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The 85th Southeastern Conference on Linguistics (SECOL) will be held in Blacksburg, Virginia at the Inn at Virginia Tech and Skelton Conference Center on April 19-21, 2018. The theme is "Crossing Borders":
There are many borders that speakers orient to: state borders, dialect borders, language borders, and social class borders, to name a few. Within the South, these borders are changing as mobility across them increases. We hope to spur conversations about how these borders are interpreted by various individuals, and how language practices can interact with and across them. To this end, we invite papers that focus on any aspect of language use that crosses borders, though research findings in any subfield of linguistics are welcome.

Our plenary speakers are:

Drawing the Line: Perceptual Dialectology, Borders, and Southernness
Jennifer Cramer, University of Kentucky

What network structure can (and can't) reveal about linguistic variation: The loss of the Southern Vowel Shift in Raleigh
Robin Dodsworth, North Carolina State University

We will also be screening "Talking Black in America," a documentary by the Language & Life Project After the viewing, the filmmakers will present about instructional materials that can accompany the film.

SECOL is the oldest regional linguistic association in the US, and is dedicated to the advancement of the study of language in all its aspects. The annual spring conference provides a venue for SECOL members to read and discuss scholarly papers. SECOL also publishes peer-reviewed articles and book reviews in The Southern Journal of Linguistics. For more info on SECOL visit www.secol.org

SECOL 85 would like to acknowledge the generous support of the Virginia Tech Department of English, Humanities at Virginia Tech, Moss Arts Center, the Institute for Society, Culture and Environment (ISCE), the Institute for Policy and Governance, and the Office for Inclusion and Diversity, and the Department of Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures.