Dr. Naomi Nagy is a sociolinguistics professor at the University of Toronto. Her research analyzes language variation and change in linguistic contact contexts, currently examining how heritage languages are used in Toronto and how they change, generation by generation.

During her doctoral studies at the University of Pennsylvania, she spent summers in Faeto, a mountaintop village in Italy, where she learned and documented an endangered variety of Francoprovençal spoken by descendants of immigrants from the French Alps who had migrated there some 800 years earlier. She was the first to look at that situation of language contact in terms of the social characteristics of the speakers. She has also been engaged in a study of French and English contact in Montreal, examining how the types and amounts of exposure to French influence how Montreal Anglophones use French, and how it differs from Francophones' French. Uniting her interests in urban Canadian contact situations and Faetar, she has developed a research project, Heritage Language Variation and Change (HLVC), to examine how a number of heritage languages, including Faetar, are used in Toronto – and specifically how (and if) they are changing from the homeland varieties, generation by generation. A book about the HLVC project will be published very soon by Cambridge University Press: Heritage Languages: Extending Variationist Approaches.

Dr. Craig Chambers obtained a joint PhD in Brain & Cognitive Sciences and Linguistics from the University of Rochester in 2001.  He held a faculty appointment at the University of Calgary before joining the University of Toronto Mississauga in 2005.  

His research focuses on the real-time interpretation of spoken and written language, and involves studies of young adults, older adults, and preschoolers.