Marie-Hélène Côté (University of Lausanne)
... is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Her work combines corpus linguistics, phonological theory and sociolinguistics. It focuses on variation in the sound system of French across the French-speaking world, with a special interest in Canadian and Swiss varieties. She is a codirector of the international research program “Phonologie du français contemporain (PFC)”.
Keynote abstract: Between emancipation and standardization: The variable fate of Laurentian French features
Agnes Kim (University of Vienna, Austrian Academy of Sciences)
… is a Postdoc researcher at the Department of Slavonic Studies of the University of Vienna and at the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Her research focuses on multilingualism and language contact of (varieties of) Slavic languages and (varieties of) German in Austria from a historical and present-day perspective. She approaches this topic with methods from various linguistic sub-disciplines, such as historical and variationist sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, and (meta-)lexicography, aiming at a multilayered description of the object of research.
Keynote abstract: Variation in GOAL-oriented motion constructions in central Europe – Cross-linguistic perspectives
Martijn Wieling (University of Groningen)
… is Professor by special appointment of Low Saxon / Groningen Language and Culture at the University of Groningen and is founder of the Speech Lab Groningen. Together with his lab members, he focuses on investigating language variation and change in the Netherlands using sophisticated statistical and computational techniques, and developing speech technology for low-resource varieties. He has also initiated the creation of a unique mobile laboratory, SPRAAKLAB, which the team uses for (dialect) data collection in the field.
Keynote abstract: How popularization and quantification may benefit language variation research(ers)