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.

Written By: Alan Flurry, writer and producer for Franklin College of Arts and Sciences

The vanishing Southern accent in Georgia has been well-documented, most recently by linguists from the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech in 2023. In a new study, the same research team shifted their investigation from the White population to the accents of Black Georgians, with results that highlight the effects of migration and education on the accents of Black Generation Z speakers.

This month Florida International University and the University of Miami hosted the 52nd annual Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) conference in Miami. Our Linguistics Department was fortunate to have multiple faculty members and students participate this year. 

Ph.D student Keiko Bridwell presented the paper “Place, Politics, and the Southern Vowel Shift.”