Location: School of Literatures, Cultures & Linguistics, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
SoSy 7: “Between Languages, Between Worlds: Language, Culture, and Global Communication”, 4 April, 2026
The deadline for Abstract Submission has been extended to 15 February 2026
The 7th Annual Sociolinguistics Symposium (SOSY) at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign is the central annual research event organized by graduate students in Linguistics, offering a key forum for scholarly exchange across language related fields. This year’s theme, Between Languages, Between Worlds: Language, Culture, and Global Communication, foregrounds the role of language in shaping cultural connection, social positioning, and senses of belonging in an increasingly interconnected world. The symposium invites work that examines how individuals and communities navigate linguistic boundaries across social, cultural, and geopolitical contexts, highlighting language as both a resource and a site of negotiation in global communication.
We invite abstracts that engage with this year’s theme by examining how language operates between social worlds, cultural systems, and global contexts. Submissions may address how linguistic practices mediate connection, difference, and belonging across local and transnational settings. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:
- Language and identity across transnational, diasporic, and migrant contexts
- Multilingualism, translanguaging, and everyday language practices across communities
- Language ideologies, power, and inequality in global and local settings
- Digital communication, social media, and mediated forms of global interaction
- Language, culture, and belonging in education, work, and public institutions
- Sociolinguistic perspectives on mobility, globalization, and cultural contact
- Narrative, stance, and positioning across languages and social worlds
- Language policy, language rights, and global communication ethics
Our plenary speaker:
- Jamie Shinhee Lee, University of Michigan-Dearborn
World Englishes in mediated and performative spaces: Korean pop culture as a site of linguistic innovation
Kachru emphasizes that English is a culturally plural language, shaped by history, power dynamics, and local creativity. In the context of Asia, he challenges the idea that “the English language is generally discussed as a language that is in Asia, but not of Asia” (Kachru 1998: 89). He observes that English in Asia has attained a level of functional nativeness and identifies several key roles it plays: as a tool for communication across diverse linguistic and cultural groups; as a nativized medium for expressing local identities; as a vehicle for pan-Asian creativity; as a language that has developed distinct subvarieties reflecting its deep penetration; and as a language that evokes complex attitudes, including both admiration and resistance (Kachru 1998: 102-103). While these observations were initially framed in the context of countries where English was introduced through colonization, many of these insights are also relevant to regions of Asia with non-colonial exposure to English. In this presentation, I will explore Kachru’s (1992:58) concept of bilingual creativity and “the imaginative/innovative function” in relation to linguistic creativity observed in Korean talk shows and popular music, where English is playfully blended with Korean to produce novel expressions, convey cultural nuances, and engage audiences in both local and global registers.
For questions concerning SoSy, please contact: samanj2@illinois.edu
SoSy 7 Chair:
Saman Jamshidi, samanj2@illinois-edu