This roundtable of lightning talks pursues the local and regional history of the English language: the place of English in the bioregion of Cascadia, the cross-border region on the North American West Coast. Cascadia has tens of thousands of years of language history, most of it not featuring English but rather a variety of Native North American language families. English is a fairly new language to the region, but its history has already included many dimensions, among them as a language of trade, a language of displacement and trauma, a language of settler-colonialism, a language of reclamation and resistance, and as the daily language for millions of people in the region. The stories of English are the stories of all of its many speakers. 

The study of the English language history of the region is not well-developed, so this roundtable aims to start a conversation about the local history of English. The speakers in this roundtable approach the history of English from a range of perspectives and disciplines: English, Linguistics, American Indian Studies, and History, as well as public outreach in the form of museum studies and community pedagogy. They will speak about aspects of English in Washington State, British Columbia, and Alaska.
 
​Participants:
 
Stefan Dollinger, University of British Columbia, English
Betsy Evans, University of Washington, Linguistics
Tami Hohn, University of Washington, American Indian Studies
Lorraine McConaghy, Historian, Museum of History and Industry
Jennifer Stone, University of Alaska Anchorage, English
Alicia Beckford Wassink, University of Washington, Linguistics

For more information, contact Studies in the History of the English Language at shel12@uw.edu. 

Accommodation requests related to a disability should be made by May 10, 2022 to the Simpson Center, 206-685-5260, scevents@uw.edu.