The Sociolinguistics Symposium (SoSy) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign developed in 2019 out of a need for more presentation opportunity for sociolinguistic-focused topics as well as a need for more collaboration space for scholars in the linguistics community. Beginning as a parallel session at the UIUC ILLS 2018 conference, SoSy became an independent event in 2019. In 2022, SoSy will hold its second online conference, connecting local scholars with scholars around the world. The UIUC sociolinguists, aka members of the Language and Society Discussion Group, have always envisioned SoSy to be a UIUC hub for all those researching and interested in sociolinguistics. With the support of the UIUC Linguistics department and other UIUC departments who so generously support and continuously encourage this event, we hope to continue SoSy well into the future to increase the strength of our research through collaboration and to showcase our field to a broad range of other disciplines.

Historically and currently, SoSy is a graduate student-run symposium aimed primarily at providing graduate and advanced undergraduate students a forum to present and discuss their research on topics related to sociolinguistics. For the events/talks of previous year’s symposiums (including the recorded Plenary Sessions), please visit the Past Conferences tab on this site.