwest Secretary
Illinois State University, Normal, Illinois
1-309-438-7840

Abstract specifications: Email submissions only; send abstract as an attachment in Word. Abstract should be no more than 250 words, excluding title and references. Include word count at the end of the abstract and omit any identifying information (name, affiliation, etc). Include contact information, affiliation, and abstract title in the body of your email.

Membership to ADS is recommended. Membership is $50 and includes a year's subscription to the society's journal, American Speech, and a copy of the Publication of the American Dialect Society (PADS, an annual hardbound supplement). Membership information is available at http://www.americandialect.org.

Membership to MMLA is required. Membership is $35 for full and associate professors, $30 for assistant professors and schoolteachers, $20 for adjunct and part-time faculty, and $15 for students, retired, and unemployed. Information on membership is available at the MMLA website, http://www.luc.edu/mmla/index.html. [Last modified: 18 Jan 2010 12:28 GMT | permalink]

In its 20th annual words of the year vote, the American Dialect Society voted “tweet” (noun, a short message sent via the Twitter.com service, and verb, the act of sending such a message) as the word of the year and “ google” (a generic form of “Google,” meaning “to search the Internet) as its word of the decade.

Presiding at the Jan. 8 voting session in Baltimore were ADS Executive Secretary Allan Metcalf of MacMurray College, and Grant Barrett, chair of the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society editorial director of online dictionary Wordnik.com. Barrett is also the editor of the column “Among the New Words” in the society’s quarterly academic journal American Speech.

“Both words are, in the end, products of the Information Age, where every person has the ability to satisfy curiosity and to broadcast to a select following, both via the Internet.” Barrett said. “I really thought blog would take the honors in the word of the decade category, but more people google than blog, don’t they? Plus, many people think ‘blog’ just sounds ugly. Maybe Google’s trademark lawyers would have preferred it, anyway.”

Download the press release: PDF, 205K.

Word of the Year is interpreted in its broader sense as “vocabulary item”—not just words but phrases. The words or phrases do not have to be brand-new, but they have to be newly prominent or notable in the past year, in the manner of Time magazine’s Person of the Year.

The vote is the longest-running such vote anywhere, the only one not tied to commercial interests, and the word-of-the-year event up to which all others lead. It is fully informed by the members’ expertise in the study of words, but it is far from a solemn occasion. Members in the 119-year-old organization include linguists, lexicographers, etymologists, grammarians, historians, researchers, writers, authors, editors, professors, university students, and independent scholars. In conducting the vote, they act in fun and do not pretend to be officially inducting words into the English language. Instead they are highlighting that language change is normal, ongoing, and entertaining.

In a companion vote, sibling organization the American Name Society voted “Salish Sea” as Name of the Year for 2009 in its sixth annual name-of-the-year contest. The Salish Sea is the includes Washington State's Puget Sound, the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and the San Juan Islands on the western coast of the United States and Canada.

Founded in 1889, the American Dialect Society is dedicated to the study of the English language in North America, and of other languages, or dialects of other languages, influencing it or influenced by it. ADS members are linguists, lexicographers, etymologists, historians, grammarians, academics, editors, writers, and independent scholars in the fields of English, foreign languages, and other disciplines. The society also publishes the quarterly journal American Speech.

The American Dialect Society is open to all persons worldwide who have an interest in language. Membership includes four annual issues of the society's academic journal, one complete scholarly work per year from the Publication of the American Dialect Society series, and subscription to its email newsletter. There is a discounted membership rate for students at any academic level, who are especially encouraged to join. [Last modified: 09 Jan 2010 12:22 GMT | permalink]

The American Dialect Society met today to nominate words-of-the-year for 2009 and the word-of-the-decade for 2000-2009. Download the nominations (PDF, 94K). The final votes in all categories will take place from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. Friday, Jan. 8, in the Ruth Room of the Baltimore Hilton in Baltimore, Maryland. The results will be posted here shortly thereafter. [Last modified: 08 Jan 2010 03:57 GMT | permalink]