written by Vanessa Fung (University of Manchester), recipient of funding from the Philological Society’s Public Events and Outreach fund.

The Manchester Forum in Linguistics (MFiL) is an annual two-day conference held at the University of Manchester. This year we celebrated the ten year anniversary of MFiL, which took place on 20^th and 21^st of April 2023, and marked a return to a fully in-person format following the pandemic. Each year, we invite talks from early career researchers and students from all areas of linguistics, with the aim of sharing current theoretical and methodological work within the field. The conference is especially interested in talks that employ novel empirical methods, and research that has wider implications for linguistic theory generally. MFiL is an opportunity for those at early stages of their careers to share their work and connect with other linguists. 

The organising committee is entirely made up of volunteers, all postgraduate research students from the Department of Linguistics and English Language. Without financial support, it would not be possible to run MFiL. We gratefully acknowledge the Philological Society for their generous contribution to our event through the Public Events and Outreach fund. As a result, and in spite of the rising costs associated with organising the conference, we were able to avoid increasing the registration fee, therefore, keeping MFiL financially accessible to anyone with an interest in linguistics and the study of language generally. This year, we welcomed talks from four plenary speakers and twenty one presenters from a range of institutions, both in the UK and abroad. The areas covered by the conference included: sociolinguistics, semantic fieldwork, typology, historical syntax, and pragmatics (amongst others). In addition to the presentations, each year MFiL also includes a careers panel, which provides an open forum for conference attendees to ask the plenary speakers about career opportunities and gain insights into working in academia.

MFiL 2023 was a great success, achieving our goals of connecting linguists across a variety of disciplines, and prompting interesting discussions. We would like, again, warmly to thank the Philological Society for their financial support.