New Ways of Analyzing Variation 46

The theme for this year’s linguistic conference is “Progress.”

While the direction of language variation and change cannot be predicted or considered to constitute progress per se, the field of linguistics generally and language variation and change specifically have made strides forward. Borrowing the idea from Robert La Follette, the theme of “Progress” was selected for 2017 because it can be both a call for progress, both in terms of how far we’ve come looking behind us and of the future directions in which we want to see the field move forward.