The Department of Linguistics hosted the annual meeting of the Canadian Linguistic Association, which was held June 2-6. The conference attracted about 250 people, most of them from universities, but also a good number of members of Indigenous communities involved in language documentation and revitalization attended. About 10% travelled from abroad (mostly the US, but including linguists from Europe, Japan, and Burkina Faso). There were 80 talks as well 66 posters, and various special sessions, including a panel on AI tools for under-resourced languages and a special session on transcription challenges for Indigenous languages, as well as a variety of workshops on methodology.
Thanks very much to the faculty organizers, Heather Goad and Michael Wagner, the graduate student organizers, Cheman Baira Agitok Sangma, Laurestine Bradford, Katya Morgunova and Jackson Mundie, and the undergraduate volunteers: Marc Bonnell, Hazel Grover, Kaloyan Kanev, Sadie Leve, Alexander Lu, Alexandra Luna, Yuki MacDougall, Severen Parr, Roy Smith, Maddy Sontag, Viviane Sun, Anne-Sophie Tessier, Zhaohan Wang, Zhiyu Yan, and Cypress Zufferli, as well as our administrative support staff.
Thanks also goes to various members of the CLA Executive, especially Richard Compton (Chair of the Program Committee), Daniel Currie Hall (Webmaster), Jila Ghomeshi (President) and Emily Elfner (Treasurer), as well as Beth MacLeod for sharing her expertise from last year’s CLA.
Finally, we would like to thank our sponsors: the Dean of Arts Development Fund, IVADO (Institut de valorisation des données) Scholarships and Grants program, NSERC Discovery Grants program, ISCEI (Indigenous Studies and Community Engagement Initiative), the Isida Cremona Fund of the Department of Linguistics, the Canadian Linguistic Association, and the Graduate Linguist Association of McGill.