Welcome!

WICL-3_213X250The Workshop on Innovations in Cantonese Linguistics (WICL) is a conference held biennially in North America that focuses on new advances in Cantonese Linguistics, including innovations in methodologies, tools, and/or computing software. New approaches and research on language variation within the Cantonese (or 粵 / 粤 “Yue”) subgroup of the Chinese language family, language contact phenomena, and new subfields and their interfaces are especially welcome.

WICL has been held every other year since 2012. The inaugural event — the very 1st Workshop on Innovations in Cantonese Linguistics (WICL-1) — was organized and held at The Ohio State University in Spring 2012, on 16-17 March 2012. At the conclusion of the conference, attendees were enthusiastic on the prospects of making WICL a biennial event, and Professor Alan Yu (U. of Chicago) offered to host WICL-2.

The 2nd Workshop on Innovations in Cantonese Linguistics (WICL-2) was held two years later at the University of Chicago, as part of a two-day event, with WICL-1 on 7 March 2014, and the 2nd East Asian Psycholinguistics Colloquium (EAPC 2), the following day, on 8 March 2014.

The 3rd Workshop on Innovations in Cantonese Linguistics (WICL-3) returned to Ohio State on 12-13 March 2016, providing the impetus, in May 2015, for Tsui Tsz-Him’s (徐子謙) creation of this dedicated WICL website. WICL-3_213X250In addition, a logo for the the WICL conference was created, with the prototype designed by Chen Litong (陳利砼), in which the letters, W, I, C, and L, were cleverly embedded in the graph for , which was then finalized with the design by Du Honglin (都虹霖), in the logo displayed here.

The 4th Workshop on Innovations in Cantonese Linguistics (WICL-4), was held in summer 2018 at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. With UBC hosting WICL-5, this biennial conference effectively became an international conference series hosted by different institutions in North America.

The 5th Workshop on Innovations in Cantonese Linguistics (WICL-5) returned to The Ohio State University on Saturday and Sunday, 18-19 April 2020. WICL-5 was originally going to be on site, then planned as hybrid, and ultimately became all virtual via Zoom due to COVID-19. As a result of the pandemic, WICL-5 was likely the first Chinese linguistics conference in the world to have been held entirely virtually!

The 6th Workshop on Innovations in Cantonese Linguistics (WICL-6) was hosted at The Ohio State University via the Zoom meeting platform on 27-28 May 2022, Eastern Daylight Saving Time. As in the case of WICL-5 (2020), we did our best to arrange the program schedule to accommodate presenters in North America, East Asia, and elsewhere in the world. For WICL-6, presenters represent four regions in the world: North America, Europe, East Asia, and Australia!

The 7th Workshop on Innovations in Cantonese Linguistics (WICL-7) will be held at Brigham Young University, to be hosted by Professor Dana Scott Bourgerie and his team. Instead of Spring 2024, WICL-7 will be delayed somewhat, to be hosted in Autumn 2024. Stay tuned!

URL: https://u.osu.edu/wicl/