Reporting for the story was conducted by Lang Sci media intern G Sorensen, and the story was co-written by G Sorensen and Rebecca Shields
We are incredibly proud of Lang Sci’s Lingusitics Student Org, which received a generous travel grant from Associated Students of Madison (ASM) to help support student travel to the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) 2025 Annual Meeting. The conference was held in Philadelphia this year, and 8 UW-Madison linguistics students were able to attend the event due to the grant. This is the second year in a row that the LSO has received ASM funding to send UW students to the LSA conference.
In addition to the funding from ASM, this year three undergraduate Linguistics majors (Michelle Drane, Thomas Harb, and Tvisha Rao) were awarded travel grants from the LSA’s Committee on Ethnic Diversity in Linguistics, and Linguistics PhD student Jae Weller was awarded a travel grant from the LSA’s Committee on Gender Equity in Linguistics. WOW!
The LSA annual meeting provides opportunities for scholarship, professionalization, and networking within a broad set of approaches to the study of linguistics and language science, and has traditionally been attended largely by faculty, researchers, and graduate students in the field. However, in recent years the LSA has begun actively trying to expand its appeal to undergraduate students – this year, even some high school students were in attendance!
“One of my favorite parts was planning out my day in the morning to see what talks I wanted to go to, then running around the hotel, and inevitably straying from my plan. It was fun to start off with a mission but being pulled in different directions,” said junior undergrad and LSO Officer Harb. “The breadth of people from all sorts of careers and backgrounds that came together with a common interest in linguistics was extraordinary.”
Drane, a sophomore undergraduate, attended a dinner for Black linguists at the conference, and commented on how important it was to have a community representing the emerging and developing field of Black linguistics. She was able to make valuable connections at the meeting and received some useful career development tips from colleagues. Notably, Drane was the only Black undergraduate out of approximately 2,000 attendees at the conference.
Several LSO members also participated in a panel discussion as part of the organized session “Building Community for Students, by Students: Student Linguistics Organizations.” As part of the workshop, the cross-institutional group established a new LSA committee called the Student Linguistics Associations Coalition (SLAC). According to the LSA meeting program, the stated goal for SLAC is to “be a network of student leaders and faculty advisors of student organizations from different institutions with the intended goal of inter-university communication and cooperation.” Harb along with Linguistics PhD student Rachyl Hietpas presented “Creating student-led conferences & event planning,” and Weller was scheduled to present “Getting started with and growing a student organization.”
Numerous UW-Madison faculty were also present at the conference, either to give presentations or to attend and network. These include Lang Sci’s Professor Kelly Wright, who moderated the American Dialect Society’s session to vote on the official “Word of the Year” (this year’s winner: rawdog, with its new expanded meaning of “taking on life without the usual protection, preparation or comfort”). Professor Wright also served on a panel discussing “Supporting the Linguist as Expert Witness: Case Studies Involving Black Speech” as part of an organized session on Linguistics in Institutions. Also presenting at the conference were Linguistics PhD students Lucas Annear and Charlotte Vanhecke, who co-authored a paper with Lang Sci Professor Joe Salmons “Laryngeal Realism and phonological acquisiton.”
Finally, we spotted UW-Madison Linguistics alum Anushri Kartik-Narayan, now a grad student at UC-Boulder, at the conference as well! Anushri presented a joint paper with Rebecca Scarborough “Testing a Place-of-Articulation Double Phoneme Boundary in English-Tamil Bilinguals.” Great to see such a strong UW presence at the LSA again this year!
