The 50th annual New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) is a yearly conference for the presentation and discussion of new research on sociolinguistic variation. This year, it was hosted by the Department of Linguistics at Stanford University October 13-15, 2022. In this fiftieth year, our theme is “What does variation mean?”


Giving the first of three plenary sessions, on Thursday, October 13, Barbra Meek presented “Re-languaging: From documentation to decolonization”. Other paper presenters from Michigan Linguistics were Julie Boland on her co-authored paper “The Power of Stereotype Surpassing Acoustic Cues of Emotion”. Robin Queen, Wyatt Barnes, Ezra Keshet together presented their paper, “Linguistics for the Common Good”. 


Project launch presentations were added this year with Wyatt Barnes presenting “Enregistering Spirantization of Young Urban Riffians”. Felicia Bisnath also took part in project launch presentations with “Ideologies about mouthing and language background in American Sign Language (ASL)”.

Rounding out the conference on Saturday, October 15, Lauretta Cheng presented her paper along with the other authors, “A comprehensive survey of variation in Asian and Pacific Islander North American English”.