2025 American Dialect Society Conference Program

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 5, 2025.)

American Dialect Society Annual Conference, 2025, Philadelphia PA

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  • September 27, 2024: Early bird registration begins.
  • November 16, 2024: Regular registration begins.
  • December 16, 2024: Late registration begins
 ThursdayJanuary 9, 2025
 12:00-2:00Executive Council Meeting
 2:00-3:00Business meeting
3:00-3:30Break
  Lexical Issues, chair: Grant Barrett
13:30-4:00Michael ShepherdWhere “the 99” meets “152”: Locating the “Take the 101″–”Take 101” isogloss in Central California
24:00-4:30Claiborne RiceEtymythologizing: Explaining words in linguistic atlas interviews
34:30-5:00David WiltonUsage citations in the digital era: “Hooker” as a case study
45:00-5:30Allison Burkette and Dennis PrestonCultural collocations: House terms and their semantic fields
5:30-6:30Break
 6:30-7:30Words-of-the-Year nominations
 FridayJanuary 10, 2025
  Variation and Change, chair: Nicole Holliday
59:00-9:30Jaime Benheim, Luca Iallonardi and Talia ShermanRepresenting Rhode Island: Lifespan change in the Senate
69:30-10:00Claire Henderson, Charles Boberg and Jackson MundieCanadian English: Fifty years of language change
710:00-10:30Patricia Cukor-Avila, Guy Bailey and Juan SalinasThe relative contributions of social and linguistic factors to linguistic variation
810:30-11:00Elena Manzella, Bridget Jankowski, Sabrina Chu, Dorothy Lok, Shaneta Widjaja, Hayden Zahary and Sali TagliamonteObsolescence vs. endurance: A study of parallels between UK youth and Canadian elders
 11:00-11:30Break
9-1111:30-1:00    (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 
1:00-2:30Lunch
  Vowels I, chair: Wil Rankinen
122:30-3:00Aidan Malanoski, Bill Haddican, Cynthia Gan, Jack Lacey, Jack Lynch, Andrew Shillingford, Samuel H. Sokol and Kujege ThiamMergers of CURE in the eastern United States
133:00- 3:30Iuliia RezvukhinaVowel spaces in speech of heritage Russian speakers in Toronto
 3:30-4:00Break
  Vowels II, chair: Margaret Renwick
144:00-4:30Marie BissellPerceptions of /ai/ raising in Ohio: Exposure, representations, and implications for sound change
154:30-5:00Sarah ErtelPrevelar raising in eastern Washington English
165:00-5:30Nicole Rosen and Lisa SullivanMore regional phonetic differentiation in Canadian English: e/i overlap in Southern Ontario and Manitoba
5:30-7:00Break
 6:45–8:15 p.m.Words-of-the-Year Vote
 SaturdayJanuary 11, 2025
 8:00-9:30ADS Breakfast: Awards and Plenary Speaker: Jennifer Cramer, Understanding language variation and change through the lens of folk linguistics
9:30-9:45Short break
  Morphosyntax, chair: Patricia Cukor-Avila
179:45-10:15Nicole Holliday and Sabriya FisherAAE morphosyntactic and prosodic feature use among students: Effects on sociolinguistic awareness and school discipline
1810:15-10:45Robert Bayley, Xinye Zhang, Daniel Erker, Rafael Orozco and Gregory GuySubject pronoun expression and heritage languages: The effects of language and dialect contact
 10:45-11:00Short break
  Sounds, chair: Marie Bissell
1911:00-11:30Margaret Renwick, Joseph A. Stanley, Lelia Glass and Jon ForrestComplementary pre-lateral mergers across ethnicities and generations in Georgia
2011:30-12:00Monica Nesbitt and Guadalupe OrtegaEthnic and stylistic variation in Boston’s Black community: A study of Haitian American speech
2112:00-12:30Connor BechlerAutomatic analysis of audio diary speech duration and relative speech volume
2212:30-1:00Dan VillarrealIntroducing the Archive of Pittsburgh Language and Speech (APLS), a publicly accessible multilayer speech corpus
 1:00-2:00Lunch
 2:00-3:00Posters (on Gather; link to follow). Special guest emcee, Kelly Elizabeth Wright!
Poster 1Joseph A. Stanley and Hallie DavidsonVariation in early 20th century rural Utah English
Poster 2John WinsteadFrequency, polysemy, and word persistence in English
Poster 3Aidan Malanoski, Bill Haddican, Kyle Gorman, Cynthia Gan, Jack Lacey, Jack Lynch, Andrew Shillingford, Samuel H. Sokol and Kujege ThiamA whole new /iw/: The changing syllabification of yod
Poster 4Kaitlin YoungThrough the looking dlass: Stop variation in the Linguistic Atlas Project
Poster 5Rachel Steindel BurdinNORTH of Boston: The NORTH/FORCE distinction among Jews in New Hampshire in the early 1900s
Poster 6Jules BlankSome spiders have three legs: Biographical influence on language variety
Poster 7Jennifer Cramer#heaintfromhere: Perceptions of what makes authentic Kentucky speech
Poster 8Keiko Bridwell and Margaret RenwickVariation in rootedness: Vowel systems across culturally differing North Georgia counties
Poster 9Vincent N. MarianiIs it giving Gen-Z? A survey on knowledge of LGBT+ slang across age groups
Poster 10Ifeoluwaposimi John-Idiagbonya and Betsy Sneller“If you think that was bad, then just listen to this…”: A case study of oral narrative development
Poster 11Ian SchneiderReading dialectological horoscopes: Negotiated literacies between students and ChatGPT in an undergraduate introductory linguistics course
Poster 12Wil RankinenThe pragmatic use of “eh” in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula English
  Attitudes, chair: Sonja Lanehart
233:00-3:30Ian Schneider and Nour Kayali“You speak too properly”: The (un)markedness of standard language in mobile American English speakers
243:30-4:00Sali 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
254:00-4:30Stefan Dollinger and Kamal Abou Mikhael What do Canadians think of their English? Language attitudes towards Standard Canadian English “from coast to coast to coast”
264:30-5:00Stephen MannCountering anti-immigration rhetoric: Changing attitudes toward L2 English speakers and codeswitching on RuPaul’s Drag Race
 SundayJanuary 12, 2025
  Perception I, chair: Kelly Elizabeth Wright
279:00-9:30William A.l KretzschmarSalience for dialect features
289:30-10:00Emmett Jessee and J CalderTransgender identity affects sibilant perception
2910:00-10:30Michol Hoffman, James Walker and Naomi NagyIn-group perceptions of ethnicity in Toronto English
 10:30-11:00Break 
  Perception II, chair: Sali Tagliamonte
3011:00-11:30Stella TakvoryanObjects of sociophonetic perception: A case study of socially mediated transcription practice in the Linguistic Atlas Project
3111:30-12:00Satchel Petty and Esha MukherjeeDescribing meaning in variation: The talker and the listener