The 12th International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (or in short, ICLaVE 12) was held from 8-11 July 2024 in beautiful Vienna, Austria. During the opening ceremony in the main building of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the chair of the organizing committee, Alexandra N. Lenz, announced that 320 scholars from 32 countries gathered in Vienna to discuss the latest research in the field of language variation and change. Thanks to the Seed Grant program of the Junge Sprachwissenschaft e.V., I myself was one of those 320 researchers and will share my journey and some conference highlights with you in this blog post.
During registration, every participant received their name tag on a lanyard with two clips (very useful because it prevents the name tag from flipping over and making people wonder who you are!), a tote bag with some paper and a pen, as well as an insulated water bottle with ICLaVE12 branding. Especially the water bottle turned out to be an excellent goodie as temperatures rose over 30 degrees and Vienna’s tap water is exceptionally cool as it comes directly from the mountains (at least we were told so). And while the breaks were catered outside in the courtyard, which I greatly appreciate because it minimizes the risk of Covid infection, there fortunately was air conditioning inside the buildings of the university.
On the second day, my colleague Lea Bauernfeind and I presented our talk “Intensification Over the Lifespan: A Panel Study from the North East of England“, also on behalf of our co-authors Isabelle Buchstaller, Yasmina Bouziani, and Elisavet Kyriakoudi, who unfortunately could not join us. Our study investigates intensifiers, which are modifying words like really, very or so over the lifespan of Tyneside speakers in a dynamic multi-cohort panel corpus, showing that overall, speakers decrease their use of intensification over their lifespan but also that there is an intense competition between the different variants of intensifiers that are used. We received great questions and suggestions on where we could take our study next, which is exactly what we were looking for in this relatively early stage of our research project.
I also attended many other talks that dealt with language variation and change over the lifespan and/or Tyneside English, deepening my understanding of the topic and collecting ideas for modifying future studies. Some of my other highlights included a talk on animal-directed zookepers’ talk (by Simon Oppermann and Hanna Bähr), narratives of queer Polish Catholics (by Justyna King), and reflections on the Lingscape app (by Christoph Purschke and Jacques Spedener). During all the talks, I took several pages of notes and will need to send out quite a few follow-up emails right after writing this blog post. Another personal highlight was getting bubble tea as a refreshment before one of the plenary talks, creating an interesting juxtaposition between my beverage and the festive large ballroom that the talk was happening in (see figure 1 - the talk was great as well, Martijn Wieling reported on his experiences collecting speech data at music festivals).
In the closing ceremony on the last day, the organizers announced that the next ICLaVE13 will take place in Lausanne, Switzerland. At the invitation of the mayor of Vienna, the conference dinner was then held at Fuhrgassl-Huber, a vinery with a nice ambience and therefore the perfect place to end this conference with good food and relaxed conversations. I am impressed by how smoothly the team ran such a large conference and I would like to thank the organizers as well as Junge Sprachwissenschaft e.V. for their support. I am looking forward to future conferences.