The American Dialect Society will hold its annual meeting in conjunction with the Linguistic Society of America Thursday, January 9, through Sunday, January 12, 2025, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The meeting will be held at the Philadelphia Marriott Downtown. (Last updated December 12, 2025.)
American Dialect Society Annual Conference, 2025, Philadelphia PA
For conference registration »»
- September 27, 2024: Early bird registration begins.
- November 16, 2024: Regular registration begins.
- December 16, 2024: Late registration begins
| Thursday | January 9, 2025 | ||
| 12:00-2:00 | Executive Council Meeting | ||
| 2:00-3:00 | Business meeting | ||
| 3:00-3:30 | Break | ||
| Lexical Issues, chair: Sonja Lanehart | |||
| 1 | 3:30-4:00 | Michael Shepherd | Where “the 99” meets “152”: Locating the “Take the 101″–”Take 101” isogloss in Central California |
| 2 | 4:00-4:30 | Claiborne Rice | Etymythologizing: Explaining words in linguistic atlas interviews |
| 3 | 4:30-5:00 | David Wilton | Usage citations in the digital era: “Hooker” as a case study |
| 4 | 5:00-5:30 | Allison Burkette and Dennis Preston | Cultural collocations: House terms and their semantic fields |
| 5:30-6:30 | Break | ||
| 6:30-7:30 | Words-of-the-Year nominations | ||
| Friday | January 10, 2025 | ||
| Variation and Change, chair: Nicole Holliday | |||
| 5 | 9:00-9:30 | Jaime Benheim, Luca Iallonardi and Talia Sherman | Representing Rhode Island: Lifespan change in the Senate |
| 6 | 9:30-10:00 | Claire Henderson, Charles Boberg and Jackson Mundie | Canadian English: Fifty years of language change |
| 7 | 10:00-10:30 | Patricia Cukor-Avila, Guy Bailey and Juan Salinas | The relative contributions of social and linguistic factors to linguistic variation |
| 8 | 10:30-11:00 | Elena Manzella, Bridget Jankowski, Sabrina Chu, Dorothy Lok, Shaneta Widjaja, Hayden Zahary and Sali Tagliamonte | Obsolescence vs. endurance: A study of parallels between UK youth and Canadian elders |
| 11:00-11:30 | Break | ||
| 9-11 | 11:30-1:00 (12:30-1:00) | Panel Walt Wolfram, Sonja Lanehart, Sharese King Q&A and discussion | An intergenerational perspective on African American LanguageEarliest periodMid-periodCurrent period |
| 1:00-2:30 | Lunch | ||
| Vowels I, chair: Wil Rankinen | |||
| 12 | 2:30-3:00 | Aidan Malanoski, Bill Haddican, Cynthia Gan, Jack Lacey, Jack Lynch, Andrew Shillingford, Samuel H. Sokol and Kujege Thiam | Mergers of CURE in the eastern United States |
| 13 | 3:00- 3:30 | Iuliia Rezvukhina | Vowel spaces in speech of heritage Russian speakers in Toronto |
| 3:30-4:00 | Break | ||
| Vowels II, chair: Margaret Renwick | |||
| 14 | 4:00-4:30 | Marie Bissell | Perceptions of /ai/ raising in Ohio: Exposure, representations, and implications for sound change |
| 15 | 4:30-5:00 | Sarah Ertel | Prevelar raising in eastern Washington English |
| 16 | 5:00-5:30 | Nicole Rosen and Lisa Sullivan | More regional phonetic differentiation in Canadian English: e/i overlap in Southern Ontario and Manitoba |
| 5:30-7:00 | Break | ||
| 6:45–8:15 p.m. | Words-of-the-Year Vote | ||
| Saturday | January 11, 2025 | ||
| 8:00-9:30 | ADS Breakfast: Awards and Plenary Speaker: Jennifer Cramer, Understanding language variation and change through the lens of folk linguistics | ||
| 9:30-9:45 | Short break | ||
| Morphosyntax, chair: Patricia Cukor-Avila | |||
| 17 | 9:45-10:15 | Nicole Holliday and Sabriya Fisher | AAE morphosyntactic and prosodic feature use among students: Effects on sociolinguistic awareness and school discipline |
| 18 | 10:15-10:45 | Robert Bayley, Xinye Zhang, Daniel Erker, Rafael Orozco and Gregory Guy | Subject pronoun expression and heritage languages: The effects of language and dialect contact |
| 10:45-11:00 | Short break | ||
