Insight from language science for character creation: A foray into sociolinguistics by Sali A Tagliamonte – Wednesday, September 10, 2025 at 7:00 pm (EDT).

Sali Tagliamonte’s field is sociolinguistics, which can help writers consider social groups, region, and different registers to create language and dialogue that authentically represents a person’s identity, social allegiance, origins, age or other characteristics. She will talk about how understanding the systematic nature of language variation is a kind of writers’ gold, offering an enhanced toolkit for augmenting their craft.

SALI A. TAGLIAMONTE is Canadian, she was born in northern Ontario and raised in northwestern Quebec. She wrote and published poetry as a teenager but when she went to York University (Ontario) in the late 1970’s she discovered Sociolinguistics and the amazing world of language variation. She went to graduate school in Ottawa in the 1980’s where she worked on dialects of English spoken by people of African descent in the Caribbean and Canada. She graduated with a PhD in 1991 and took up a post-doctoral position for several years honing her craft of studying how language varies and changes over time and across social groups. In 1995, she took up a Lectureship at the University of York (England) where she worked on dialects from the far north shore of Scotland to Devon in the southwest (1995-2001). She returned to Canada in 2001 to become as Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Toronto. She has been working on Ontario dialects ever since, in essence she has gone back to her own roots. Sali lives in East York (Toronto) on an oak ravine with her husband and two cats. She has five children aged 22 to 42, 4 grandchildren and innumerable academic ‘children’ from the host of students that have come through her teaching