Linguistics in Practice Award

About the award

The Linguistics in Practice award will be bestowed for the first time at the 2025 Annual Meeting. It honors an individual linguist or a team (including at least one linguist) that has had an influence or impact on culture or society, especially on individuals without linguistics training. It honors a career outside academia for a lifetime of achievement or an important instance of invention or innovation.

The award will consist of recognition at the LSA Annual Meeting and a special episode of the podcast, Linguistics CareerCast. 

Purpose

  • Recognizes the breadth of audience (both direct and indirect) and the scope of a product or service’s impact.
  • Values innovation including borrowings and adaptations of existing paradigms and products, as well as net-new methods or practices.
  • Recognizes pioneers for creating new career paths, and making linguistics or language knowledge part of job requirements.
  • Highlights making linguistic knowledge an aspect of quality.

Below are venues meant to spark the imagination about the breadth and scope of impact opportunities. This is not an exhaustive list.

  • New and old media (publishing, film & television, AR/VR, social media)
  • Natural language processing, artificial intelligence, large language models, machine learning
  • Civic design and civic tech
  • Naming and branding, intellectual property
  • User/customer experience design & research
  • Conversation design
  • Automatic speech recognition, text-to-speech, orthographies, fonts
  • Taxonomies, ontology, knowledge management, information architecture
  • Standards and policies
  • Language access
  • Translation & interpretation, language learning (especially in digital products)
  • Lexicography, terminology
  • Laws and regulations, jury instructions
  • Business writing, technical documents, instructional design
  • Organizational development, systems thinking, business processes
  • Arts institutions, libraries, museums
  • Non-profit organizations (management & development)
  • Medicine, and allied health
  • Discourse analysis of communication in institutional settings

Eligibility

Individual

  • Must have at least one degree in linguistics
  • Primary area of employment must be focused in sectors such as business, industry, government, non-profits, entrepreneurship, technology. That is, outside of higher education.

Team

  • Must include at least 2 members, one of whom must have a degree in linguistics.
  • ​Primary area of employment must be focused in sectors such as business, industry, government, non-profits, entrepreneurship, technology - that is, outside of higher education/academia

Neither the nominator nor the award candidate is required to be a member of the LSA.

Frequency

The award is given every year, as nominations warrant.

About the nominations

All nominations should include the following, as appropriate:

  • A description of the body of work which is the basis of the nomination
  • An assessment of its significance
    • Provide evidence that the work has had a demonstrable impact on a specific venue, market segment or industry
  • A description of the nominee’s contribution to this work. And for a team, the key elements of each member’s contribution
  • Evidence of the accessibility of the work to non-specialist audiences and/or awareness of the work by specialist audiences
  • At least 2 supportive letters (but no more than 5) that attest to the significance of the work.

The nomination period opens on February 18, 2025, and closes at 11:59 PM (ET) on June 30, 2025.

Selection

All nominations will be evaluated by a panel of (at least three) linguists recommended by the Linguistics Beyond Academia Special Interest Group leadership, representing work in technology, industry, non-profit organizations and government agencies. The panel reviews nominations and makes recommendations to the Executive Committee, which must formally approve the recommendations. The winner will be recognized at the Awards Ceremony at the LSA Annual Meeting in January.

Awardee

  • 2025: Janice (Ginny) Redish