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


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.