| Sounds, chair: Marie Bissell | |||
| 19 | 11:00-11:30 | Margaret Renwick, Joseph A. Stanley, Lelia Glass and Jon Forrest | Complementary pre-lateral mergers across ethnicities and generations in Georgia |
| 20 | 11:30-12:00 | Monica Nesbitt and Guadalupe Ortega | Ethnic and stylistic variation in Boston’s Black community: A study of Haitian American speech |
| 21 | 12:00-12:30 | Connor Bechler | Automatic analysis of audio diary speech duration and relative speech volume |
| 22 | 12:30-1:00 | Dan Villarreal | Introducing the Archive of Pittsburgh Language and Speech (APLS), a publicly accessible multilayer speech corpus |
| 1:00-2:00 | Lunch | ||
| 2:00-3:00 | Posters (on Gather; link to follow). Special guest emcee, Kelly Elizabeth Wright! | ||
| Poster 1 | Joseph A. Stanley and Hallie Davidson | Variation in early 20th century rural Utah English | |
| Poster 2 | John Winstead | Frequency, polysemy, and word persistence in English | |
| Poster 3 | Aidan Malanoski, Bill Haddican, Kyle Gorman, Cynthia Gan, Jack Lacey, Jack Lynch, Andrew Shillingford, Samuel H. Sokol and Kujege Thiam | A whole new /iw/: The changing syllabification of yod | |
| Poster 4 | Kaitlin Young | Through the looking dlass: Stop variation in the Linguistic Atlas Project | |
| Poster 5 | Rachel Steindel Burdin | NORTH of Boston: The NORTH/FORCE distinction among Jews in New Hampshire in the early 1900s | |
| Poster 6 | Jules Blank | Some spiders have three legs: Biographical influence on language variety | |
| Poster 7 | Jennifer Cramer | #heaintfromhere: Perceptions of what makes authentic Kentucky speech | |
| Poster 8 | Keiko Bridwell and Margaret Renwick | Variation in rootedness: Vowel systems across culturally differing North Georgia counties | |
| Poster 9 | Vincent N. Mariani | Is it giving Gen-Z? A survey on knowledge of LGBT+ slang across age groups | |
| Poster 10 | Ifeoluwaposimi John-Idiagbonya and Betsy Sneller | “If you think that was bad, then just listen to this…”: A case study of oral narrative development | |
| Poster 11 | Ian Schneider | Reading dialectological horoscopes: Negotiated literacies between students and ChatGPT in an undergraduate introductory linguistics course | |
| Poster 12 | Wil Rankinen | The pragmatic use of “eh” in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula English | |
| Attitudes, chair: Tracey Weldon | |||
| 23 | 3:00-3:30 | Ian Schneider and Nour Kayali | “You speak too properly”: The (un)markedness of standard language in mobile American English speakers |
| 24 | 3:30-4:00 | Sali Tagliamonte and Allison Burkette | “Why do y’all give a shit?” and who the hell says “crick”? The patterning of Southern American English features in rural Canada |
| 25 | 4:00-4:30 | Stefan Dollinger and Kamal Abou Mikhael | What do Canadians think of their English? Language attitudes towards Standard Canadian English “from coast to coast to coast” |
| 26 | 4:30-5:00 | Stephen Mann | Countering anti-immigration rhetoric: Changing attitudes toward L2 English speakers and codeswitching on RuPaul’s Drag Race |
| Sunday | January 12, 2025 | ||
| Perception I, chair: Kelly Elizabeth Wright | |||
| 27 | 9:00-9:30 | William A.l Kretzschmar | Salience for dialect features |
| 28 | 9:30-10:00 | Emmett Jessee and J Calder | Transgender identity affects sibilant perception |
| 29 | 10:00-10:30 | Michol Hoffman, James Walker and Naomi Nagy | In-group perceptions of ethnicity in Toronto English |
| 10:30-11:00 | Break | ||
| Perception II, chair: Sali Tagliamonte | |||
| 30 | 11:00-11:30 | Stella Takvoryan | Objects of sociophonetic perception: A case study of socially mediated transcription practice in the Linguistic Atlas Project |
| 31 | 11:30-12:00 | Satchel Petty and Esha Mukherjee | Describing meaning in variation: The talker and the listener |