New Ways of Analysing Variation

Call for Papers

The organizing committee of New Ways of Analysing Variation – Asia Pacific 9 (NWAV-AP 9) invites abstract submissions for the conference to be held in Hong Kong SAR from 11 to 13 June 2027.

Since its founding in 2011 at the University of Delhi, NWAV-AP has served as the AsiaPacific regional sister conference of New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV), one of the leading international conferences in sociolinguistics. NWAV-AP brings together scholars interested in understanding how linguistic practices vary across speakers, communities, modalities, and social contexts, and how such variation contributes to processes of linguistic change. Over the past decade, NWAV-AP has become a major forum for empirical, theoretical, and methodological innovation in sociolinguistic research across Asia and the Pacific.

Hong Kong provides an especially compelling setting for these conversations. As a multilingual and transnational city shaped by colonial history, migration, mobility, and ongoing sociopolitical negotiation, Hong Kong offers a dynamic sociolinguistic landscape in which Cantonese, English, Mandarin, Hong Kong Sign Language, and numerous heritage and contact languages coexist and interact. The city has also emerged as an important center for research in sociophonetics, corpus linguistics, language contact, cognition, and multilingualism, making it an ideal location for interdisciplinary dialogue on variation and change.

Reflecting this context, the conference theme, “Variation and Change at and Across Boundaries,” highlights the ways linguistic practices emerge, evolve, and circulate at the intersections of social, geographic, political, ideological, cognitive, disciplinary, methodological, and modal boundaries.

At Boundaries

We particularly encourage submissions examining how variation and change are shaped in contexts of mobility, contact, multilingualism, marginality, hybrid identities, and sociopolitical transformation. We welcome research situated in borderlands, contact zones, peripheral communities, and socially or linguistically marginalized spaces, including work on minority and heritage languages, sign languages, migration, linguistic diversity, and language practices that challenge or complicate conventional sociolinguistic categories. Such contexts offer important insights into how linguistic variation reflects identity, resistance, belonging, and the ongoing reconfiguration of social, geographic, political, and ideological boundaries.

Across Boundaries

We also welcome work that crosses disciplinary, methodological, cognitive, and modal boundaries, including research that brings variationist perspectives into dialogue with sociophonetics, corpus linguistics, computational modeling, psycholinguistics, linguistic anthropology, education, disability studies, sign linguistics, and cognitive science. Contributions that bridge production and perception, speech and sign, variation and cognition, ideology and processing, or experimental, quantitative, ethnographic, and community-centered approaches are especially encouraged. More broadly, NWAV-AP 9 seeks to foster conversations across frameworks, methodologies, modalities, and traditions of inquiry in order to explore new directions for the study of language variation and change.

Important Dates

• Abstract submission opens: 1 May 2026
• Submission Portal opens: 15 May 2026
• Abstract submission deadline: 1 Oct 2026
• Sending abstracts to reviewers: 15 Oct 2026
• Notification of acceptance: 15 Jan 2027
• Early bird registration deadline: 1 Mar 2027
• Conference dates: 11-13 Jun 2027

Keynote Speakers

• Lauren Hall-Lew (University of Edinburgh)
• Meredith Tamminga (University of Pennsylvania)
• Tsung-Lun Alan Wan (National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University)

Topics of Interest Include

• accommodation and convergence
• affect
• applied sociolinguistics
• borderlands and contact zones
• boundary-crossing methods
• codeswitching and translanguaging
• cognition and language variation
• computational sociolinguistics
• conversation analysis
• consonants
• corpus linguistics
• cultural anthropology
• digital discourse
• disability and accessibility
• discourse and pragmatics
• embodiment and gestures
• endangered and minority languages
• ethnography
• experimental sociolinguistics
• heritage languages
• interfaces and intersections
• interdisciplinary approaches
• language acquisition and pedagogy
• language attitudes
• language change
• language contact and multilingualism
• language documentation
• language ideology and identity
• language policy
• language processing
• language, gender, and sexuality
• language, migration, and mobility
• language, race, and ethnicity
• lexical variation
• lifespan change
• methodological innovation
• morphosyntactic variation
• personae and identity
• place, place-making, and belonging
• prosody
• psychosociolinguistics
• qualia
• quantitative methods
• revitalization
• scholarship of language teaching
• semiotics and metapragmatics
• sign languages
• sign language variation
• social meaning
• social stratification and distribution
• sociolinguistic perception
• sociolinguistic production
• sociophonetics
• stance and stance-taking
• style
• theory of variation and change
• variation and AI
• variation and cognition
• variation and pedagogy
• variation in institutions
• vowels

