On the first and second of May we, the committee of the Manchester Forum in Linguistics, had the pleasure of seeing our hard work come to fruition. The Manchester Forum in Linguistics (MFiL) is a yearly two-day conference aimed at PhD students and early career researchers. We are thankful to The Philological Society for providing financial support for this event. 

At nine on the first of May our first presenters registered, suddenly it felt real! Our conference had officially started. After our first plenary talk by Dr Alexander Göbel on ‘Intonation and its meanings: Three case studies’, we had our first round of oral presentations. We had three parallel sessions: one on phonetics & phonology, one on semantics and one on forensic & experimental linguistics. Lunch proved a great opportunity for attendees to ask further questions and to discuss these first talks and academic life in general with each other. It was very beneficial to talk with researchers outside our own institution about these things; the international perspective that our global presenters could provide was especially insightful.  

In the afternoon we had two more parallel sessions on psycholinguistics and discourse analysis. It was then time for our poster session. We had four wonderful posters on a variety of topics. We finished the first successful day with another plenary talk ‘RP or more? A way forwards for understanding social stratification and English accent variation’ by Dr Caitlin Halfacre. However, the conference fun had not ended quite yet! We were able to continue interesting and thought-provoking conversations over dinner. 

The following day we started with a plenary talk ‘Appraisal for intelligence analysis: Exploring the utility of a qualitative methodology in forensic and security contexts’ by Dr Madison Hunter, after which we had our final round of oral presentations. We had two parallel sessions on sociolinguistics and language acquisition. All presenters and attendees could then attend two workshops: ‘Academic Publishing in Linguistics’ which was organised in cooperation with the Languages Editorial Office and delivered by MDPI UK and ‘How to use LaTex in Linguistics Writings’ which was delivered by Eve Suharwardy. These workshops gave practical guidance that will benefit the research that people are undertaking.

It was then time for our final plenary talk by Dr Mathew Gillings on ‘(Im)politeness variation and corpus linguistics’. We finished the day with a career panel ‘Insights into starting a career in academia’ with our plenary speakers Dr Alexander Göbel, Dr Caitlin Halfacre, Dr Madison Hunter and Dr Mathew Gillings. They gave honest and thoughtful advice, leaving everyone with a better understanding of the current job market. After officially closing the conference, we went over to the pub to unofficially close the conference in the sunshine as well. It was a fitting ending to an amazing two days.

We would like to thank all our presenters and attendees for coming, we had a great time!This conference was funded by the North West Consortium Doctoral Training Partnership, part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council. We would also like to thank our other funders, namely the Linguistics and English Language department and ArtsMethods of the University of Manchester, and of course The Philological Society.