Dr. Naomi Nagy is a sociolinguist, with particular interest in understanding language contact through variationist sociolinguistic approaches. She directs the Heritage Language Variation and Change Project which examines variation in 10 languages spoken in Toronto. Her goals include documenting cross-generational variation via digital recordings and time-aligned transcriptions of conversations, ethnic orientation questionnaires, and elicitation tasks. Cross-linguistic comparisons develop a generalized understanding of contact-induced language change and helps push the field of variationist sociolinguistics to expand beyond its monolingually-oriented core. Her recent publications from the project, many co-authored with students, have appeared in Asia-Pacific Language Variation, Heritage Language Journal, International Journal of Bilingualism, International Journal of the Sociology of Language, Journal of Phonetics, Language Documentation and Conservation, Language Learning, Language Variation and Change, Languages, Lingua, Revue Géolinguistique and 160+ conference presentations.

She co-edited Social Lives in Language – Sociolinguistics and multilingual speech communities with Miriam Meyerhoff (2008), Francoprovençal: documenting contact varieties in Europe and North America as a special issue of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language with Jonathan Kasstan (2018), and Variation at the Crossroads: Advancing theory by integrating methods, as a special issue of the Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique with Michol Hoffman (2017).

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