NWAV AP 3: Background

The annual North American meeting of New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) has a long and influential history of bringing together scholars researching language variation and change. NWAV ASIA-PACIFIC has developed as a “branch” of NWAV specifically focused on Asia and the Pacific.

While the Western study of sociolinguistic variation and change emerged in the mid 1960s, highly quantitative work on variation and change has existed in Japan and other parts of the region for nearly a hundred years. By committing to meeting in the Asia-Pacific circle, the NWAV ASIA-PACIFIC conferences highlight and re-acknowledge the long and rich history of research on language variation and change in the Asia-Pacific region, which has often been overlooked in the field of sociolinguistics. At the first NWAV AP meeting, the conference established a tradition of showcasing the innovative descriptive, philological, historical and socially informed research being conducted by emerging and established scholars in some of the world's most fertile arenas of language and dialect contact.

The first meeting of NWAV ASIA-PACIFIC was held at the University of Delhi, India in February 2011 and the second meeting was hosted by NINJAL (National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics) in Tokyo in August 2012.