New Ways of Analyz(s)ing Variation 53 (NWAV 53) was hosted by the department, from November 5-7, 2025. In response to the current moment in human history and in synergy with the Linguistic Society of America’s Language, Conflict, and Peace-Making initiative, the theme for this year’s conference was Sociolinguistics, Conflict, Justice and Peace.
NWAV is the primary international conference in the area of sociolinguistics, and this year was the first time that U-M hosted it since 2004. The conference was very successful, with over 300 attendees, 120 oral presentations, and 65 poster presentations. Three plenary talks were presented by leading scholars, focusing on a broad range of topics related to the conference theme:
- “Raciosemiotic Order in the Court”
Author: Sharese King - “Variation in Psycho-Emotional Impacts: Underrepresented Dialect Speakers’ Experiences with Automatic Speech Recognition”
Author: Alicia Bedford Wassink (U-M PhD, 1999) - “The Future of (Socio)linguistics is Trans”
Author: Lal Zimman
In addition to hosting the conference, the U-M was very well represented, with a number of posters and presentations given by a number of our graduate students, faculty members, alumni:
- “‘They (zios)’: A corpus-informed profile of the "zionist" word family in online political discourse”
Authors: Rachel McCullough (current U-M graduate student), Cass Dykeman, Bochen Li, Deija McCalla, Chung-fan Ni, Charles Silber, Matthew Rensi - “Immigrant family code-switching practices and heritage language transmission: A cautionary tale at the intersection of motivation, social success, and language proficiency”
Authors: Zahira Flores-Gaona (current U-M graduate student), Lauren (Ren) Salig (current U-M postdoc), Valeria Ortiz-Villalobos (current U-M graduate student), Teresa Satterfield (current U-M faculty member), Ioulia Kovelman (current U-M faculty member) - “Shifting Vowels in a Stable Place: Place, Persona, and Social Expectations of NCVS Reversal in Michigan”
Authors: Patrick Gehringer, Jessi Grieser (current U-M faculty member) - “The Relationship between Attitudes and Experience on the Pronunciations of Hispanic Names”
Author: Isaias Ceballos III (current U-M graduate student) - “‘¿Te gusta cómo hablo español?’: Using AI to understand language variation ideologies and identity development in US Hispanic children”
Authors: Jacqueline Aguiar (current U-M undergraduate student), Sophia Sims (current U-M undergraduate student), Teresa Satterfield (current U-M faculty member) - “‘It is nothing but a Compton thing’: Perceptions of LLM-generated and naturally-elicited AAL text”
Authors: George Stain (current U-M graduate student), Sophie Faircloth (current U-M graduate student), Nour Kayali (current U-M graduate student), Jessi Grieser (current U-M faculty member)
- “An Ancient Greek Freedman Saves the Day with Linguistic Profiling: Incorporating Metalinguistic Evidence for Language Variation in Past Societies”
Author: Justin Miller (current U-M faculty member) - “Morphosyntactic Shifts in Chicontepec Huasteca Nahuatl: Generational and Bilingual Influences on Possessive Morphology”
Author: Cecilia Solís-Barroso (current U-M graduate student) - “Those That Stay: Migration, Language, & Identity in the Rif”
Author: Wyatt Barnes (current U-M graduate student) - “Podcasts as Sociolinguistic Data: A New Resource for Studying Language Variation, Stance, and Identity Performance at Scale”
Authors: Ben Litterer (current U-M graduate student), Dallas Card (current U-M faculty member), David Jurgens (current U-M faculty member) - “Contrapuntal Lives: Influencers, Aspirations of Migration, and Linguistic Practices in Bishkek and the Kyrgyz Diaspora”
Authors: Ashley McDermot (current U-M graduate student), Asel Nurdinova - “India and Pakistan: Two Nations Divided by the Same Language and Different Language Ideologies about Urdu”
Author: Rizwan Ahmad (U-M PhD, 2007) - “Who gets to rise? Production and evaluation of uptalk in Hong Kong English and the politics of voice”
Author: Wilkinson Daniel Wong Gonzales (U-M PhD, 2022)
- “Migration-conditioned social meanings of languages in the Ningbo-Fenghua region”
Authors: Lizzy Jianing Feng, Wilkinson Daniel Wong Gonzales (U-M PhD, 2022) - “Variation and Contact-Induced Change in Manado Possessives”
Author: Pristina Koon (U-M BA, 2024) - “It all began with William Labov: A session in tribute to an NWAV founder”
Authors: Patricia Cukor-Avila (U-M PhD, 1995), Gillian Sankoff, Guy Bailey, Sali Tagliamonte, John Baugh - “It rolls off the tongue: sociophonetic variation in the articulation of /r/ in three varieties of French”
Authors: Alicia Beckford Wassink (U-M PhD, 1999), Ty Gill-Saucier, Flo Humbert - “Assessing the Degree of Mutual Intelligibility Between Eastern and Western Armenian”
Author: Annika Topelian (U-M BA, 2020) - “Expanding Phonetic Variation Research to Sign Languages using Human Pose Estimation”
Authors: Amelia Becker, Reed Blaylock (U-M BA, 2011), Melissa Baese-Berk, Zed Sehyr, Naomi Caselli - “Adopting a community-centered approach to teaching about Creole languages: A collaboration with Creole users and linguists”
Authors: Joy Peltier (U-M PhD, 2022), Sophia Eakins (U-M PhD, 2025), Alicia Stevers (U-M PhD, 2020), Wilkinson Daniel Wong Gonzales (U-M PhD, 2022), Moira Saltzman (U-M PhD, 2022), Yourdanis Sedarous (U-M PhD, 2022), Felicia Bisnath (U-M PhD, 2022), Ariana Bancu (U-M PhD, 2019), Danielle Burgess (U-M PhD, 2023), Marlyse Baptista
