The University of Georgia will be hosting the fifth annual Language Varieties in the South (LAVIS) conference in conjunction with the Southeastern Conference on Linguistics (SECOL) in April of 2024.

Health officials worldwide are closely monitoring the outbreak of illness caused by the newly identified coronavirus (COVID‑19). The University of Georgia continues to provide updates on operations, instruction and facilities to the campus community.

Here is the latest news:

Dr. Doug Merchant, a 2019 UGA Linguistics doctoral graduate, and Dr. Timothy Gupton, a UGA professor of Spanish Linguistics, recently co-authored an article that was featured in the Journal of Linguistics, published by the Cambridge University Press.

The abstract and link to their article, "Processing dissociations between raising and control in Brazilian Portuguese," can be found below.

Abstract

Recently our very own Dr. Jon Forrest won a Willson Center Faculty Research Grant in the Humanities and Arts for his project, "Black Language and Identity in Georgia."

Researchers for this project will gather interviews with Black residents of Georgia, examining changes in accent over time and differences in accent between different areas of the state. These interviews will also cover aspects of Black identity and culture, especially how language connects to these aspects of social life.

The Linguistics Conference at the University of Georgia (LCUGA 2025) was hosted on March 15-16, 2025, in Athens, Georgia. The theme of this year's conference was Connecting the Disciplines through Language, with the intended goal to stress the interdisciplinary nature of Linguistics as a field and build community with rising scholars from multiple universities in the United States and abroad.

Find below a list of featured speakers, workshops, pictures from the eventful weekend, and our amazing committee that planned the conference!

"Thin Ice: Language and cultural change in a melting Arctic," Lenore A. Grenoble, Department of Linguistics, The University of Chicago; Ilisimatusarfik, The University of Greenland; Arctic Language Ecology Lab, North-Eastern Federal University, Yakutsk.