GURT 2025: Language and Food

Food and language are omnipresent in everyday life. We use language to talk about food, and food terms have rich cultural histories. Menus and food packaging labels provide windows into not only an item’s nature and quality, but also the desired customer’s identity. People talk while they cook, and while they eat; in fact, mealtime has long been a privileged site for the study of language in use, especially in families. Parents use language to socialize their children into food preferences; even among adults, the taste of food is collaboratively negotiated in interaction (as can be witnessed at a wine or chocolate tasting). Children talk about food in school cafeterias; co-workers do so in workplace break rooms. People participate in online forums on topics such as gourmet cooking, veganism, and weight loss; they use language about food to portray themselves as certain kinds of people (gourmand, disciplined eater, environmentalist, picky eater, athlete). People post brunch photos on Instagram, recipe videos on TikTok and Facebook, and restaurant reviews on Yelp. Food is a necessity and a luxury; it is intertwined with identities (e.g., cultural, gendered, socioeconomic, political, religious), relationships (e.g., parent-child, friend-friend, host-guest), and values (e.g., healthful eating, ethical eating), all of which are negotiated through language.

GURT 2025 will bring together diverse scholars whose work explores intersections between language and food. These scholars include our distinguished plenary speakers:

Martha Sif Karrebæk (University Copenhagen),

Elinor Ochs and Tamar Kremer-Sadlik (University of California, Los Angeles),

Alla Tovares (Howard University), and

Camilla Vásquez (University of South Florida).

The conference aims to be inclusive of multiple approaches to the study of language and food, including (but not limited to) interactional sociolinguistics, conversation analysis, critical discourse analysis, multimodal discourse analysis, ethnography of communication, cultural discourse analysis, narrative analysis, variation analysis, semiotics, systemic functional linguistics, historical linguistics, comparative linguistics, computational/corpus linguistics, and cognitive linguistics. In line with this, we invite submissions that consider various types of interactions and texts, including (but not limited to) menus, recipes, mealtime conversations, food-related online discussions, social media posts about food, food-related podcasts, food advertisements, and documentary and reality TV shows about food.

GURT 2025 will illuminate the multifaceted connections between language and food, while also lending insights into the role of language in creating and negotiating social structures, processes, ideologies, and identities that go well beyond food. The conference will bring together leading scholars from around the world and from various disciplines to share their research. In keeping with the spirit of diversity, we welcome abstracts for individual papers, posters, and colloquia that engage with the area’s various topical and theoretical foci, types and sources of data, methodological questions, and practical applications. For additional submission information and to submit your abstract, see: . (If you have not previously used EasyChair, you must create an account by clicking on "Create account" at the bottom lefthand side of the login page.)

Host or Publisher Georgetown Department of Linguistics