Presidential Address: A Sense of Place and Belonging in the American Dialect Society

After the 2023 annual meeting of the American Dialect Society (ADS) in Denver, an ad hoc committee was formed to draft a resolution to amend article 2 of the society’s constitution. The proposed amendment clarifies the ADS’s mission and dispels the notion that the society is preoccupied with the English language. Using her recent work on the relationship among Finnish American identity, place-making, and language use, the author demonstrates how linguistic and methodological diversity are central to ADS, its mission, and its membership. The goal of her presentation at the society’s 2024 annual meeting in New York, presented here, is threefold: (1) to reify the need to update and clarify the society’s mission, (2) to demonstrate how language use and associated social meanings shape both identity and place, and (3) to exemplify that discursive practices function ideologically to define a place and affect belonging, whether that belonging is to an ethnic group, place, or learned society.