We particularly welcome submissions that bring variationist perspectives into dialogue with related areas of inquiry and that explore how language varies, changes, and circulates across communities, institutions, modalities, and lived experiences. Graduate students and early-career researchers are especially encouraged to submit abstracts.

Abstract Guidelines

Abstracts must not exceed 500 words and must be submitted in both text form and PDF form through the submission platform.

When preparing the PDF version, authors should use A4 paper size. The abstract itself must fit on one page. References, examples, tables, figures, and other appendices may be included on a second page and do not count toward the word limit.

All abstracts must be fully anonymized and should not contain any identifying information about the author(s).

Abstracts may be submitted in English or Chinese (including Mandarin, Cantonese, and other Sinitic varieties written in Chinese characters). Authors are also welcome to include an optional second version of their abstract in another language for inclusion in the conference program.

Submission Types

Regular Papers and Posters

Both papers and posters will be presented in person and will include time for discussion. Following long-standing NWAV tradition, oral presentations will be scheduled in a 20-minute format, consisting of 15 minutes for presentation and 5 minutes for discussion. Poster presentations will be featured in dedicated poster sessions designed to encourage extended interaction and discussion among presenters and attendees.

Project Launch (Poster Category)

Project Launch submissions provide an opportunity for researchers to present works in progress, pilot studies, emerging datasets, or the early stages of a research project and receive feedback from the NWAV-AP community. This format is particularly well suited for graduate students and early-career researchers.

Special Sessions / Themed Panels

Proposals for Special Sessions or Themed Panels are welcome, particularly those aligned with the conference theme, “Variation and Change at and Across Boundaries.” These sessions are intended to foster sustained dialogue around a shared topic, methodological approach, theoretical question, or sociolinguistic context.

A proposal should include:

• a session overview describing the theme, rationale, and significance of the panel
• an abstract for each individual paper included in the session

Proposals should be submitted as a single PDF file, with each abstract appearing on a separate page.

Individual paper abstracts must remain fully anonymized. The session overview may include identifying information if necessary for evaluation and coordination purposes. Special Session / Themed Panel proposals must be submitted both through the Microsoft CMT submission portal and via email to the organizing committee at: nwavap9@outlook.com

Prospective organizers of Special Sessions / Themed Panels are also encouraged to contact the organizing committee in advance with any questions regarding proposal preparation or submission.

Submission Limits

Each author may submit:

• one single-authored and one co-authored abstract, or
• two co-authored abstracts

This limit applies across all presentation types.

Submission Platform

Abstracts should be submitted through the Microsoft CMT platform. The submission portal will open on 15 May 2026 and will close on 1 October 2026 at 11:59pm Hong Kong Time (HKT). Please note that creating a free account on the Microsoft CMT platform is required in order to submit an abstract.

Submissions received after the deadline may no longer be considered.

NWAV-AP 9 is committed to fostering an inclusive and respectful scholarly environment. We welcome submissions from researchers at all career stages and from all regions of the world, and we particularly encourage proposals from those working with underrepresented communities and languages. We look forward to welcoming scholars from around the world to Hong Kong and to continuing NWAV-AP’s tradition as a vibrant forum for scholarly exchange on linguistic variation and change.

Contact Us

For all enquiries, please contact:
nwavap9@outlook.com

Acknowledgments

The Microsoft CMT service was used for managing the peer-reviewing process for this conference. This service was provided for free by Microsoft and they bore all expenses, including costs for Azure cloud services as well as for software development and support.