Welcome to Germanic Linguistics Annual Conference 31. GLAC is the annual conference of the Society for Germanic Linguistics (SGL) based in North America. This year’s conference will be held at the University of North Texas (UNT) in Denton, TX. The conference will take place in person from May 2 to May 3, 2025. 

Our 2025 Plenary Speakers

Isaac L. Bleaman
Isaac L. Bleaman
University of California, Berkeley

Social Dimensions of Variation in Yiddish: Historical Perspectives and New Insights

Yiddish contributed significantly to the development of sociolinguistics and language contact, particularly through the pioneering work of Uriel Weinreich and Joshua Fishman. However, very little quantitative variationist research has been conducted on either contemporary or historical varieties of the language. In this talk, I will present my findings on the social significance of variation in New York-based communities that are committed to language maintenance in Yiddish.

The results show how differences in communities' maintenance practices and ideologies (e.g., whether to prioritize language dominance; whether to standardize the language) have contributed to inter-community differences in the quantitative patterning of two variables: voice onset time and number agreement. At the end of the talk, I will preview the resources available in the Corpus of Spoken Yiddish in Europe (CSYE), which is now being developed through a National Science Foundation CAREER grant. Among other applications in research and language revitalization, the CSYE will provide the data necessary to address questions related to the social meaning of variation and the direction of language change in the pre-Holocaust period.

Theresa Biberauer
Theresa Biberauer
University of Cambridge, Stellenbosch University, University of the Western Cape, and CRISSP, KU Leuven

What you can learn from imperatives: the case of Afrikaans

Grammatically speaking, Afrikaans is a peculiar mix of the conservative and the innovative. On the one hand, it retains the characteristic West Germanic word-order properties of Verb Second and OV, and verb clusters, and it has separable and non-separable particle verbs, modal particles, and even some scrambling. On the other hand, there are phenomena like “quirky V2” (Vandag loop koop ons pannekoek, lit: today walk buy we pancake, i.e. ‘Today, we’re going to go and buy pancakes.’ ), negative concord involving a clause-final concord element (Die pannekoek is nie duur nie, lit. the pancake is not expensive neg, i.e. ‘The pancake isn’t expensive.’), and Differential Object Marking (Ek sien dit en ek sien vir jou, lit: I see it and I see for you, i.e. ‘I see it and I see you.’), none of which are replicated in other Germanic varieties.

The purpose of this talk is to make the case for the idea that a further innovation – Afrikaans’s distinctive moenie (must.not)-containing negative imperative – plays a key role in signaling to acquirers of the language both its conservative and its innovative properties. I highlight evidence from Southern African German varieties (Namibian and Kroondal German) and from South African English in support of this proposal.


In addition, there will be a preconference workshop on computational linguistics on May 1 (from 3:00 to 6:00 CT) organized by:

Frederik Hartmann (University of North Texas)

We invite faculty, graduate students, and independent scholars to submit abstracts to Germanic Linguistics Annual Conference 31. GLAC 2025 will take place in person at the University of North Texas from Friday, May 2 to Saturday, May 3, 2025. Preceding the main sessions of GLAC, there will be a workshop on computational linguistics on Thursday, May 1.

Papers may be on any aspect of any historical or modern Germanic language or dialect, including English (up to the Early Modern period) and the extraterritorial varieties. Papers from the full range of linguistic and philological subfields, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, stylistics, language variation, language typology, metrics, first and second language acquisition, foreign language education, language contact and language change, as well as differing theoretical perspectives, are welcome.

All participants may submit a maximum of two abstracts, including one abstract for a single-authored paper and one for a co-authored paper. Accepted papers will be scheduled for 30-minute presentations (a 20-minute talk, followed by a 10-minute question-and-answer period). All abstracts will undergo anonymous peer review.

Abstracts must be submitted electronically in PDF format by February 15, 2025. They should be anonymous, a maximum of one single-spaced page (including references), and in standard 12-point font. They should be submitted through EasyAbs at: https://easyabs.linguistlist.org/conference/GLAC31/

Notification of acceptance will be sent by March 1, 2025.