American Dialect Society

From Thursday, January 6, 2011, through Saturday, January 8, ADS will hold its next annual meeting at the Hilton Pittsburgh in downtown Pittsburgh, hosted as usual by the Linguistic Society of America.

Monday, August 9 is the deadline for proposals for 20-minute presentations. All you need is a title and an abstract of 150 to 300 words. Send it via e-mail to Executive Secretary Allan Metcalf at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

Presenters must be current members of the American Dialect Society.

Audio-visual equipment: An LCD projector will be available for all presentations. If you will need other equipment such as an overhead projector, a tape player, or a CD player, please say so when you send your proposal.

Scheduling: If you have a preference for day or time of your presentation, please indicate that too. We cannot guarantee the time you prefer, but the program committee will try to accommodate you. The meeting will follow our customary schedule:

Thursday, January 6: Executive Council and annual business meeting in the afternoon. Program session in late afternoon, followed by Words of the Year nominations.

Friday, January 7: Programs sessions in morning and afternoon. Words of the Year vote and Bring-Your-Own-Book reception in the early evening.

Saturday, January 8: Program sessions in morning and afternoon; Annual Luncheon in between.

Proposals will be judged anonymously by a committee chaired by Luanne von Schneidemesser, ADS president-elect. If your proposal is accepted, you’ll be asked for an abstract of no more than 200 words for the LSA program.

Session chairs: If you’re interested in chairing a session, let the Executive Secretary know at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Tell him any preference you have for time or topic.

Special sessions: If you’re interested in proposing an entire session rather than an individual paper, don’t wait till August. Get in touch with the program chair now at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

Teaching panel: As usual, the ADS Committee on Teaching will sponsor a panel at the annual meeting. If you would like to propose a 20-minute talk, send your proposal directly to the chair of the Committee on Teaching, Anne Curzan, at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Her deadline is also August 9.

Travel grant for ADS member: The first annual Audrey Duckert Memorial Travel Award of $500 to attend the Annual Meeting will be given to an ADS member. The recipient will be chosen by ADS President Connie Eble. Applications in the form of a letter to President Eble will be due September 1, after the program for the Annual Meeting has been determined. Audrey Duckert was a long-time member of ADS and co-founder of the Dictionary of American Regional English.

Travel grants for students: Four travel grants of $500 each will be awarded to students whose papers have been chosen for the program. Furthermore, all students who are members of ADS are invited to attend the Annual Luncheon for free.

Hotel and registration: ADS members will be eligible to reserve rooms and register for the meeting at LSA member rates. For details see the website www.lsadc.org.

Future LSA-ADS meetings: 2012 January 5–8, Hilton Portland and Executive Tower. 2013 January 2–5, Hilton Minneapolis.

WOTY: As we have done for two decades now, we will choose candidates for Word of the Year on Thursday and vote for our WOTY the next day, with our Bring Your Own Book exhibit and reception immediately following. If you have a nominee for WOTY 2010, you can send it to our New Words Committee chair, Grant Barrett, at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). [Last modified: 25 Apr 2010 11:54 GMT | permalink]

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: 03 May 2010 08:38 GMT | permalink]