Tim, Lauren, and I are back from CVC in St. John’s and it was a wonderful workshop!  I’m happy to have the opportunity to host CVC next year at UTM!  Here are some photos of the conference and our touristing afterward.

None of us vomitted, so that was good. Witless Bay, Atlantic Ocean

Sharing my snacks with Arwen the Whale Sniffer. Witless Bay, Atlantic Ocean

Lauren and I enjoying our introduction. Memorial University of Newfoundland.

Us in the fog, no filter. Cape St. Mary’s

Tim and Lauren in the fog, Cape St. Mary’s

Where we watched the Raptors win the chip. Duke of Duckworth, St. John’s.

It’s been a busy start to my summer after an equally busy semester.

In January I presented with my ROP students at the annual meeting of the American Dialect Society and presented with Alex Motut at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. Photo below of me with me and Alex’s poster.

In March, the students from my graduate seminar and I presented at the Buffalo-Toronto Workshop on our work on TH-stopping in Multicultural Toronto English. Photo below of, (l to r) Tim Gadanidis, Poco Umbal, Lisa Schlegl, and Lauren Bigelow. I was also teaching LIN256, Sociolinguistics which is always fun.

My MA student from last year, Tim Gadanidis, won a SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship: one of the most prestigious graduate studies awards in Canada! He’ll continue his groundbreaking work on the social meanings of uh and um.

Currently, I am supervising a Jackman Humanities Institute Scholars-In-Residence project on the social meaning of Toronto Slang. My team of five undergraduates, from a diversity of fields (neuroscience, English, criminology, linguistics, psychology and more!) and I are three weeks into our four project. Starting, tomorrow Paul Kerswill will be visiting us for a few days from the University of York.

Coming up, I’ll be presenting a talk at the Change and Variation in Canada conference in St. John’s with my current master’s student Lauren Bigelow. I’ve also been invited to be a plenary speaker at two upcoming conferences: the Rural-Urban Workshop at UofT in October and DiPVaC 5 in Melbourne next June.

I’m well into the first semester of the 2018-2019 academic year and am consistently inspired by my two courses: English Worldwide and a grad seminar on multiethnolects. I’m full of ideas that I hope will come to fruition soon! Last weekend I was at NWAV supporting UofT grad students and enjoying the latest from the world of variationist sociolinguistics.

I’ll be back in New York in January to present at the American Dialect Society and the Linguistic Society of America annual meetings. My talk at the ADS is with my summer research students (see below!) and my poster at the LSA is with Alex Motut (UofT/NUTMEG).

August has been a busy month for my multiethnolects in the GTA project. My research team and I have been busy transcribing, force aligning, and analyzing data we collected in during our fieldwork trips. We presented a poster at the UTM ‘Smarti Gras’ Undergraduate Summer Research fair. Here is a photo of us.

Me with two of my students from summer research courses, Nur Sakinah Nor Kamal (left) and Srishti Prashar (right). Maria Velasco and Vidhya Elango were also coauthors but couldn’t attend.

We hope to bring our research to a conference in the near future!

For the remainder of the month I will be prepping for my new course, English Worldwide, which I’ll be teaching for the first time in the Fall as well as a graduate seminar on multiethnolects.

June was a busy month for me. Two new papers are now available online to read. The first, in American Speech, is a critical take on current ideas in the World Englishes paradigm. Alex D’Arcy (UVic) and I deal with our own settler status in this country and interrogate how settler colonialism has shaped views on English varieties around the world.

The second paper, written with Martina Wiltschko (UBC) and Alex D’Arcy, appears in Language in Society. We take a transdisiplinary perspective and attempt to deconstruct the Canadian pragmatic marker eh.

While it’s always great to see the final results of a project, especially a collaboration, it’s maybe even more exciting to be at the very beginning. The rest of the month has been filled with the initial stages of my new research project which aims to document what I am calling Multicultural Toronto English. Me and several student RAs have been collecting data in different neighbourhoods and hope to start talking about what we’re finding soon!