The 14th Annual Central Kentucky Linguistics Conference (CKLiC, pronounced “See-click”) was held February 20-21, 2026, in Lexington, Kentucky. The conference was hosted by the University of Kentucky’s Linguistics Graduate Student Association (LGSA) in collaboration with Ohio State University’s Student Linguistic Association (SLA).
SLA President, Yasemin Fincan, was central to OSU’s participation in CKLiC this year, reflecting her commitment to graduate student conferences, which she says, “create room for asking the wrong questions, for discovering problems in your own work, and for getting feedback before ideas harden into something unchangeable. They remind us that scholarship develops not only through polished results but also through shared thinking and sustained engagement with one another.” Although Yasemin led the collaboration with Kentucky’s LGSA, she was supported by numerous members of the SLA in securing funding, reviewing abstracts, making travel arrangements, and organizing the conference program.
The theme of this year’s CKLiC was Inter- and Intra-Language Variation: From Typology to Regionalisms. The conference program included presentations by five OSU undergraduate linguistics majors (Liz Boehmer, Erin Falkenbach, Nathan Peters, McKinley Roza, and Dongxu Wu) and six OSU linguistics graduate students (Losha Baklanov, Maddie Bloomquist, Yasemin Fincan, Kyler Laycock, Ash Lewis, and Sahil Patel). OSU linguistics professors Cynthia Clopper and Jessica Kantarovich participated in the faculty keynote panel that concluded in the conference.
