Welcome to SYNC 2025! The conference will be held on Saturday, December 6th, 2025 at CUNY Graduate Center. We look forward to seeing all of you!

The latest: All abstracts are currently under review! Decisions will be sent to the submitters by Nov 17. Make sure to check back on this site regularly for updated information on the schedule and registration! 

We are excited to announce that Professor Matthew Garley (York College, CUNY Graduate Center) will be the keynote speaker! Below you can find the title and abstract of his talk.

Title: Orthographic instability and orthographic freedom in language contact

Abstract: Some of the most interesting outcomes of language contact happen in informal, unregulated spaces, as Sebba (2007) and others (e.g. Cutler & Royneland 2018, Lexander 2020) have noted. Orthographic standardization and widespread literacy are fairly recent developments in the history of human language, and subcultural and countercultural forces, including pop-cultural movements like punk and hip-hop, provide motivations for creative play with standard writing practices. Examining recent literature and drawing on two large corpus studies of multilingual hip hop communities online, I argue that language contact situations are orthographically destabilizing, as language users draw on a wider repertoire of orthographic-phonemic correspondences, and that these multilingual environments offer the opportunity for wider orthographic freedom, leading to creative practices that turn Span. a huevo into <awebo>, Eng. peace into <peazen>, and a staggering array of other creative written forms. The study combines quantitative analysis of variant orthographic patterns emerging from the corpora with qualitative analysis of specific spelling choices in context. In considering the status of standardized orthography in modern languages, I argue for continued attention to written language in sociolinguistic study.